I'm Just Looking For...

by Julie Ferris

There was a time in our recent history when marriage was first and foremost an enterprise that joined families and protected their lineage. Holy unions positioned oneself in society. And, of course, another reason to connect one’s life to another in a legally binding way has always been present: Money.

Yet, for most of us, we may engage in coupledom, partnership and even marriage for another wholly impractical and fantastical set of reasons—love and companionship.

But shifting our cultural standards of how to meet and marry, how to date and how to find that other half, has been slow. For more than 300 years, personal ads have been a tool to connect, and for nearly as many years, they’ve had their critics.

From Lonely to Looking

Noga Arikha’s essay, “Swiping right in the 1700s: The Evolution of Personal Ads” reminds us that the first personal ad published, by one Helen Morrison in 1727, landed its author in an asylum for a month as a result of this shockingly autonomous practice our culture wasn’t ready for. 

Arikha adds that “the values that had sustained the inherited rules of matrimony were changing during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries…ideals associated with romantic love were taking center stage at a time when Romantic reactions to a rationalized, industrializing world emphasized the individual, lonely soul,” (2009).

We were seeking companions because we were just plain lonely.

And despite whatever changes have happened to the technology of personal ads, from phoning in a print order to the profile picture-driven profiles of today’s “must love dogs” online matchmaking services, one thing remains true. Anonymity is the key.

The People Behind the Pen

The requisite intimate qualities and fantasies can be publicly shared and assessed only because they represent a person we have not yet met, who we do not know live and in the flesh. This concept isn’t new to popular culture, either. The Shop Around the Corner, later modernized as You’ve Got Mail, features a lead couple who know one another in person—frustrations and all—and then both rely on a personal ad-style connection where they write letters or chat, not realizing until the end that the poets at the end of the pen, saying all the right things, are indeed the same shopkeeper and businessman who are friendly foes in everyday life.

The safety included in anonymity has carried through all 300 years of personal advertising. From the ability to ignore all responses delivered to your post box to never swiping right, for the tiny sum of a few personal details, you purchase the right to remain safely behind your ad, unexposed in your choice-making. 

Anonymity is the thesis and catharsis of Rupert Holmes’ 1979 hit, often called “The Piña Colada Song” (actually named “Escape”).

A bored, lonely husband sings about his dissatisfaction in his partner and how he searched newspaper personal ads to see what his options were. The woman who wrote about the now famous piña coladas piques his interest and he responds. When the pair finally meet, both are shocked to see the other standing before them.

A form of confession, this sharing of secrets allows the writer to embody a person they hope to be, to showcase those qualities they want cherished and hope the perfect other is one drawn to these quirks. If your confession that you lick the microwave popcorn bag, don’t like ice cream or only read entertainment magazines and nothing more and someone responds, your match is made.

You’re Not Alone

The validation available to you when someone responds to these bold presentations of what’s “wrong” with you by cultural standards provides a kind of love. It provides forgiveness and verifies you can still fit in the social order. Your strange habit that, by all cultural measures is “different,” becomes sanctioned when another hears about it and continues to move forward, treating you as a regular member of society and importantly, telling you you’re not alone.

Pew Market Research says more than one third of those using online dating sites haven’t ever actually gone on a date with someone they met there. One third of personal ad or app users are engaging each other without even meeting because the gesture of having someone respond to self you’ve shared in and of itself is a connection.

300 Years and Going Strong

Today, the industry has exponentially amplified its profitability with online advertising and matchmaking services. There is, of course, an app for that. In fact, of the $2.9 billion dating industry, 70% of this annual profit is derived from online dating sites.

But personal ads were always profitable. Framed often as “classified” and purchased through the sales group of papers and magazines, advertisers paid for the privilege of creating a profile. Originally, publishers would offer a reply program: As readers responded to your ad, the paper would collect the mailed-in responses and deliver them to you, often weekly. Publishers soon began leveraging premium-rate telephone numbers to entice writers to publish their ad for free, but those replying via phone call must pay the premium rate. Newspapers charge by the character — a throwback to old typeset processes — and therefore, abbreviation and acronym became their own economy of love. Researchers note how this industry jargon has moved forward into today’s online dating as well.

The Lonely Hearts Club Cast of THE FEW

In THE FEW, personals remain the profitable choice for such a small publication. But, true to the history of personal ads, the play embraces the lonely over-the-road truck driver. This is one of many landmarks in the practice’s evolution. In the early 1900s, personal ads saw a resurgence as Western farmers wrote to solicit love and practical assistance. From housekeepers to wife material, this isolated group leveraged personal ads to improve their situation. A different sort of request—pen pals—became the hallmark of World War II soldiers using the same mechanism to connect with others.  

