Nothing Personal
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| Photo: Vance Christie |
In today's world of online classifieds, I'll admit to knowing only a few such sites in the US (such as CraigsList) and was indeed surprised to see that the top site for online ad viewing (and in the time spent browsing them) was in Russia (what??) according to one tracking site, SimilarWeb. But in my day, before LinkedIn and Ebay Motors, classifieds were about the only places to go if you were looking for a job or a car. For one thing, ads were cheap since they were shoved to the very back of the paper and often in the smallest typeface possible (likely to squeeze in more ads; you were charged more if you wanted a larger font or one with bold letters). These days, advertising in print, say for a fashion ad, can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or an average of about $700 per inch, wrote Fit Small Business. Placing a personal ad in the New York Review basically runs about $600 for just 100 words (about half of this paragraph; an average book runs about 70,000 words, wrote Books Calculator). So it was surprising for me to still see a hefty business happening in the "personals" section. What sort of person decides to place such an ad, one which will likely be viewed by a national or possibly a world, audience? Why not just place an inexpensive ad in the local paper (okay, too small a town and you'd likely be quickly identified), or one online (admittedly, I know nothing about such online sites other than hearing about them so perhaps there is little or no advantage, i.e. Must Love Dogs)? But every now and then, I'd peek at those listings and find that the mood of the listings had changed, both in ages and genders...and for me, readability. Here's one actual example: 35M B 150 ISO LTR (FWB/NSA) W/25-50M GL T, GSOH.
Wait, what happened to real words, and real descriptions? Apparently, I wasn't alone in that confusion of deciphering the new lingo as the BBC wrote a short piece about today's personal ads. Take this example in their story: Matt turned to online dating after coming out of a 16-year relationship three years ago, but has also tried in-person dating events. Although he thinks it is "easier" to strike up conversation with people online, he says the connection is "so much weaker" and acronyms can be "off-putting". "I find the use of acronyms like FWB (Friends With Benefits) and ONS really difficult," the PE teacher said...But online dating in the 2020s has opened Matt's mind to other ways of describing himself. After someone explained to him the breakdown of his past relationship might partly be down to conflicting star signs, the 44-year-old from Bath has started using astrology to guide his decisions on swiping right. Wait, astrology? Go back a few decades and I remember when people at parties used to ask, "what sign are you?" Such a question was often scoffed at, even back then, and was often viewed (at least by me) as something leftover from the hippies (although, that was the era I grew up in). But maybe there was/is something to that field. Maybe reading Tarot cards and studying the stars & planets is as valid a field as acupuncture, another centuries-old field slow to gain acceptance. And if astrological signs and numbers were indeed something we were born with, or born under, then what else may be out there? Could it be that someone versed in such fields may have a bit of a better understanding of what comprises our "whole" personality?
So what would happen if you mixed color with astrology? It's already been done, and is a "field" (previously unknown to me) called colorstrology. Here's how Michelle Bernhardt, author of the book, explained it: Just as certain astrological signs have a natural affinity for one another, so do colors. Some colors clash, while others are complementary...Colorstrology reflects these innate and unique differences. It is important to understand that your birth color and your favorite color may or may not be one and the same. Your birth color honors the real you. A favorite color can change as you grow and evolve, and often does. It can be influenced by outside stimuli and opinions. Your birth color, however, is a constant. It is a key that connects your inner and outer worlds...There is a world of possibility contained in each day of birth. There are strengths and weaknesses and gifts and challenges. You have a sun sign and a ruling planet, and you belong to a particular element -- fire, earth, air, or water. You're birthday carries a numerological vibration that has a very specific meaning. Each of these components shapes your personality and life experiences, and when combined, create the personal colors on which Colorstrology is based. Naturally, I wondered what "my" color would be and, as the author mentioned, I found that it was way down the list of what I would have expected, although my wife felt that the "description" of the color's traits and how it applied to me were pretty close. But here's the interesting part (and I have to add that while I am open to fields such as numerology and astrology, I don't understand them enough to place a lot of belief in them): I wondered about the colors I tended to see while under hypnosis, colors which remain the same even if I'm with different hypnotherapists (I've only been twice). So I moved to the overall chart of birth colors, picked out the two colors I felt came closest, and read their descriptions, and --gulp-- they were spot on. So maybe there was something about that Age of Aquarius during my youthful days entering adulthood.
