¡Let´s play! Emotional energy during speed dating events

Abstract

This article describes and analyses which are the fluctuations of emotional energy –in terms of Randall Collins– in situations of interaction that happen in speed dating events, situated in Buenos Aires City (Argentina), from a qualitative approach. These events are scenes where cis heterosexual, adults, single and middle-class women and men concur for erotic and/or affectively socialize. The interactions where emotional energy increases happen when the organizer gives the patterns of interaction of the event, like it were a game, so people can have “successful” dates; and the interactions in which it decreases are, for example, scenes of failed male seduction that make the female clients feel the date as “endless”.