A few days ago, on Instagram, I came across a series of personal ads.
“Big heart, broad chest, good sense of rhythm. Damn, I turn 70 in 13 months and I’m still looking for my better half! Is it you? Are you around 55 to 75, with a sparkle in your eye, poetry in your soul, a good number of songs that tell the story of your life, and a love of dancing, cooking, spices, and easy laughter? Do you like feeling comfortable in your body, both clothed and unclothed? If you like Latin music, that’s a plus. I’m a 69-year-old man, neither tall nor rich, but comfortable in my own skin and in my lifestyle.”
“Woman, 34, Brooklyn, law student and future labor lawyer. A homebody in the good sense, loves hosting elaborate vegetarian dinners and watching Hacks in bed while high, but is also happy to roam around New York for its cultural life and adores trips upstate and abroad. Honest, direct, hyper-responsible eldest daughter who has been to therapy, lovable. Let’s raise rescued pugs, not children. You: 29–49, any gender, have canvassed door-to-door for Zohran, will never ask me to go camping, hate artificial intelligence, kinky is a plus. Let’s see who can make the better spreadsheet for our Google Maps restaurant map; if you win, I’ll bake you cookies.”
“Witchy Brooklyn lesbian seeks future wife. Me: fiction writer, 28, five foot three, curly hair. I love two-hour walks, watching figure skating, and women’s history. You: woman between 26 and 32, willing to be weird and silly, want children but no pets, affectionate and empathetic. Let’s have long, meandering conversations and watch strange films at BAM. If we fall in love, I’ll show you my favorite trees at the Botanical Garden.”
Some of you may recognize the format: it is the rather old-fashioned one of personal ads, traditionally sent by people looking for love to their local newspapers, to be published in a dedicated section. It is a format one might imagine has fallen out of use by now, made obsolete by dating apps. And yet these three ads were published in June in Personals, a regular section of the newsletter published weekly by the New York magazine The Cut.
Personals was launched about a year ago, and since then it has enjoyed unexpected success, to the point that several other U.S. newsletters have taken inspiration from it and created their own ad sections to connect readers looking for new relationships or friends. It takes inspiration from a historic column published in New York magazine, The Cut’s parent publication, between the 1980s and the early 2000s: Strictly Personal.
Personal ads, however, existed long before Strictly Personal. The first one known with certainty was published in an English weekly newspaper in 1695, and over the course of the nineteenth century the format spread until it became a regular fixture in newspapers. As newspapers became cheaper, periodicals began to appear that were devoted exclusively to finding a husband or wife, with explicit titles such as Matrimonial Herald or Matrimonial Gazette. Anyone who wanted to reply to an ad would leave a note at the newspaper’s offices, or arrange to meet at a neutral place indicated by the advertiser, such as a library or a café.
The peak of their popularity, however, came in the second half of the twentieth century. Toward the end of the 1980s, local American newspapers began linking ads to a paid telephone number, the famous 1-900 number, so that anyone who wanted to reply would call an answering service and pay ninety-nine cents a minute. For weeklies, it was an enormous source of income. The American journalist Dan Bockrath explains that those magazines functioned as a kind of social network before the digital age: people bought them to find out where to go out at night, and at the back of the paper they would also find personal ads, alongside advice columns about love. When the internet arrived, that model dried up within just a few years.
In this context, the return of personal ads, reimagined for an audience that buys fewer and fewer print newspapers, obviously has to do with growing disaffection toward dating apps. People who have used them for years describe more or less the same fatigue: profiles all look alike, conversations fizzle out without leading anywhere, and one is left with the feeling of handing over one’s most vulnerable data to a company that, in return, fails to keep its promises.
Personal ads, by contrast, allow people to start again from two things that apps have made rare. The first is an initial compatibility. People who subscribe to a newsletter already share interests and a certain way of looking at the world with the other readers, explained Camille Sojit Pejcha, who runs a Substack about desire and sexuality, Pleasure-Seeking. In her experience, two people who meet through shared content start from more solid common ground than two random strangers, in the same way that many people would prefer the love of their life to be introduced to them by a close friend.
The second is the way people describe themselves. Even an app like Hinge asks users to describe themselves in writing, but it does so through answers to preset prompts, and in any case that text remains subordinate to the photos, which act as the first filter: first you look, then maybe you read. In personal ads, on the other hand, there is never a photo, so the text is not an accessory, and whoever replies necessarily does so after reading. The space is limited, and this forces people to choose two or three things and make them vivid instead of filling in twenty fields. And because the newsletter’s readers are already a filtered audience, sharing a certain sensibility, people can allow themselves references and jokes that would be lost on an app.
In addition to Personals, which is delightful to read even for those who do not live in New York or are not looking for a soulmate, over the past year the idea has also occurred to a series of more or less niche writers and creators. John Fulton, who publishes the newsletter The Eastside Rag about neighborhoods on the east side of Los Angeles, told The Atlantic that he found himself almost accidentally acting as a “matchmaking agency”: today, he says, the ads have become the most anticipated and appreciated content among his readers, and in March he organized a singles party at a local venue attended by more than three hundred people.
The artist and filmmaker Miranda July, in her newsletter, has built a column called Beguiled around a very long questionnaire: anyone who wants to appear in it answers questions about why they are single, their morning rituals, and what an ex or a friend would say about them, while anyone interested fills out the same questionnaire, which is sent privately to the person. Emily Sundberg, meanwhile, said she opened an ad section connected to her newsletter Feed Me at readers’ request, partly because relationships had already begun at parties organized by the newsletter, and more than one subscriber had told her they had written on dating apps that they were looking for someone just as passionate about Feed Me. When the section launched, more than one hundred people had already posted an ad.
The version that renounces digital shortcuts more than any other, however, comes from London, where last November a new print newspaper called The Lonely Hearts Club was created for people tired of swipes and algorithms. Publishing a forty-word ad costs thirty-five pounds, and anyone who wants to reply must write a letter by hand addressed to the recipient’s code, with no direct messages or emails. The editorial team receives the letters and forwards them without opening them, so that everything remains anonymous.
The founder, Nilly von Baibus, said he personally distributed more than one hundred copies of the first issue in around seventy venues across London; the second issue, meanwhile, was also distributed in cities such as Bath and Glasgow. Ads from back issues do not expire, and from the website it is possible to download an old issue and reply to an ad even months after it was published.
Viola Stefanello