One of my favorite late night past times is trolling the Craigslist personals for freaks. I’m particularly fond of Missed Encounters: ‘I was the blonde girl in 7-11, you drove by in a red pick up. We shared a “look.”’ Why ‘look’ is in quotations is beyond me. Also, there’s way more missed than encounter in that statement.
What cracks me up about the personals is the range of expectations. On one end: ‘Lonely dude seeks chick to hang with and maybe more.’ Pretty realistic (albeit sad) for an ad posted at 2 AM on a site that also boasts furniture and serial killers. Way over on the other end: ‘Male, 35, seeking a Lady 21-27. Must be very fit and attractive. The body is a temple and I’m looking for a lady who treats it that way. Must be very thin, no fatties. Willing to try new things.’ No picture. If this guy was the equivalent to that description, he wouldn’t be creeping Craigslist. More importantly, we’re dealing with a huge number of people lonely enough to compose love(lust) wanted ads in the middle of the night but still demanding perfection. I’m no math whiz, but something doesn’t add up.
So one lonely night after a solo evening of Trader Joe’s wine and the 437th viewing of Armageddon, I decided to compose my own Craigslist ad to shake things up: “Do you like babes who over-share, laugh too hard at their own jokes, and sometimes wish they’d been born a boy? How about a girl who has crumbs stuck to her shirt, eats a pint of peppermint ice-cream a night, farts more than an old dog? Into self-deprecation? Bouts of mild depression? It’s your lucky day! If parking a little further away at Target counts as exercise, I work out once a week. I’m unemployed, out of shape, but super charming in a self-aware way. I probably won’t go past second base but I’ll make out for hours like a ninth grader in heat. Commitment-phobe? Don’t worry, I’ll sabotage it before things get too serious. Sound like a deal? That’s because it is! Oh shoot… there’s a lucky charm stuck to my sock. Got it. Yum. Stale and chewy.” No picture. (This was for research only).
I got over 60 responses. Some were guys telling me how gross I was. Thanks, knew that. There were the typical auto responses, “Hello, you sound super sexy. I’m a professional male looking to treat a woman right.” What does that even mean – a professional what? But then there was a whole slew of well-meaning dudes who included pictures – bonus! One guy, though nice enough, used “ha ha,” no exclamation points every five words. Out. Another wrote me with a numbered list of THINGS I NEEDED TO CHANGE ABOUT MYSELF. Good start to any relationship there, guy. Lots were suspicious as to whether I was sincere (got me there) but were responding just in case because they liked my honesty. Which is when I started to feel a little guilty. I had no intention of responding to anyone and, like the perfection-seekers I slammed earlier, I wasn’t about to go out with someone who, a)Didn’t understand that ellipses aren’t interchangeable with periods, b)Attached a photo that looked like it’d been dragged off the Sex Offenders site, c)Described himself as ‘pretty mellow,’ or d)Used the word, ‘classic’ more than three times. Okay, used it even once.
Perfection seeking, whether generic or specific, is all a form of pushing people away; a job description no one can fill. And sure, it’s probably the backlash to falling chin-scrape-hard for Ethan who read Dostoevsky, came back from South America with a tan and a weathered straw hat, who kept a sadness (read: self-indulgent crap) buried deep and only let it show in his deep brown eyes right before he climbed into his beat up forest green jeep and left forever… to give a purely hypothetical example. But still, plowing face first into the concrete sidewalk that is love is still probably better than trying to piece together a harmless soul mate out of perfect parts. Didn’t turn out so well for Frankenstein.
