Safety-in-numbers dating Group meets group. You take it from there.

It's Saturday night in Center City. At the Nodding Head brewpub on Sansom Street, three male friends in their 20s are looking for women.

As the first round arrives, so do the ladies. A quick introduction reveals that a potential pair share the same profession, and the group of seven settles into a cushioned red booth.

This is no impromptu meeting. They're participating in the recently reinvented social experiment known as organized group dating, billed as a low-key way to meet friends and lovers through informal gatherings. The drill: Six to eight single men and women go out for a few hours to find a mate in the crowd. They may hit a bar, pick pumpkins, or play laser tag - all in the name of finding love with minimal stress and more authenticity.

What happened to good old-fashioned one-on-one? It's a mad, mad world out there.

Blind dates can be scary and awkward. Professional matchmakers are costly, and speed dating requires nerves of steel. For a generation whose social life blossomed at the same time as online matchmaking sites such as match.com and JDate, they feel they've been there and done that. Plus, people often misrepresent themselves in their personal profiles.

Yet group dating, participants say, demands that you be yourself. You won't, after all, try out a new persona, or even a new hairstyle, in the presence of friends.

"Your friends keep you honest," said Adam Sachs, chief executive officer of Ignighter.com, a Web site that promotes group-to-group dating. On this site, a group of friends create one profile - and from there, groups are matched with other groups.

Testament to the growing trend is Ignighter's rising enrollment. According to Sachs, it has doubled in the last month without any marketing effort. He estimates the site currently has more than 20,000 users in more than 5,000 groups, primarily in larger urban areas. Other Web sites that promote group dates include Teamdating.com and Iamfreetonight.com.

Of course, using group dynamics to prospect for partners is nothing new. "The idea behind it is timeless. People have done this for generations," explained Bridget Jennings, one of the female group daters at Nodding Head.

Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University, says natural dating patterns evolved from hunting and gathering bands.

Millions of years ago in Africa, our ancestors took advantage of the dry season to meet at the watering hole, a precursor to courting as a crowd.