By Ari Mulgay
June 29 , 2022
In this week’s issue of The Distance, we have an essay from writer Ari Mulgay about the nature of “missed connections” — singular moments that might be easy to overlook, even though they have the power to shape the rest of your life. But first, if you aren't subscribed to The Distance, please sign up here. Now, here's Ari:
“You hit me with your bike on Fulton Street right in front of the bus stop,” writes an anonymous Brooklynite on Craigslist’s ‘Missed Connections’ forum. “I thought you were cute and wish we exchanged numbers. Reply if you feel the same.”
The tone here is typical of a Missed Connections post: wistful, sheepish, tinged with regret. But, if we imagine the possibility of this connection being rekindled, the post offers a concrete record of a phenomenon that, absent a space like Missed Connections, would be difficult to pinpoint: a serendipitous moment like this can spark a close personal relationship or alter the trajectory of a career. How should we think about chance when some of the most essential details of our lives are ripple effects of easily missable encounters?
You might submit a Missed Connection after one of these encounters has left you imagining what could have followed if only you’d shared your phone number. You post a few identifying details on Craigslist’s public message board hoping that the stranger — perhaps also fixated on that moment — finds the message and responds. In this way, the forum offers a second chance.
Like most of Craigslist’s functions, the Missed Connections section has an ancestry leading back to print media. By most accounts, the earliest personal advertisem*nts, or “classifieds,” were placed in English newspapers in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Think employers seeking workers, artisans hawking wares, and, most notably, lonely hearts declaring themselves eligible for marriage.
The parties who advertised themselves in these “classifieds” would pay per word or even per letter, resulting in the pithy, economical tone that’s still prominent even on free online fora like Craigslist. Although originally used mostly by people at the fringes of marriageable society (widows, orphans, bachelorettes just beyond typical marrying age), lonely-hearts advertising gradually became so popular that, in the early 1900s, there was an entire magazine devoted to it. In the past decade, the form has become so ubiquitous that the “Rush Hour Crush” feature in the English Metro newspaper became the venue for long-running prank.
By the mid-1700s, the genre had evolved. Lovestruck urbanites were taking out advertising space to reach the eyes of particular people they had encountered in the world. By one account, the very first missed connection sought a “lady, genteely dressed,” who’d been spotted leading “a string of beautiful stone horses.” The anonymous gentleman who commissioned it wanted to know whether she’d be “inclinable to marry” him. While other classifieds were usually generic and purely future-looking (“wanted: kitchen worker”), the missed connection sought to recreate a vivid, fleeting, and potentially life-altering encounter — a moment the writer must have replayed incessantly in his mind.
If only he’d asked the lady her name when he had the chance! As a technology of communication, the missed connection responds to the basic human fear of letting opportunity slip away.
Bringing “missed connections” into the age of technological connectivity
Like job-recruiting and second-hand selling, missed connection-seeking found its way online by 1996, when Craig Newmark purchased an internet domain to expand his popular email-based newsletter, Craigslist. Even as it ate into the market for newspaper advertising, this early online classifieds forum did not differ much in form from its print predecessors, and it used the same basic technology to distribute missed connections as it did solicitations for housing or gig work.
Posts on Craigslist, which are all sorted simply by category, location, and time of upload, have roughly the same reach and lifespan as advertisem*nts in local newspapers — though the marginal cost of posting online allows Craigslist to host even the most trivial of classifieds for free.
Like so much of the early internet, many of Craigslist’s functions have been reimagined in recent years by tech companies hoping to optimize or further monetize the user experience. As it turns out, many of these functions are, at their most basic level, a matter of connecting people, products, and services. There are, for instance, websites that match potential employers and workers. Other sites present real estate to renters and buyers based on their stated preferences. And, of course, social media platforms and search engines make most of their money by targeting advertisem*nts to users based on whatever they can gather from their other activity online — essentially connecting companies directly to potential consumers.
Love, too, has had its tech makeover, first with dating websites in the 2000s, then again with smartphone-era apps that employ complex proprietary algorithms to determine which users would most likely connect with one other.
In determining how to direct content towards a particular user, these platforms’ algorithms rely on guesses and observations about that person’s habits and preferences — not to mention their age, gender, race, and socioeconomic means. In effect, the decisions we’re presented with online are engineered; no encounter happens by chance. As a result, there is no internet equivalent of, say, hitting someone with your bike on Fulton Street.
How much about ending up with your perfect home, your dream job, even your soulmate, is simply about finding them among an ocean of endless options? Even when we do find them, we aren’t always adept at recognizing the moment of opportunity — hence, missed connections. Do increasingly targeted algorithms boost the odds of making and recognizing those connections? Do we lose anything by entrusting potential connections to new technologies rather than letting them form out of the chaos of the in-person world?
Questions like these don’t have simple answers, but perhaps we can approach them by juxtaposing these online experiences with the comparatively low-tech machinations of Missed Connections. While many of Craigslist’s other pages now have higher-tech counterparts, Missed Connections remains the online capital of its unique brand of romantic yearning. There’s something to be said about its simplicity, its anonymity, its tacit reassurance that relationships, be they momentary or lifelong, can still germinate by chance in the real world — even if they sometimes need a little nudge from a website to get off the ground.
As one writer has recounted about a romance that began after a man she saw in a bookstore posted a Missed Connection, “If he had spoken to me, we probably never would have spoken again.” Although they never exchanged contact information or small-talk until she responded to his post, she maintains that “the activities that would eventually yield our love — did not take place online. How could they? They took place at St. Mark’s Bookshop, because that is where we met.”
The enduring popularity of Missed Connections suggests that, although we aren’t always adept at noticing them as they happen, our lives are marked by moments like this. Sometimes, if chance has its way, such ephemeral connections change us in long-lasting ways. And when luck fails, Missed Connections is there to offer a second chance.
Ari Mulgay is an editor, writer, and researcher currently working on history books for the Tobin Project.
