You’ve exhausted all the neutral territory with no luck. Acquaintances and relations have arranged parties for you with singles from hell. You send them back at your first meeting. What’s next? The answer is territory designed for meeting people, sometimes many, sometimes a selected person or two. The Internet, text messages and phone chat lines can be used for introductions but classified adverts in magazines and newspapers are still among the most popular and the cheapest, though not always the best way of finding friends, romance and/or marriage.

Classified Adverts

There is nothing new about such adverts. They have been going for a century since Matrimonial Herald published a quarterly list of some 200 lonely hearts, categorised into bachelors, spinsters, widowers and widows. The adverts proved so popular that they were copied by other newspapers. Working class men tended to advertise themselves as simple but honest, while aristocrats hid their search for moneyed heiresses by emphasising their own princely charms.

In the hope that they will attract people of like minds, today’s advertisers use magazines or newspapers which reflect their own interests. Executive Mike Presdee of the British Sociological Association says that the pressure of work has led to this social phenomenon where people try to meet others through personal ads rather than the slower rituals of courtship. Mark Mason, a psychologist at Nene College, Northampton, trawled through 2,200 personal ads in local papers nationwide as well as The Guardian and The Times, to find what people were looking for in these columns and how they advertised themselves.

Public Relations: Personal Choice

Giving his results to the British Psychological Society in Edinburgh, he said that the best way to win a partner through such adverts was to stick to stereotypes. Few advertisers departed from convention. ‘Genuine’ was the adjective most commonly used, followed by ‘humorous’, ‘attractive’, ‘caring’ and ‘loving’. Only two adverts in a thousand contained adjectives like ‘fat’, ‘unattractive’, ‘cynical’ or ‘eccentric’. Desired ages varied. Men wanted women five to ten years younger than themselves, while women wanted men their own age or slightly older. These qualifications are not rigid, however. A glance at the Evening Standard personal ad column, ‘Meeting Point’ and similar ones elsewhere shows that advertisers appear less bothered about age than other attributes, often giving a range of ten or more years either way for their desiderata.

Describing themselves as attractive and highlighting their physical attributes may be the way men are responding to the fact that today’s women are able to be more selective than ever before. They also know such adverts elicit more replies, with adjectives like ‘genuine’, ‘sincere’, ‘high earning’, ‘humorous’, ‘caring’ and ‘loving’ getting the maximum response. One query such descriptions might raise in a woman’s heart is why such a prince among men has not been grabbed already. Ignoring that question, a suitable ad for a man to make might be as follows:

At a recent wedding I attended, the 45-year-old groom, who had been married twice before, acknowledged at the reception that he had won his bride through Teletext. To be noticed first in the adverts, he described all his charms with the letter A: attractive, adventurous, amicable, etc., ending with available. The latter at least proved to be temporarily untrue for when the new lady love arrived at the arranged trysting place (a local pub,) there was no sign of the adventurous suitor. He had found it closed and gone off elsewhere. This is not an unusual scenario for such advertisements, but in this case there was a happy ending, as the wedding proved.

Heterosexual females look for rich men, at least rich enough to have their own home and car. Some might prefer, though never state, that only men with a bank balance of over £ lm need apply. In return they offer the ‘attractiveness’ which men want, as well as the stereotyped female qualities such as young, loving and warm, which men also desired. Adverts most likely to attract a response from a man might therefore be worded something like the following: