Debbie Hughes & Mike Winnett

It took exactly two minutes for Debbie Hughes and Michael Winnett to realize they had a romantic spark between them. Well, two minutes and some change.

“We were supposed to stop talking to each other and talk to the others down the line,” Hughes said.

That’s the rule at a speed dating night.

Talk a couple minutes with someone, note if you want to talk to them again and move on.

“But I’m tall, I’m 5-9, so I shouted over to him, ‘Mike, how tall are you?’ He said 6 foot 1, and I thought ‘OK, that will work.’”

A lot between Hughes and Winnett ended up working after meeting by chance at a speed dating night at Harrah’s Metropolis Casino & Hotel last May. The two dated for seven months until Winnett proposed Dec. 22 in front of Hughes’ family. They’re engaged and planning a wedding.

“With some people that two minutes lasted a long time,” Winnett said. “With her it wasn’t enough.”

The casino and hotel hosted the night along with iList Paducah. (The next one is set for Saturday, Feb. 27 — sign up here!) Sixty-two people showed up (at last year’s event) of varying ages, backgrounds and comfort levels.

And Hughes said if anyone ever needed proof you can find your life partner in the most unlikely of places, at the most unexpected time, just look at the bubbling new couple.

Hughes, 43, is a blond-haired nurse who works at the Marshall Nemer Pavilion at Lourdes hospital. She lives outside Metropolis, Ill., with her 18-year-old daughter, Rachel Howard, and has been divorced for seven years.

Winnett is a 52-year-old Paducah native who works in an auto parts warehouse on North Tenth Street. He’s never been married and before last May had only seen speed dating in movies such as “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

“I don’t know how else we ever would have met,” Hughes said.

Nerves almost kept both from attending.

“My friends gave me a hard time,” Winnett said. “‘Good luck with that,’ they said.”

Hughes and her daughter searched Google for tips and strategies to get through the night, and Howard quizzed her mom as she fixed her hair. One Web site suggested wearing a hot pink or red shirt to stand out to men, which Hughes did. “It worked,” Winnett said. “I commented on her shirt.”

That the two even had such an event in the region to attend is a little surprising. “We didn’t think there were any other places around that held speed dating events,” said Kyle Shepley, marketing manager for Harrah’s. “It was around Valentine’s Day last year we started brainstorming ideas, and it seemed like a different idea.”

Such fast-paced, trendy social gatherings are more commonly found in bustling cities, true metropolises, where meeting new people in new places comes with the territory.

As their time together dwindled at last year’s event, Hughes made sure Winnett marked her as a person to contact later.

“I asked him if he was marking me down, and I told him to,” Hughes said. “And I tell him now he can’t ever say he didn’t know what he was getting into, because I was telling him what to do in the first two minutes we’d met.”

© The Paducah Sun

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