Health Clubs-Meeting Place Or Not

Health Clubs:

Great Meeting

Place Or Not?

by Jovan Tahale

February 6, 2018

The health club has long been a place where people meet and scope the various physiques on parade.  Across the country, singles are also greeting and hooking up for romance, fun or whatever they can agree upon, as they work out  in designer lycra outfits searching the place with eager eyes.

Caryn says she was thirty pounds overweight and overwhelmed by the sculptured bodies that sped by her on the indoor track.  She joined the health club to add some discipline to her latest weight-losing program, but she was not psychologically prepared for the colorful array of bodies on display.  The health club atmosphere made her feel like a hippo among swans.  On the track, which met her standards for exercise, guys zoomed past her without a glance back.  Therefore, she was stunned one morning, when a deep voice called her “beautiful” as he passed her walking on the track.  She smiled at him and he was waiting when she came off the track an hour later.  They stood and talked about running techniques, healthful eating and workout routines. “He made me feel beautiful,” she says.  “We got involved very quickly because we had a lot in common.  We both loved to cook and watch baseball.  I also felt good about meeting him at a health club rather than a club or a bar.  Though I had been looking to meet someone for quite some time, the environment made it a wholesome place to meet.  I wasn’t leery of him, as I would have been if we had met in a club.”  They dated steady for six months and then he ran off into the sunset with a jogger (Caryn was a walker) who was a lot smaller in size.  “I was extremely disappointed because I thought we were mutually at the same place romantically.  I had fallen in love, but to him it was casual.  I stopped going to the club for awhile.  But after I dusted myself off, I went back with the same goals in mind, shape up and find a “running buddy for life.”

After Ed’s divorce, he joined the health club with the specific purpose of getting his biceps in shape and finding the woman of his dreams.“I meet all kinds of women at the club, because I find that women are more relaxed and less apprehensive about a guy talking to them, as he sweats on a nearby machine.  I’ve been going for eight months now and I’ve dated two or three women I met there.  But I haven’t met one yet with any real potential.  I find that too many are looking for fancy flash in a guy and someone to mold into what they want him to be.  “You can’t sweat at the health club in skin tight biker shorts with a weightlifter’s chest and go outside and get into a Volkswagen that’s five years old.  If you do, you’ll end up riding alone.”

Marla met Tom when he helped her adjust the weights on an arm-bending machine.  They clicked immediately.  “She was friendly and I was immediately attracted to the way she smiled at everybody in the weight room…men and women.  He was so cute and I was flattered tremendously when he asked me out.  There were dozens of women there, who looked much better than me,” says Marla.  “Yeah, but she had the sass I look for in a woman, and it was clear she liked herself and I was attracted to that.”  Marla drives a bus and Tom drives a bread truck.  “There also was no pressure to date.  She treated me like she met a new friend, not a potential husband and I wanted more,” says Tom. They married seven months after they met.

OTHER SWEATY SUCCESS STORIES

Shirley met Jake in the pool…Kim met Hank on the track…Darlene met John when they argued over whose turn it was to use the weight machine…Steve met Liz on the bike machines…Joe met Sheila when she bumped into him as she was leaving the track.

“The health club is a great low key place to meet men,” says Joni.  “And if you see someone you like and miss’em, you can always meet again on another night.  It’s also easier to skip past someone who may have latched onto you and you’re not interested.  Here, you have a major agenda and it’s clear.  No one wants to appear to distract you from that.  If someone is talking to you and you’re not interested, you move to another machine or head for the pool.  No one is insulted because after all, it’s the main reason you’re there.”