We bring a conversation analytic perspective to the phenomenon of soliciting and providing motives for participation in speed dating. Using data from three speed-dating events, we analyze how college-aged volunteers in a research study collaboratively formulate motives for participation and identities as speed daters. The findings reveal detailed and sequentially organized procedures by which participants display, monitor, and enforce normative expectations about how people of their age should treat this institutional activity. In particular, participants use a three-turn motive solicitation sequence to produce ‘casual’ accounts for participation that suggest a disinvested orientation toward speed dating. In the few cases in which what might be considered the ‘obvious’ motive for speed dating is invoked – meeting someone to date – it tends to be done ironically. When offered in earnest, however, interlocutors withhold alignment with this motive and treat it as accountable.
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