Jill Kinkade's little girl was with a sitter at home in Lake Forest so she was rushing. Maybe she should have changed from her work clothes, she thought. Too late.

She paid her $35, got a name tag and began to do the efficient thing. She dated 11 men in a single hour.

On her drive home, she cried.

"Of the 11 men I talked to, only one knew I was a mom. I had not had enough time. They don't know who I am. I probably don't know who they are, either."

Jill imagined, in some twisted way, that the omission made her guilty of misrepresentation or, worse, a bad mother. But it's a tricky business. You get five minutes to make the case for your perky, dateable self. You mention the mother thing in the first minute and it seems like a shield. You interrupt to mention it, and it seems like it's an issue. You mention it last thing and it's a kiss-off. You don't mention it, you cry on the way home.

Jill is not new at this dating stuff. Never married, she's done personal ads and given her dating profile to a few singles' Web sites. She's met men through Parents Without Partners. Her friends are always on the lookout for her, at her own request. She's even considered hiring a professional dating service.

She isn't even new to this Rapid Date stuff. In fact, she is totally sold on the Rapid Date people, the caliber of men they draw, the whole efficient philosophy. (Which is, more or less, have fun and an open heart and it's just five minutes.)

Jill also believes that efficiency is good and because chemistry with a man is essential, this five-minute meeting avoids all that inefficient getting to know them through lengthy blind dates or voluminous e-mail or with chatty phone calls before you know if, you know, his body, his heart and his soul are now or could ever be saying something meaningful to yours.

"Sometimes it's enough that he doesn't totally disgust me," says Jill, laughing "And I will go out with him again."

Jill is pretty, highly educated, well-traveled, mannerly and thin. Still, she and the 10 other women and 11 men she'd seen that night were doing what they do a lot of the time. They were looking for something they think everybody but them has: a great relationship. That starts with a single date, or a single Rapid Date or a quick check of how many e-mails your profile on the matchmaking Web site is pulling in.

One really attractive woman in Southern California posted her profile on a new Web site - it included a photograph - and she got 20,000 e-mail dating inquiries in the first six weeks. And those were just the interested men who lived within 50 miles of her ZIP code. (Not only was she pretty, she was baby-making age. That makes a difference in your "returns," say site frequenters. From the 20,000, she ended up with nine dates; one relationship lasted a month.)

More than 18 million people nationwide visit Internet singles sites each week. Some people choose a church by the quality of the singles program it has. Some choose a gym that way.

Dating is, for some, as much a game as college football.

Which, as everyone knows, is best played by professionals.

Take five (minutes)

Here's how RapidDate works. You preregister with the Santa Monica-based service, which sets the time and place for the meet-and-greet in Orange County. Everybody gets a name tag. There is random mingling, then there is instruction - "Don't talk about your exes" - and the men are directed to numbered tables. Men stay put, with their drinks and their respective personalities, as the women, who hold onto their purses and their dignity, rotate through them. Each person tries making eager, friendly conversation, all in hopes of leaving an impression, or getting one. When the egg timer dings, polite goodbye things are said. The women move on to the next numbered table. The first order of business there is to unfold the folded scorecard and mark, quite discreetly, whether they want to have the last five-minute man or woman contact them.

Yes or no.

The folks from RapidDate will compare scorecards in the private confines of their own offices. If a guy and a girl both indicated they wanted to see each other again, e-mail addresses or phone numbers are distributed appropriately. (Usual rate of "match success" is 150 percent of attendees. At a recent Newport Beach event, there were 40 attendees, though RapidDate made a whopping 100 matches.)

Shielded by this middleman, no one loses face. (No one may need to. At the Newport Beach event, the crowd included a former NFL cheerleader, a gorgeous orthodontist, a way-good-looking BMX stunt show promoter and a cop in stiletto heels.)

The price is only an hour or two. Conventional wisdom is: You get one date, it's a good return; if you get more than one date, you're ahead of the game. You've drunk a nice green-apple martini and you've made a lot of conversation, maybe exchanged a few business cards.

Renee Piane, a co-founder of RapidDatingUSA.com, says men usually spend their five minutes deciding "if they would sleep with this woman," and women spend the time "deciding if they can see themselves kissing him."

Sometime the five minutes is overly short. Sometimes, though, it can be about four minutes too long.

Woman shortage

No less an authority than the Wall Street Journal reported that there's a woman shortage now and a bigger one coming. They cited slight demographic shifts and male pickiness about their partner's educational status and male marriage postponements because of the once real and then massively over-perceived woman glut and, lo, you get a woman shortage. Specifically, for every million women in their 30s, there are 80,000 extra men of the same age. If you factor in that a lot of older men want younger women, well, this is almost crisis time for men.

No woman we talked to believed it.

Point of fact, they don't believe much, except maybe that the next contact is the one they've been waiting for. They don't believe the profiles on the Internet sites. (For the record, neither do the men.)

"I used to dissect every word," says 34-year old apartment manager Laura Nguyen. "I'd try to figure out what the order of the stuff they wrote meant. I just fly by that stuff now. First, I don't have the time. Second, everybody lies. Third, if they don't, they don't have any imagination anyway, so why read it?"

