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Love: Second Chances
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| Eugene |
from the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...4-2003Jul9.html
Delayed Reactions
Pursuing Second Chances Through the Personals
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Because we are a city of loners, voyeurs and witnesses, waiting for the last possible moment to make a move or just as often waiting a moment too long. Because we live on the prospect of a second chance.
That's why we have the I Saw You personals. The Missed Connections and You Caught My Eye personals.
Because what happened to Ben West, 29, is the sort of thing that happens a thousand times a day:
In the checkout line at Whole Foods, 7:30 p.m. Two pairs of eyes fall to one bag of pesticide-free French roast, rise to each other.
"You can get it cheaper at Eastern Market," she coos.
He stares into a tub of gluten-free chicken soup, sees fireworks. Just maybe, she sees them, too. They talk about the pros and cons of vegetarianism. She is going home to wash her dog and videotape something on television. That Hitler movie? No, the last episode of "Buffy."
Shira (or Shirah, he doesn't know, or Sheera, even, or more appropriately She-Ra, Princess of Unfinished Conversations) brightens his lousy day. He could love her. It's a possibility.
After all, he asks, "what could be more young urban American than a match made over groceries?"
For one thing, a match unmade, when Boy ("hiking boots, blue vest, white sleeves, jeans, glasses") neglects to ask Girl ("brunette, early thirties, jeans, bluestone necklace, sweater vest, cool belt") for her telephone number. Stars, just aligned, reel off course. Another what-might-have-been dissolves into the wet, hot, buzzing Northwest Washington night.
And yet!
A believer in online dating, capitalism, independent newsweeklies, the undeniability of fate and the power of love at first sight, West, 29, places a classified ad. He prefers the low-tech, high-traffic DC Missed Connections page of craigslist.org -- a popular free site that allows people to advertise clubs, sublets, and themselves, among other things -- and calls his notice "Logan Freshfields 5/20, get it right this time."
If only. The I Saw You ads in the City Paper are often the first thing people read each week, says Kimberly Dorn, who coordinates the paper's Matches section, but judging by user feedback, success rates are low. Very low.
The Washington section of craigslist.org's Missed Connections page ran about 280 postings this May, which, incidentally, is about 270 more than it had last May. The page had 165,200 hits in May 2003 and 1,700 in May 2002, but the folks at craigslist who keep informal tallies on successful matchups know of a few from San Francisco, a few from New York and absolutely none from Washington. Yet we keep advertising.
Adding craigslist.org's totals to the City Paper and the Blade, which run about 80 ads between them every week, plus a few in The Washington Post, that figures to roughly 8,000 paper-clip-size pipe dreams in Washington this year.
Sure, the number includes serial advertisers like Mike Myers, 21, who said he posts a Missed Connection once a month. But still -- that's a lot of fleeting glances and potential loves lost.
Who knows, maybe you are "tall as the corn at harvest, hair red as a Pacific sunset, talking on cell phone." If so, there's a "musically inclined skater" who is hoping you're around "to play Galaga and watch 'Magnum PI.' " Lucky you.
Though, of course, you could be the blond, ponytailed, freckled woman with "green eyes, shopping bags, great smile" at Connecticut and P last week. In that case, there's a skatergirl wearing "black capris, black tee, snow hat" who would like to have coffee.
Or perhaps you're a man who talked to another man about "Japan, Chinese food, HK and Switzerland" and got off the Red Line at Friendship Heights. If so, someone would like to continue the conversation. But if you got off at Cleveland Park and only made eye contact with another man, someone else would like to have "drinks? dinner?" And if you have a nose ring and were headed all the way to Shady Grove, there's a bearded gentleman who would like to know more about your ankle tattoo.
("Who knew the Metro was such a meat market?" muses the City Paper's Dorn. But really, who didn't know?)
Then again, maybe you don't take the Metro at all and instead are one of the many men who drive black Lexuses to work every morning. In that case, there is a good chance someone would like to get in touch. A lot of people seem to place ads seeking men in black Lexuses.
The black Lexus phenomenon, says Galdino Pranzarone, a prominent sexologist and professor at Roanoke College in western Virginia, is because of a little thing some like to call the "lovemap." It explains everything about who we fall in love with and why so many are moved to take out personal ads based on a flash of eye contact or two minutes of chitchat. The lovemap is set, Pranzarone says, somewhere between the ages of 5 and 10.
