I've been a romantic for as long as I can remember. At age eleven, I fell off my bike and broke my arm when a boy I liked rode past and said hi. Lying on the side of the road, my arm unnaturally bent beneath me, I looked up to see if he'd noticed my fall. He hadn't, and for the six weeks that I wore a cast, I replayed the scene a thousand times — the ending always a twist on whatever "happily ever after" means to an eleven-year-old. I had an acute sense of the right and wrong way to meet a boy. If your Sunday School crush scrapes you off the pavement — well really, what could be more romantic?
Fifteen years later, I remain incurable (and a terribly clumsy bike-rider). So when I learned that my job would involve being the doyenne of Nerve Personals, I was somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, I got to be NerveCenter's matchmaker, yenta to the thoughtful hedonists, missionary to the single masses; on the other hand — personals? I mentally filed personal ads with singles cruises — cheesy, sleazy, desperate, embarrassing, whatever — certainly not romantic. What could be less romantic than meeting someone through the equivalent of a Sears catalog?
Well, let's say that my assumptions have been challenged and I've become a romantic of the twenty-first-century variety. No, I didn't find my sweetheart on the Nerve personals (met him in a bar, actually — awfully embarrassing for a romantic), but one of my friends is currently racking up frequent flyer miles because she fell in love with a boy from L.A. on NerveCenter. (Area codes, people! Limit your search by area code.) And judging by the sincere, funny, smart — yes, even romantic — personals posted on NerveCenter (almost a thousand already), I can't imagine she's the first or last.
Why shouldn't love notes exchanged via online personals be as romantic as hand-penned declarations of love? LOL all you like, but somewhere out there, emails like Winston Churchill's letters to his wife Clementine (You give me so much happiness in a world of accident and storm), Napoleon's letters to his "sweet, incomparable Josephine" (I wake filled with thoughts of you. Your portrait and the intoxicating evening which we spent yesterday have left my senses in turmoil) or Robert Burns' letters to his "dearest Madam" (You alone engross every faculty of my mind) are fighting their way through the ease-inspired carelessness of the medium to get to their intended.
Those historic correspondences sprang from real life encounters; with personals, it begins with the ad. And what greater challenge is there for a writer than to attempt to say, in fifty words or less, why you deserve consideration as a soul mate? "You should get to know me, quite frankly, because you've already found me," writes one NerveCenter member. "A love of minor chords is nice," writes another. If you like instructions: "Tell me one good story . . . anything, but only one . . . dirty, lovely, romantic, scary, therapeutic, true, a lie, enlightening"; if you'd rather give them: "I believe there has to be someone out there who can make sense of me and can't live without doing so."
You see, love found online begins with the word (and in some cases, the picture — nothing wrong with giving the imagination a helping hand). The dance of making eye contact, starting a conversation, putting your hand on his arm is replaced by a carefully constructed sentence here, a saucy instant message there. The joy lies in staying up all night to woo someone with words, in turning on your computer and finding something sweet.
Is it going too far to suggest that online personals signal the return of the billet-doux — of the very practice of courtship itself? Why not find out for yourself?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Contributing editor Emma Taylor is one half of "Em & Lo," and has been a near-expert at Nerve for the past five years. Together with her better half, Lo, she has written Nerve's two original books, "The Big Bang" (July '03) and "Nerve's Guide to Sex Etiquette" (February '04). She writes for Men's Journal, Glamour, The Guardian (U.K.) and EmandLo.com. She can currently be heard starring on Nerve's voicemail system.
