personals are for losers
Reading the classifieds used to be one of my favorite hobbies. Now when I read these personals, ads written by people of all genders across age groups, 27F, 47F, 38M, I just feel depressed. All these loners seeking connections. When I read them now, they read like a history of failed loves. In the negative space of the ad, what isn’t written, I can see all the injuries of the lonely heart that compel someone to send a signal out into the void: I’m here, and I’m looking for the one.
Maybe personals are really just a catalog of failures. It’s the art form that serves as a record of bad timing, of personality defects, of the wounds that have prevent you from truly connecting with others. Black Cat seeks Golden Retriever: you’re really just compulsively serious and morose and you need someone to make up for the fact that you’re not very fun. Soft Femme seeks Sturdy Butch to sit on the couch and read next to during quiet time: you were a lonely gay kid and you have a hard time connecting with people through conversation, now maybe you’re incapable of it.
I read these new personals in my inbox and I think very mean thoughts. I used to find hope in them. I used to see them as a record of the resilience of the human heart, proof of courage — a sincere way of putting oneself out there. But this morning, as I read the newest little poems of desperation in my inbox, I can’t help but think they’re pathetic. Maybe spending more than a decade reading and writing these little signals into the void has burnt me out.
It makes sense to write something into the personals section when you’re in your 20’s, 30’s, 50’s, 70’s, once you’ve given life a chance to rough you up a bit, when you’re old enough to have made mistakes, when there’s been enough time to do it wrong and realize you’ve been doing it wrong.
I was 17 years old when I first started reading and writing personals. Desperate, lost. I was 17 and I’d already felt like I messed up and I needed to try and make up for it. I hadn’t even really given life a proper go yet, and I’d already felt this way. If I now feel like the people in their 30’s writing these ads are sort of sad, the fact that I was looking for connection on Craigslist and I wasn’t even a legal adult yet burdens me with a heavy blanket of grief
After a year of fucking people in the M4M and M4TS sections of Craigslist, I followed my friend Sol on our senior class trip to San Francisco. Sol was a photographer who actually had a reason to be in the Bay. — they wanted to size it up and see what the city had going on. I no longer had any illusions about my future as a painter and had no delusions about my inability to pay for an out-of-state school. I was really just on this trip so I would have something to look forward to in the depths of my teenage suicidality— and because I couldn’t afford the trips to New York or Italy that some of my other classmates went on.
We arrived in the city with barely enough time to get from the airport to this fair, the raison d’être of this whole trip. It was the kind of event where a bunch of gatekeepers size up the future generation of artists and try to entice them to their school with scholarships. Or, they critique your shitty little portfolio of art and tell you what you need to change if you want a shot at getting in.
There was maybe a dozen of us on this trip, all of us dragging our luggage and giant portfolio cases from the BART station through the hills of San Francisco to SFAI — one of the oldest schools in America before it closed in 2022. The trip wiped me out. I was hungry, because I generally just wasn’t eating anything at this point in my teenagehood, and especially wasn’t eating on this semi-unsupervised trip without free breakfast and lunch. I sat in the atrium with my drawings and my suitcase, fading and dizzy, while most of my other classmates got in line to get critiqued on their work at folding tables. I was glad I’d already given up on doing any of this because it meant I could sit in the corner of the palatial atrium and feel tired instead of standing around showing my stupid little paintings to some random adults and acting like I gave a shit about what they thought.
While I sat dazed in the corner, watching throngs of young people laugh, chatter, or cry, a boy came up to me. He seemed older. Maybe because he had an unplaceable European accent, which gave him an adult mystique, or maybe because he’d had a full, thick beard and handsome face. He asked an innocuous question, like, if I knew where the bathroom was. I answered, and he asked another, and another. He asked how old I was, if I was from San Francisco, did I go to this school, was I thinking of going to this school, what kind of art do you do. I answered, casually — almost blithely — and then he said goodbye. The only question I had on my mind was: where was my friend who promised to bring me back a bag of Baked Lays from the vending machine? I was desperate to undo the deep calorie deficit in my body because I was starting to feel like a ghost.
When I turned around, Sol was looking at me with a bewildered, big eyed smile. Who was that? He was flirting with you. What? I said back, still thinking about the Baked Lays I wasn’t eating.
I belatedly realized how hot that guy was. My magnet school with a focus on the arts only had one male student to every six girls. This boy, with his muscles, big earthen hands, his deep voice and strange accent, put my male classmates (who all had a sort of wimpy twink look) to shame.
Once I got a few chips in me, the conversation with him played back, like I was just now living through it 10 minutes after the fact. His name was Yotam, he worked with clay, but he wasn’t sure if SFAI had a ceramics program. He was hoping it did, and he was hoping that I was going to this school here too, because then we’d get to see each other again. Fuck, he was flirting with me.
I couldn’t get Yotam out of my head for the rest of the trip. Sol suggested I write a missed connection on Craigslist, that’s what people do. But I’d already seen a lot of the personal ads in Las Vegas and I wasn’t exactly convinced that sexy European teenage ceramicists would be checking those. From my own experience meeting up with the people who wrote them, personals seemed like they were for losers and sad middle aged people. Of course, I wrote one anyway.
You were the ceramicist at SFAI. I was hungry. I didn’t realize you were flirting with me. I’m sorry. I can’t stop thinking about you.