According to lovemap theory -- propounded originally by Johns Hopkins professor John Money -- before we're old enough to reliably use silverware, our brains may be encoded with every detail of our ideal partner. So when a near approximation walks by, a chemical reaction akin to the Kmart Bluelight Special goes off in our heads. Hence the cultural fascination with love at first sight. And the cultural obsession with attractive men in fancy cars -- not a particularly unusual lovemap entry.
That, presumably, is why Garfield Lindo, 39, is looking for tall, redheaded Terry from Odenton; why Rodney Woodland, 23, who works in the Blade classified department, is looking for a skinny man who rode the Green Line train wearing a green yarmulke. It's why Scott Pustay, 24, is trying to find a cute girl in gym clothes who once walked down Connecticut Avenue and why Aysar "Ace" Barbari, 41, took out two ads in the Blade last month aimed at two tall, dark-haired men, both of whom he spotted in their mid-size sedans. (The lovemap is very, very detailed, Pranzarone says.)
Barbari, it turns out, was seen once himself, when he winked at a man in a car at the airport, where he was waiting to pick up his partner. He saw the ad and recognized himself, as did his now ex-partner, and arranged to meet his seer at Pentagon City -- but the man was neither tall nor dark-haired. So much for fate.
Men, it would seem, considerably outnumber women when it comes to falling in love at first sight. Robert Butterworth, a California psychologist and a specialist in the subject, says that's because men are more visual creatures with more visual lovemaps.
Butterworth says a Japanese gizmo made by NTT DoCoMo that looks, feels and functions much like a Palm Pilot might revolutionize love at first sight. Except it also stores a detailed personal ad for its owner, which is effectively a self-reported lovemap, and anytime the owner comes within a certain distance of someone who has a matching personal on her own PDA, both gizmos beep. Great for fate, doom for the I Saw You ad, and coming eventually to an electronics store near you.
Until then, though, we are left trying to understand a population -- a generation, really -- that communicates through winks, nods and newspapers, occasionally in lieu of, say, the spoken word. For evidence of the inefficiency of this approach, take this long-remembered coupling of ads in City Paper, which appeared in September 2000. Members of the newspaper's staff swear they double-checked with both parties to verify that the ads were real, though it could have been a clever joke:
8/21 DUPONT CIRCLE Metro 10 p.m. To the gorgeous redhead across the platform from me: I was wearing the Nader for President shirt. I saw you smile at me, but your train came before I could introduce myself. Would love to discuss Green party politics with you.
DUPONT METRO, 8/21. 10 p.m. Me: tall, redhead, little black dress, northbound platform. You: southbound, dark-haired Middle Eastern (?) man in Armani suit, carrying briefcase. Tried to get your attention, but only attracted the dweeb next to you in the Ralph Nader shirt. Work late often? Meet me for drinks afterwards?
Which makes you wonder: Why do we do this to ourselves?
Here, at last, we leave the territory of analysts and matchmakers and go to that weepy, lovesick place where only the Harlequin romance novelists dare venture.
And really, who better to explain why we do this than B.J. Daniels, author of more than 20 romantic suspense novels? Her seventh book, "Love at First Sight," deals precisely with this subject: Daniels's heroine, the goody-two-shoes-turned-gumshoe Karen Sutton -- especially fond of cardigans and muscular men -- witnesses a murder and uses I Saw You personals to catch the killer (and, along the way, a husband!).
Daniels discovered the personals in Missoula, Mont., where she lives, and immediately thought, "Oh, my gosh! What if you saw someone and they didn't want to be seen?"
And so we return to Shira from Whole Foods.
Turns out West never found his girl with the ad, and a survey of every Shira in the Washington phone book (including two Sheeras and two Shirahs) didn't find her, either. It did turn up more than 30 nos, though, and one "I don't know what you're talking about. I'm engaged."
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| butterfly |
| quote: | Originally posted by Eugene
Men, it would seem, considerably outnumber women when it comes to falling in love at first sight. Robert Butterworth, a California psychologist and a specialist in the subject, says that's because men are more visual creatures with more visual lovemaps.
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this surprises me. |
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