Craigslist Missed Connections Have Good Bones
I am a simple woman. I enjoy long walks, sunrises, putting my pants on one leg at a time, and reading missed connections ads to reignite my faith in humanity. I open craigslist’s endearingly outdated hellscape of a landing page on a daily basis and navigate my way to my city’s missed connections. The links I have already clicked on are purple, new posts are blue: “Black Leather Skirt Hobby Store”, “beautiful blonde at dollar store 8/20”, “Thank you for the ride on Monday”. I scroll and skim, reading each new listing in its entirety.
Missed connections are frequently scams, jokes, or thinly veiled sex solicitations. Sometimes they are sincere, even well intentioned. They rarely describe a cinematic moment between strangers. Rather, these ads detail checking out a stranger in the parking lot of an Outback Steakhouse, or making eye contact with a fellow driver idling in rush hour traffic. And they never fail to crack something open inside of me.
Maybe it is the absurdity of it all; these people are horny at the gas station, they are stricken with love and lust at the Winco on Myrtle Street around 12:30 pm. Maybe it is the tragedy; these ads remind me that more often than not, when we are confronted with what we want we are too afraid to take it - we are more drawn to the idea of love than the practice of it. Maybe it is nothing more than a habit; I began reading these ads as a teenager, before I had fallen in love or broken a heart or loitered at a gas station past 11pm. Missed connections entranced me in my adolescence because they conveyed something I so deeply wanted to understand- how it feels to want and to be wanted. To yearn. To lose. To win.
The ones I find funny are the ones that are creepy. Missed connections pages are peppered with ads describing women’s bodies in varying degrees of explicitness, watching them from a distance or even following them. It is not the situation that I find funny, but the narration. It is my own voyeuristic fascination with the voyeur himself - one who writes about his impropriety using text jargon reminiscent of an early 2000s teen movie. It is his ridiculous facade of self-confidence relegated to a platform designed for people who admittedly lack it. Maybe I just need to laugh at what scares me; when I stop at the gas station late at night or walk home alone, I am a woman. I watch people watch me and I am cold because I am fearful. I keep my keys between my knuckles, wear a mean expression and headphones without music. But when I read craigslist missed connections ads, I root for everyone - even myself. These ads personify men who frighten me into a character that amuses me, and in doing so he is neutralized. I can laugh at someone who follows me through the library or catcalls me on the street if I envision he writes one of them. He probably uses the wrong form of “there” and a yahoo email address. He probably craves intimacy and companionship. He is probably a product of his upbringing, his environment; maybe he is trying to do the best with what he has. He probably types the eggplant emoji erotically and earnestly. That guy doesn’t scare me. In fact, in the safety of my room, awash in the blue light of my phone screen, I care about him enough to find him funny - or at least to not hate him.
As above, so below. Missed connections make me brave and make me laugh, and on occasion they break my heart; they make me weak. A good, earnest missed connection depicts love - or the idea of it - in that beautifully tragic, heart-wrenching form that artists have been trying to convey since people began falling in and out of love with each other.
To put it verbosely, Marilyn Robinson wrote, To crave and to have are as like a thing and its shadow, for when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it… and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it? and Charles Bukowski wrote, I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little pictures of, and Franz Kafka wrote to his lover, Milena, I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna and say: come with me. And some random guy in Nampa, Idaho wrote a missed connections ad on craigslist last week to say, I turned and looked and you were yelling at someone else. I waved at you anyways and you waved back. I just wanted to say I wish I had started a conversation with you.
The mere existence of missed connections reveals something divinely universal: love terrifies us, and we are desperate for it. So much so, that we would rather leave everything unsaid than risk rejection. Make a tinder, make a hinge, make a bumble. Swipe and message with mutually assured destruction. Like an instagram story. Leave someone on read. Admire a perfect stranger, post a personal ad on an infrequently trafficked website, and leave things up to the gods of craigslist. The truth is cold and a bit lonely: we are willing to settle for the idea of love over love itself, because who has the time? The bravery? The resilience? Love is to a missed connection ad as Schrodinger's cat is to the box.
Is this a bit bleak? Of course, but it is beautiful nonetheless. People who write missed connections ads entertain love even when they don’t have the stomach for it. At least those freaks believe in serendipity - that is more than can be said of most of us.
When I began reading these ads as a teenager, I wanted so badly to find an ad written about me. I would close my browser window devastated when I didn’t fit the description of “Beautiful woman at Ridley’s”. At that time, I only understood love as something performative. I wanted to be the object of desire without actually having to engage with it. This idea of love left no room for my own agency, for my ability to give.
These days, the missed connections remind me to engage with the world around me kindly, to look at strangers and see them, to treat time spent in traffic and at the grocery store and pumping gas as time well spent. Instead of reading these ads in search of myself, desperate to witness myself through someone else's eyes, I read them in hopes of understanding what the writer feels - that ridiculous, shameless yearning. The lens of a missed connection captures the mundane, and it is brazenly rose-tinted. These people find love in parking lots and traffic. In searching for something so human, and finding it in the cereal aisle, they remind me that there is no such thing as wasted time. There are no meaningless interactions.
I once read that the secret to finding serenity is going to the grocery store without the blinders of routine, taking in everything with fresh, eager eyes. Allegedly, in doing this you discover the inherent beauty lurking around every corner; you find that banality is just joy in a threadbare coat. This is what I think of when I read missed connections ads - of suburban shopping centers teaming with hopeful people, who make small talk with strangers and daydream about them on the commute home. Who are terrified to get what they want, but search for it nonetheless. That is the thing about love: when you look for it everywhere, that’s exactly where it is.
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