After the ads were placed, interested parties would call a toll-based 900 number and leave a message in that person’s mailbox. The cost of leaving these messages hovered around $1.75 per minute, and the average call lasted about three minutes. You would listen to the person’s outgoing message and then leave your voice mail, and you even had the option to listen and rerecord if you wanted. The person who placed the ad would go through the messages and contact those people they were interested in.
With no photos and so little information to go off of, finding love through personals could be a frustrating experience. That said, occasionally newspaper personals really did lead to love connections. As it happens, Eric’s dad, Ed, was an active user of classified newspaper personal ads in Chicago during the 1980s and early 1990s, and he remembers his experiences well. Ed published his ads in the Chicago Reader, the local alternative weekly. Fortunately for us, he saved the last, most successful one he ever posted:
SEEKING ADVENTURE??
Divorced Jewish male, 49, enjoys sailing, hiking, biking, camping, travel, art, music, French and Spanish. Seeking a woman who’s looking for a long-term relationship and who shares some of these interests. Be bold—call right now! Chicago Reader Box XXXXX.
There’s a lot in this ad that will look familiar to today’s online daters. Ed gives his status, religion, age, and personal interests. We get a sense that he’s pretty cosmopolitan, and there’s even a promise of adventure if we dare to be bold. (Nice move, Ed!)
The ad above generated responses from about thirty-five women, he recalls. Those who responded had to call the designated 900 number and type in his mailbox code. When they did, they heard his personal greeting, which he reconstructed for us:
Hello! If you’re seeking adventure and fun, you’ve come to the right ad! My name is Ed. I’m a forty-nine-year-old divorced Jewish man with two adult children. I have my own house in Lincoln Park and I’ve owned my own advertising and public relations company since 1969. I’m a longtime recreational sailor and I have a boat in Monroe Harbor. I also enjoy bike riding, hiking, running, camping, and photography. I graduated from the University of Michigan with an English degree, and after graduating from college I worked for six months, saved all my earnings, and attended the Sorbonne College. During the summer vacation I hitchhiked ten thousand miles through Europe and parts of the Middle East. Obviously, world travel is a big interest of mine! I’m active in two French-language groups and I also speak Spanish. If I’ve caught your attention and you’d like to talk to me on the phone, please respond to this message and leave a number where I can reach you. I look forward to hearing from you soon!
Damn, Ed sounds pretty badass in this greeting. Dude owns a boat and is active in not one but two French-language groups. Ed told us that he’d call in to check the messages about once a week—a far cry from today’s online daters, many of whom check for matches every few hours or even get instant push notifications on their phone. “I listened to each of them several times, making notes about key items of information. Then I called the women who sounded most interesting, and that time, one really stood out.”
Hello, my name is Anne and I really like your Reader ad as well as your voice introduction when I called you just now. I’m a divorced thirty-seven-year-old woman with no children, and yes—I am seeking adventure! I enjoy many of the activities you listed. I lived in Colombia and in Peru for a short time, so I speak Spanish, as you do. If you’d like to meet in person, please call me. I hope you do!
Ed made the call and invited Anne to meet for coffee. Often, he explained to us, these first encounters went badly, because with newspaper ads you had no idea what the other person looked like, and you were basically going off how they sounded on the phone. But he and Anne had a good vibe right away, and things quickly took off. They dated for six years before he proposed to her on a sailing trip by hoisting a self-made sail that said, “Dear Annie, I love you—Will you marry me?” She said yes, and before long they’d sailed off to California to start a new life together.