Galvanized by my own surprise at the number of interesting, funny and decent people I met on Craigslist after posting a personal ad a few weeks ago, I decided to dig a bit deeper.
At first, I was worried I was missing something, some obvious, glaring pitfall in meeting people online. Everybody I wrote to seemed so nice. There had to be something wrong with these guys, right?
But meeting “on the Internet” has largely lost the stigma it had a decade ago, when “the Internet” seemed like code for “a back alley” or “because I couldn’t find anyone in real life.”
My experience has been almost entirely positive, as has the experience of my new friends, I’m happy to say — particularly since the people I’ve been corresponding with say they’ve never replied to a Craigslist ad before, making me their only “Craigslist friend.”
One friend, Edward, elaborated on his online socializing: As an autistic early teen, Edward lived mostly online, where he “had half a dozen instant messaging windows open at the same time, held chat room meetings, had power; could tell someone twice my age what needed to be done; could ban someone who got out of line.”
Edward has “met” people from all around the world online, and he describes his experiences as positive, right in sync with my own.
But not everyone shares this experience.
It’s partly a numbers game: It’s no coincidence that I’m a woman getting all these responses. Since more men than women seem to read “the personals,” men who post also seem to get fewer responses.
Mike Z of Berlin, for instance, who decided to post a new personal ad every day for 30 days, quit after 14 posts when almost all he’d gotten was spam ads.
He’d started out hopeful in his initial post Jan. 2 — “hello?” — straightforwardly stating that he was “looking for a girlfriend,” admitting that he’d been single for awhile.
A few women had responded, Mike said, but no one had stuck around: “It seems that you can be having a good conversation and then it just ends, me figuring maybe tomorrow they’ll write back or something, but nothing ever comes of it.”
By Jan. 8, Day 7, Mike was tired of getting nothing but spam, and the ad he posted showed it.
Starting with a primal-scream type “aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Mike demanded to know what was wrong with him and his ads that caused him to be so snubbed by Connecticut Craigslist women.
He asked women to respond with suggestions, if not interest, on what he could change to improve his ads.
Women did respond.
One woman, Mike says, wrote him “about a page and a half,” advising him to get “better pictures,” and not to “come off as so desperate” or say he was lonely.
There is something to this. In the DIY ethos of Craigslist, there aren’t many pointers along the way for how to craft a personal ad that displays your best qualities, no guidelines or auto-formatting like at larger, dating-specific Web sites.
At the same time, it’s exactly that do-it-yourself mentality that eventually caused women to respond to Mike — with advice rather than the offer of a coffee meet-up, sure, but in an effort to connect, nonetheless.
Mike was still disappointed enough to stop posting his ads, the last of which is on the Hartford Craigslist site as “another post lucky 13” on Jan. 21.
That’s tough, and I wish Mike luck — and hope.
Because, as my experience has shown, there are good people out there — here in Connecticut — and online.
My main disappointment remains that I can’t meet them all.
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