If they've been on the sites even a few days and responded to a few e-mails, they also know to avoid a nasty dating pitfall. Don't fantasize. One woman tried out the KZLA- FM site because she thought men who liked country music would be hunky and bluejeaned and aw-shucks polite. When she found a guy named Josh, she was just sure he was going to ride in with a plaid flannel shirt on, seduce her with his lazy drawl and boyishly romance her off her feet. She was thinking Hartnett and Brolin.

This guy wasn't close.

She is philosophical about that.

"Not an expensive lesson."

Maybe not, but this is not a totally inexpensive hobby. A month's subscription on a Web site is about $25. Video dating services can be up to $1,000 a year. If you're a guy, it is not that uncommon to have spent $1,500 a year to look; women tend to spend appreciably less.

Just putting the money down isn't enough. Professional daters know that you get out of it what you put in. Do the work, go to the sites. Everybody at the paid parties, everybody on the Internet - everybody, just everybody - knows someone who found someone else this way and is, as we write this, deliriously happy.

Brian's song

Brian Fast, restaurateur, writer (with an agent), all- around good guy, has been divorced for 11 years.

He is quick to tell you that there's still a stigma attached to the kind of dating a lot of people do. They don't want to be identified in a story; they don't want their parents to know; they don't want to explain, over and over, "that the odds are against us, and it really is harder now to find someone."

Why is that? There's the time constraint, of course. And the access to dateable others.

Besides, he says, this is a kind of "cult thing" and it's actually fun.

"Dating shows you how different people are," says the 43- year-old man with the great view of the ocean from his Laguna home. "The sooner you get that and respect that and the baggage that comes with it, the better you are at this. And the more you seem to attract people who are more," he laughs here "balanced."

A friend of Brian's once told him to write down what he wanted in a woman. He decided to make two lists. The What I Want and the What I'm Not Willing to Deal With lists.

The first thing he wanted was physical and intellectual compatibility, then a solid upbringing, common interests and common goals. She needed to be curious, artistic or at least appreciative of the arts. She would have to be natural, and she would have to be young enough to still have a baby or two. He doesn't date under 30.

"OK, so she's a beach girl with some maternal stuff working though she needs ambition but not a CEO ambition."

He won't deal with abandonment issues and drugs.

He won't date an attorney.

"They fight for a living, and it's all about winning the argument."

He is absolutely astonished that these things are not yet clear to his friends who persist in setting him up with blind dates.

"Even my lifelong friends show me they know nothing about me by the women they set me up with."

Still, it's getting tiring. "I'd much rather have Ebola than a bad date right now."

See, the thing is, he says, he really is already happy.

"Do I want to be married? Absolutely. Positively. Do I need to? No."

He is back at RapidDate for a second turn. Women love him. He imagines it is because he is tall and employed.

It is, the women all say, because he never takes his eyes off you once you sit down.

Brian laughs that it is something so easy.

What does that say about other men? he wonders.

What does that say about what women need?

First steps

Ella Quinn married young and stayed that way for 25 years. Her two children grown, she changed her life and moved here from Washington state.

"Dating? I thought it would be a lark after all those years. I thought it'd be fun and easy. It's not."

She says she didn't want to believe what women in Orange County were telling her.

"They said that men around here are looking for Barbie dolls in bikinis who play beach volleyball. Two women, after having slept with the guys, were told they did not have the bodies the guys were looking for."

Ella has said done a few RapidDate events. Said no to everybody. She went on match.com for three months - it took her two months to write the profile she had to post - and matchmaker.com for one. After two years of being single, she had her first "look-see" - it's for coffee - last week.

It's not a date.

"A date is when you know what you're saying yes to."

An old-fashioned guy

Richard Nelson's divorce was finalized a year and a half ago. He immediately took to Great Expectations, a video dating service based in Irvine, and met someone who told him, after a few months, that he wasn't over his first wife.

"She was right."

There was another woman, who was actually married, then another who wanted someone who made more money. There was another who was "extremely nice but too fat for me." His last relationship was with a really great woman who, alas, was too old to have more children, and he wants children, but "She was this really super person as a person and it was hard to break up."

He's been to the Athletic Singles Association events - membership was expensive, he remembers. So, too, the Great Expectations thing and the California Connections thing - they are out of business now, he thinks - and had one date and "It was a flop."

On the RapidDate front, he got two hits his first time out and, by his own admission, dropped the ball. "Maybe when ski season starts."

He feels like he is getting old "and desperate. I'm tired of these professional daters who want you to take them to nice places but don't want to get married."

The Southern California market is more difficult than most, Nelson says. "Everybody here has an agenda. The women want money."

He says he will not marry another American woman, except maybe one from Iowa who understands traditional roles.

Richard owns his own home in La Habra. He makes good money at a large Los Angeles credit union. He is thinking of moving to a condo "which has a common area to do laundry in so I can meet people."

He says dating is like taking a test, and he's tired of it.

But his mother wants grandchildren.

First impressions

Another woman at the very same RapidDating party also wore a business suit. She didn't cry at all on the way home, but she, like Jill Kinkade, wondered if the men there had seen the real her.

She's a 30-something lawyer, but she believes, in her heart, that she has been preparing for the past six years "to give it up tomorrow to be a wife and mother."

How do you say that with clothing?

How will they ever believe you?

The man who can see through the veneer is the one she wants.

Surely he is out there.