Wait a minute, what on Earth does any of this have to do with personal ads and bookstores? Long ago, as in long ago when I was single, I answered a personal ad, one which appeared in the small-town paper which was available almost everywhere (hint: it was free). I used to write short pieces for the paper and thought, what exactly is this "market" for finding a date or meeting someone interesting by answering a personal ad (this was all before the days of online dating sites, a world now so vast that it would be scary for someone like me who has been absent from the world of dating for like a century). It would be an "assignment" and I'd get paid to do it so why not? So I answered an "ad," and we agreed to meet at a local bar (the only one in the town) and at least in my opinion, she turned out to he far from what she had described (a constant cigarette smoker for one...never mentioned). All in all, it was enough to convince me at the time that trying to meet someone through that method was not for me because, well, there were a lot of fictional descriptions out there (in those days, there were no photos to go with the ad). But looking at the dating world decades later, I think that little has changed: people still like to embellish their image; and if you can't do it on your own, there's always AI. No really! Bumping into "the one" by socializing or chatting while in line somewhere seems as odd these days as talking to strangers in an elevator. To my ancient eyes, today's world of quick clicks and AI manipulation must make it even more difficult to "attract" a date, all of which forces people on both sides to become creative (which doesn't always mean being more truthful). So quickly, a few such "personals" to decode (and again, these are actual ads from the magazines above; and note that I have no idea what ads appear online): --Morticia ISO a Gomez type to torture, a mutual obsession to burn the wick at both ends. Sanity optional with a touch of wishfulness. Don't you know? Hearts are wild creatures, which is why our ribs are cages. --Resplendent female falconer, done molting. Seeks sassy fit male for flights of fancy. --Irresolute and chainsmoking hetaera wants a dissolute, self-indulgent parvenu. Must provide prenup in her favor, mandatory book dates, mutual love for the vintage and rare, and occasional mosh-pitting before death do us part. --I am Krang's android body. To actualize, I need your ideas. No pictures, only words. --Performative top wants power-hungry bottom. Wulfish. Hephaestion in search of true Alexander. Dare bring the wolf home to Olympia? Mother dearest will snark, "Who's the harriet?" --Irrevocably cynical about love & its lesser permutations. Now an aspiring demi-mondaine: overtalented, overeducated, underappreciated. --Gemini, 29, Sapphic. Even though I burned the toast, and got red lipstick all over your newspaper, you forgave me because I boiled the perfect egg, and made all three hours of Jeanne Dielman a romp. You were charmed that I wrote this in a blue bathtub on a stenography pad with a pencil sharpened at both ends. And we laugh about how you almost didn't answer it. And one more: Sociable, upbeat, intermittently needy Londoner, would like to meet nice, non-sedentary bloke who might honestly say similar things about himself...no tweeds or monocles. Hmm, maybe reading those cryptic initials and abbreviations would be easier...but give stars to all those creative writers in search of something.
Those of you navigating today's world of dating, you've likely already discovered that you're far from alone. Netflix even has a series on "seniors" dating, although the people featured are rather up there in both income and marriages. A WIRED piece online noted: Of all things about dating that people got wrong in 2024, one remains the standout: that old people don’t have a lot of sex. In fact, on several dating platforms, boomers (individuals aged 59 to 72) were the fastest growing userbase. Aging singles were having the most orgasmic sex of their lives, according to data from Match.com, where 50-plus daters are joining at a higher rate than every other demographic. Since 2022, the kink-positive app Feeld has experienced a 340 percent surge in users who are 60-plus...Many other apps also reported a record 2024. Tinder, setting a new benchmark, reached 50 million users. Hinge’s global downloads topped an all-time high, ranking it as the second most downloaded dating app in the markets it serves, the company reported in a November shareholder letter. Sniffies, the platform for queer cruisers that uses map technology, saw a 26 percent increase in straight singles. A total of 130 billion chats—yes, billion—were sent between gay men on Grindr. On Bumble, where women make the first move, paid users increased by 10 percent, topping 3 million...A study released by Flirtini found that one in four people rely on TikTok to figure out how to navigate their relationship, despite a clear rise in misinformation. And speaking of a changing world of dating, this emerged from TIME: In a survey we conducted at Hinge with over 4,000 daters on the app, we found that 93% of singles are looking for someone who’s comfortable being vulnerable. And they’re 66% more likely to go on a second date with someone who shows emotional vulnerability on the first date. In fact, a majority say emotional vulnerability is the biggest thing they’re looking for on a first date—ranking it higher than attractiveness, income, or height.
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| Comic by Tom Tomorrow: This Modern World |
But as long as we're still on the topic of writing "personals," and despite the holidays now fading as quickly as pulling out of a rest stop, there were also these letters to Santa (yes, children do still "write" to Santa as seen in the documentary, Dear Santa). Wrote Smithsonian, things have seemingly moved from asking for a model train set (are they still being made?) to a mother asking for food. Here's part of what the article said: Yes, many of these letters feature kids endearingly asking for toys: Ayden from Tennessee says, “I’m 11 years old and I think I’ve been really good this year. My favorite things are dinosaurs and space.” Included in Ayden’s wish list for Santa is a “velociraptor plushie,” of course. But keep reading and deeper messages emerge as well: Tenisha from Georgia, a mother of two, tells Santa, “My wish is to bring a smile to my children’s faces this year. The past few years have been really challenging for us, financially. If there is any way for you to bless me with a gift card at a grocery store…to buy groceries to make them a memorable holiday dinner, I would appreciate it.” And 14-year-old Maddison from Maryland says, “Please if I can ask you to help me and my mom for the Christmas holiday...Mom pays the bills, she’s a great mom.” Maddison kindly started this letter to Santa with “Hello, how are you?”
