I’m not sure what reminded me of this today, but I was thinking about what personal ads were like in the days before Match and eHarmony. I find it quaint and amusing.
I’ll tell you about it, but first you have to get off of my lawn.
First you had to write your profile. You’d walk or drive to the office of a local newspaper. As far as I know, this was in one location only, so people from the suburbs would have to drive into the city, and park on one of the most unparkable streets there is. You’d ask a clerk for a personal ad form. Then you’d fill in your profile in a section where every letter went in its own little box. And you’d abbreviated everything, because you’d get charged by the letter. That’s where terms like “SWM” came from, because no one wanted to pay to have to spell it out.
Then you’d “submit” your profile. That meant handing the form back to the clerk and pay a fee. I don;t remember what it was, but probably $5-10 for a very short ad that would run for a week. If you wanted it to stay “online” longer, you’d have to go into the office every week and renew it.
When people saw your profile and decided to respond, they’d write to you. On paper. Then they’d mail it to the newspaper, addressed to a particular mailbox.
To check your messages, you’d of course have to go back to the office and ask the clerk if you had any mail.
It was kind of thrilling when technology advanced to where you could do some of this by telephone. Touch tone only, of course, and not everyone had that.
I did this back in the Stone Age. For some reason, I liked it better than I ever liked online dating. I felt like I could be more specific, and I didn’t get many responses, but the ones I got weren’t bad. It’s a quality/quantity thing. In my opinion, there are too many choices in online dating, and because you see so much right up front (pictures, profiles), it’s easy to eliminate people quickly.
Or maybe I was much less cynical back then. I bet that was it.
I don’t know anything early online dating but I did a lot of dating through singles ads in the 1990s. You wrote or typed the ad and sent it to the newspaper (snail mail and, later, email), and people responded by dialing a phone number and leaving a message. You picked up your messages and called the ones you were interested in. In some places these were called matchboxes, thus the band name Matchbox 20.
There was also a business in the 1980s where you paid a large sum to have a photo taken and make a video that members of the opposite sex could view. I had a special offer where I could review their photo library and watch videos prior to joining. If the idea was to get me interested in a lot of good-looking women, it failed miserably.
