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The Personals: Sea of Love or Sea of Trouble?
| Article
# : |
18951 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1991 |
1,861 Words |
| Author
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Sherry Von Ohlsen
Sherry Von Ohlsen writes from her base in Sparta, New Jersey. |
Every week, millions of Americans participate in a dating game whose board is the printed page, whose rules are ever-changing, and whose outcome is always in doubt. We're talking about the personals, those advertisements for love, affection, and companionship found in the classified sections of everything from your local newspaper to the literary New York Review of Books and the anything-goes Village Voice.
The phrase dating game may conjure up images of twenty-year-olds sweating it out until a date is made for Saturday night, but the reality is that personal ads are taken out and responded to by men and women of all ages and backgrounds. Those using the personals include academics, lawyers, and doctors, many of whom are in their forties, fifties, and sixties. The predisposing factor in all this is that people need and want human companionship; it's the same drive that helped launch the precursor of personals, the Lonely Hearts column of Victorian times, to which the unrequited wrote in for pen pals.
A new wrinkle on the old game of meeting people through the personals is offered by Gary Glicker's Telephone Response Exchange, which publishes seventy-five to one hundred ads in the Personal Dialogue column in more than seventy newspapers around the country. Instead of responding via letters, people call in to a computerized phone system and leave messages. The advertiser listens and screens the messages to decide if anyone who responds is the kind of person he or she is looking for.
Bye, Bye Bar Scene
"The personals are an alternative to the bar scene," says Kathy Camarra, sales director for the Record, a daily based in New Jersey. "In transient areas like metropolitan New York, personal ads are a good way to find people and a more personal way to get acquainted with someone. Using them is definitely better than sitting in a dimly lit room with someone asking you your sign."
One man, Mitch, couldn't agree more. When he responded to an ad three years ago in New York Magazine, he had already been "kind of beaten up in the dating game," he says. The guarded etiquette and image consciousness of New Yorkers made it difficult for Mitch to meet the right woman. One year after contacting a woman "looking for an unconventional man," Mitch married her. So far, they're living happily ever after.
"I didn't put a whole lot of effort into it," Mitch
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