Two Zero Five: Casual Encounters

I read today that Craigslist has shut down its Casual Encounters areas. I have to say that I'm saddened by that.

I was never a user of Casual Encounters. I've never been someone who uses hook-up apps. I've never been at Tinder or Match.com or any of their kin. For all the obvious reasons, I've always been too afraid to go to use hook-up apps. It's hard--- impossible, really ---to imagine that anyone would swipe whatever the direction is to show any interest in me.  Tinder and its rivals aren't places where whatever strengths I have can be brought to bear. The things that I've spent a lifetime working round--- age and looks ---are on immediate display there, and none of my strengths show up in a profile photo and a two or three sentence biography.

Back in the days of my own lost youth (or at least back at the end of the last millennium), I did visit Nerve.com a fair amount. I've no idea if Nerve.com still exists, or if it still has a Personals area. I'm actually wondering if Personals style ads are still done, here almost twenty years into the new millennium--- if a world where even text messages seem like a lot of trouble to do, does anyone under, say, forty have the energy to sit and construct a Personals ad? I also wonder if the corporate panic that's caused Craigslist to shut down Casual Encounters will spell the end of Personals sites (where they still exist).

Nerve.com marketed itself as an erotica-for-intellectuals site. You were encouraged to talk about your interests in books, films, politics, art. I suppose that did encourage a bit of pretentiousness (cf. the old New York Review of Books personals) but it also gave someone like me a chance to be seen as useful. It also brought out a fair number of lovely undergraduate and early twentysomething girls who prided themselves on being both bookish and sexually adventurous.

I did meet a few interesting partners there. There were telephone encounters, and one or two webcam encounters. One girl--- a lovely girl in Cincinnati who went on to joint degrees in Law and Library Science ---did become deeply important to me. I've only come close to marrying a bare handful of times in my life, but she was very much on the small list of girls I'd have been proud to marry or partner with. I remember exchanging messages with her at Nerve.com (she called herself SmartChick in those days), and I remember that first night when we spoke by phone. We stayed on the phone for hours and hours, and for almost two years we never slept (together or apart) without long, long conversations in the dark.

Casual Encounters was always something I'd read for amusement more than any thought of placing an ad. The ads were a strange mix of the hilarious, the hopeless, and the grimly earnest. There were disturbing ads that could've come straight from a novel about serial killers and affecting and sad ads that had such obvious backstories of loneliness and empty days. I'd read Craiglist Casual Encounters sites in cities all over the world and try to gauge what the sexual tastes of the lonely, the adventurous, and the desperate were out there across continents and seas. I read the ads the way I'd read short stories, and I'd laugh or sigh or just try to build up an image of who the characters in the stories were and what they were life in what's known as Real Life.

I've seen a couple of eulogies at on-line magazines for Casual Encounters. One girl now in her late twenties wrote about her freshman year at university and realising that she could summon sexual partners to her residence hall and never have to leave the building or put shoes on. Another girl wrote about how Casual Encounters could produce scary results and dull ones both, but how the ads let her finally accept that sex could be adventurous and exciting, let her experiment with all the half-formed hopes and fantasies and dreams she was having. Casual Encounters, they both argued, allowed a belief that there was a world of sexual (and, yes, romantic) experiences and partners out there. The Casual Encounters ads let you believe that there really was someone out there whose interests would mirror yours.  That's no small thing, really.

Anyway... I will miss Casual Encounters. I'll miss the possibilities it offered, the sense of adventure implicit in the idea of following up the ads.  For all that so many of the ads were silly or stupid or incoherent, Craigslist Casual Encounters did make the world seem more open to experience and pleasure and excitement. Those ads made sex (and romance) seem more accessible, more possible. Our world will be a bit less delightful without them.