All of this seems to echo a search for connection with someone, real or imagined. A search for a simple hello or a smile, a reactionary hint that one of those nods may lead to something deeper, from cute innocent children writing to Santa, to seemingly sex-starved seniors looking for someone to take to dinner (and perhaps other places). But what if that world was different, as it is for so many. What if you were severely disabled, or had next to no money, or were missing limbs or scarred from burns? What if you were one of the 5000 children separated from your family at the border?* Would that mean you were any less lonely, or any less earnest in searching for a companion, a friend, even someone to just talk to you face to face? Or what if you simply couldn't recognize or remember anyone?...not dementia (although that's very real) but prosopagnosia. In a piece in National Geographic, it asked: What do legendary primatologist Jane Goodall, actor Brad Pitt, and the late British neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, have in common? The answer: a condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. It’s a neurological disorder in which people struggle to remember and recognize familiar or famous faces—and it may be more common than previously thought...people with the condition have trouble remembering the faces of individuals or telling them apart. But all of these people are looking for some human connection, even those who can't recognize it. Added the piece in The New Yorker on bookstores: The big winner in the pandemic was the romance novel. Eighteen million print copies were sold in 2020; in 2023, more than thirty-nine million copies were sold (the article also noted that E-book sales peaked more than ten years ago).
So before I get into my own imaginary personal ad, let me elaborate on what I discovered by diving into my colorstrology. Bear in mind that I am partially colorblind, so the colors I "see" would likely be different from someone who was not colorblind (see my earlier post of being colorblind). But I did choose the two main colors I "saw" each time I was hypnotized, both being "dawn" colors of deep maroon and purple, those sort of fake-looking early-morning sky colors you see in paintings, that is until you actually witness such a morning. So the first color description in the book read: Devoted. Perceptive. Persuasive. And the second read: Intense. Provocative. Mystic. Hey, not bad. As one would say, I'll take those. But then they went on to describe this: You have a complex nature and are not satisfied with the superficial. Something inside of you longs for more meaning...Deep emotions should be explored with love and compassion, or your thoughts can become negative or antagonistic...The ability to disarm people with your wit and intelligence is remarkable. Try not to cover any fear or insecurity with arrogance or a sharp tongue. Well, it sure sounded great at the start; and at the end of it (it did go on), it was indeed...spot on. Sigh. So if somehow I decided to tackle today's world and write a "personal" ad of my own, I would likely word it this way: Happily Married Male ISO fears and insecurity from childhood; it's been ages but feel that we should meet again and catch up and have deep and maybe intimate conversations together. Let's discover if we can rekindle what we shared from long ago, for better or worse. At this point in our lives, it may be the perfect time to talk and to see if anything has changed...
Wrapping it up as if on cue, came this from Cloud Support, again in WIRED (consider it a sort of Dear Abby advice column for today's online world): Fantasy and fiction offer an escape hatch from your usual point of view and let you explore perspectives different from your own. Choosing a droid as your avatar doesn’t mean you’re a robot deep down. Reading a novel that portrays the world through the eyes of a female narrator doesn’t mean you’re secretly a woman (or a “creep”). The pioneers of the internet hoped that digital spaces would liberate us from our ordinary lives, allowing us to experiment with assumed identities behind the veil of anonymity. That’s certainly not the utopia we ended up with (instead, we’re often sorted into rigid boxes by prediction engines and targeted ads)...Play-acting and role-playing, of course, can sometimes reveal deeper longings, especially those the conscious mind has refused to entertain. If you feel an overwhelming sense of euphoria while playing a female character or find yourself fantasizing about being the avatar in real life, then maybe your friends are right and there’s something deeper going on. Gender itself, it’s often said, is a “script,” a kind of performance that is socially reinforced to make people all across the gender spectrum conform to the standard binary. Choosing a female character might simply be an acknowledgment of parts of yourself that you’ve felt compelled to repress in ordinary life—not a sign that you’re living in the wrong body, necessarily, just evidence that your mode of gender expression has become too narrow. Wait, was that real or AI?
