Personals: My Life as a Columnist (of Sorts), Part One

I've been single most of my adult life, so I have a long dating history. It includes a large ad-dating component which, for me, began so long ago that the local classifieds didn't have that kind of category. Back then, the only place I knew to look for such ads was Mother Earth News.

Although I didn't run my own ad there, I did answer a few, and I ended up dating a Canadian farmer for awhile. He was cute and intelligent, but as time went by, I not only noticed a mean streak, but also figured out what he was up to. His wife had custody of their young son, and he was hoping to marry a U.S. woman and then abduct the child and spirit him into the U.S. where his ex-wife would not (presumably) find him. There was no love lost on either side when we ended it, and I gave up on long-distance relationships and ad-dating.

When local papers started to include an ad-dating category in their classifieds, I decided to give the process another try. In those early days, responding required writing a letter and sending it off to an anonymous box number at the newspaper. From there it was forwarded, in a large envelope with other responses, to the advertiser. There was waiting involved--long and, as often as not, endless waiting.

Call me a quick study... I soon figured out that the power position was being the advertiser, not the respondent. So I ran my first ad:

NIGHT-SHIFT WOMAN, 30s, 5'7", 135 lbs., non-smoker, seeks easygoing male friend for outdoor play, shared meals, casual times.

I rented a PO Box so I could include my address in the ad and thus receive my responses more quickly. There were about two dozen of them in the week following publication. Many men, I discovered, are borderline illiterate, care not a whit about the first impression they make, and in some cases don't even own a decent whole piece of paper to scrawl on.

One man, however, identified himself as a writer. He didn't waste a lot of words in his response to my ad, but he was taller than me and knew how to type and spell, which set him apart from the crowd. The writer part intrigued me, so I wrote back to him.

We exchanged half a dozen letters in the two weeks following my ad. He told me he was a writer of fiction and had several pieces in print. I proposed a little get-acquainted game of matching answers to determine which of us would pay for our first coffee date. An odd number of matches, he would pay. An even number, I would pay. No matches at all, Dutch treat. We matched one answer.

We agreed to meet at the mall. By the way, did I mention he was a writer? Right down to the corduroy blazer with leather elbow patches, the wire-rimmed glasses, the (I swear I am not making this up) pipe. Upon first sight of his gorgeous, lean, blue-eyed self, do you suppose I creamed my delicate underthings? Yes, indeedy, you bet I did.

We dated for three intense months. We continued to write to each other while dating, long letters handed to each other several times a week. There was a point at which I would happily have married him and worked at my crappy job forever to support him while he wrote prize-winning Faulknerian novels. There were a lot of reasons the relationship ended, not the least of which was his excessive use of alcohol, but he surely rocked my world for awhile.

A year or so later, he had another short story published. I recognized elements of my personal history in it.

[Sigh...]