Call me old school (which would be quite accurate) but I enjoy a format used by The Sun, one of the last magazines to not have advertising (it counts on the support of its readers and subscribers, much as the magazine Orion does). A regular feature is simply called Readers Write where each month a subject is presented and readers from all over write in about their experiences. One month the subject can be about basements, while another month it can be about dating. But the voices and stories are as real as they are varied. Nothing to hide, nothing to fake, nothing to brag about...just a story to tell. This particular month the subject was "timing," and here's one such tale: When Dennis and I got married, I was thirty-six and in a hurry to start a family. Dennis’s mother, Irene, was thrilled that her fifty-year-old “baby boy” had finally tied the knot, and she loved the idea of another grandchild. It had been three decades since her last one. After a couple of years of unsuccessful attempts, Dennis and I resorted to in vitro fertilization. Irene offered financial help. She continued to give it through two failed rounds of IVF and Dennis’s growing weariness of our frequent-flyer status at the clinic. The third IVF cycle worked, and I enjoyed a textbook pregnancy. Then my due date came and went. Irene began calling every other day to express her hopes that the baby would be born on her birthday, nearly two weeks away. I told her they would never let me go that long. Yet my obstetrician didn’t schedule an induction until I was ten days overdue. Fifty-six hours after arriving at the hospital, I had an emergency C-section, and Irene’s wish ame true: Stephen, her first grandchild in thirty years, was born on her ninety-fourth birthday. Selfishly, Dennis and I kept putting off a trip from our home in New York City to Irene’s assisted-living facility in Philadelphia. She had congestive heart failure, and we didn’t want to bring Stephen inside the facility’s hospital, where she’d been spending increasing amounts of time. Then, when the baby was five weeks old, she asked with uncharacteristic impatience, “When will you bring my grandson to me?” We drove to Pennsylvania the next day. Smiling at Stephen from her hospital bed, Irene declared, “My life is complete. My baby boy has a baby boy.” We promised we’d visit again after she was discharged. Days later she entered hospice care. We wanted to return, but a massive power outage struck much of the Northeast. That night, from the patio of our West Village apartment, we saw the stars over the city for the first time. On the brightest one I made a wish for Stephen. When the power came back on the next afternoon, Dennis’s brother finally reached him with the news: their mother had passed away during the blackout. Though we were heartbroken, there was also something beautiful in the way it had occurred. We’ve told Stephen countless times about the night God turned out the lights so we could see his grandmother’s star.
There's a connection there. And after digging into all that has changed since the days of newspapers and tiny-print classifieds, my feeling is that all of these tales of dating and chatting and placing ads seem to have something in common, and that is for someone to listen. We all have a story to tell, a story of our lives, of our loves, of our losses and our accomplishments. What we dreamed, our best moments, what touched us and what we feared. And while the newness of another person, real or imagined, can seem exciting, it would seem that all we may be searching for is for someone to hear us, someone to listen to a few small bits of our life and our feelings, all before we turn the key and realize that we are alone, be it in a room or in a life. So perhaps that gift of listening would be the best way to start the new year, to pause even for a minute or so and listen to a stranger, or a spouse, or a parent, or a child. There likely is something important there even if we can't see it or hear it, something which may truly be life-changing. As the 33-year old Japanese man told reporters, a young man who simply stands with a sign that says "Please Let Me Stay Over Tonight" (and has ended up staying at the homes of over 500 strangers, wrote one site), he just listens. Hearing their stories, he said: ...feels like reading a different novel every night. There's a book in each of us, even if it may not be in a bookstore...
*Wrote a piece in the New York Review about children being separated from their families when crossing the border: Between 2017 and 2020 at least 5,500 children were taken away and scattered all over the country, some in literal warehouses or repurposed big-box stores, some in "tent-cities," some sent into haphazardly contracted foster care, some simply lost. The true number may never be known because the records were so poorly kept. This was intentional: political appointees like Scott Lloyd, acting head of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), had directed staff to not keep lists of the children and to "get rid of" those lists they did have. Among the various agencies involved, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security, and ORR, there was no central database of separations. And ICE opposed, blocked, and delayed reunification even in cases where parents had been processed through the judicial system. Today it is estimated that more than a thousand families have still not been reunited.
Addendum: The online world of connecting has moved onto AI with such apps as Nomi, Kindroid and Replika, all of which use technology similar to that found in apps like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, wrote a piece in The New York Times. They allow users to build their own personalized A.I. companions and chat with them by talking or texting back and forth. (Basic versions of many of these apps are free, but users pay a subscription fee to unlock the good features, such as the ability to talk to multiple A.I. friends at once.) In the article, the author reported: Sometimes, my A.I. friends invented stories about me or our friendships -- a phenomenon known as “hallucination.” But people don’t seem to care if their A.I. friends make occasional mistakes. Some of these apps have millions of users already, and several investors told me that A.I. companionship is one of the fastest-growing parts of the industry. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other big social media platforms have already started experimenting with putting A.I. chatbots in their apps, meaning it may become mainstream soon. The piece also noted: Roughly one in three Americans adults reports feeling lonely at least once a week...I should note that in this case, the "artificial" part of AI may prove accurate in its description of companionship.
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