So, when we enter the publishing office of THE FEW, we immediately see instant and obvious hallmarks of the personal ad. A need for capital, flexing the economy of the paid service, is keeping the paper afloat. On the edge of a potential millennium breakdown, the 1999 setting also prompts an uptick in ad sales, further demonstrating that finding love, or, as some advertisers suggest in their ads, just companionship, is more essential now than ever.

The lonely, secluded setting of northern Idaho and the desolate profession of traveling the country alone in a big rig embody the more recent history of the practice.

When we meet the characters, we also see remnants of other popular plays on the anonymous ad. The man in the letters becomes someone not only validated by your response, but he becomes larger than life, more ideal than the man standing before you. On paper, he’s piña coladas and getting drunk in the rain.

THE FEW gives us another insight, however, and presents an important counterpoint to my case.

If anonymity is the key to personal ads working, what we learn from Hunter’s characters is that it’s their desperation to no longer be anonymous that drives them. All lonely, all looking for connection, those who manage the personal ads may be the most in need of validation and acknowledgement. They are the most in need of relationships with another.

In fact, THE FEW becomes a case study in how those who enable the search for connection through this time-tested model come to quickly realize they, too, are also looking. For validation. For companionship. For love. 

American Misfits

by John M. Baker

Playwright Sam Hunter
Photo: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Sam Hunter’s plays take us down roads not frequently traveled on the American stage. Anchored in small towns and cities throughout the landlocked state of Idaho, the plays are often set in unglamorous locations and populated by characters on the margins of society. From the tarnished evangelical in A BRIGHT NEW BOISE seeking employment at a Hobby Lobby craft store to the 600-pound online teacher in THE WHALE eating himself to death in his apartment, Hunter's characters find themselves in simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary circumstances, navigating big questions of modern life. With his growing body of work, Hunter is slowly mapping what he calls “a quotidian America that is often hidden behind curtains and doors.” In the process, he’s capturing the beauty and ugliness, the fragility and ruggedness, the banality and spirituality of living in America in the 21st century. 

Though New York City is Hunter’s home now, his roots are firmly planted in Idaho. Born and raised in the state’s panhandle, Hunter can trace his family’s lineage back six generations to the region’s first homesteaders. This deep-seated connection to the Northwest — like Horton Foote and the South — is only part of why Hunter frequently sets his plays in his home state. “Idaho has become a useful landscape,” he explains, “because people don’t have a lot of preconceived notions about it.” You’ve probably never set foot in the towns of Hunter’s plays, but there’s still something recognizable about the employee lounge in A BRIGHT NEW BOISE, the one-bedroom apartment in THE WHALE, and the lobby of the assisted living home in REST. “Which is really helpful,” he continues, “because it allows me to make something pan-American.” 

Morbidly obese writing instructor Charlie (Matthew Arkin) and his friend and caretaker Liz (Blake Lindsley) share a moment in this image from South Coast Repertory's West Coast premiere of THE WHALE (2013). Photo: Scott Brinegar.

Within these familiar and foreign landscapes, Hunter places characters from a particular walk of life. They’re Middle Americans: big-box store employees, nurses, a retired music professor, a former night watchman, a missionary. “I think the prevalence of upper middle class and upper class characters in our plays is surprising,” explains Hunter, “especially given the fact that the majority of America is not these people.” More specifically, Hunter is fascinated by the people living on the fringes of acceptability in these small towns. “The stories my dad told me about people from his hometown were just incredible,” he explained to David Rooney of The New York Times. “Like the guy who used to go to my grandpa’s grocery store: My dad had to deliver food to him, and his house was full of dead cats. You hear about somebody like that, and you think, ‘What is the story of that person?’” 

While a closeted gay teen in northern Idaho, Hunter attended a fundamentalist Christian high school and worked part-time at the local Walmart, which informs why so many of his plays center on characters living in quiet desperation, hungering for something greater. “Most of my plays are about seeking hope and meaning,” says Hunter, “and religion is the eternal well of hope and meaning for most Americans. It so shaped my childhood growing up in Idaho and going to a religious school, and so I see it in the larger cultural dialogue a lot. Mostly I write about it because people don't seem to want to talk about it.” Even when nonbelievers populate the plays, they still “point to the divine,” as Hunter says, whether it’s by way of Melville in THE WHALE or Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in REST. 

Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre pitted actors Michael Laurence and Tasha Lawrence against each other as former lovers Bryan and QZ in its Off-Broadway premiere of THE FEW (2014). Photo: Joan Marcus.

“Hunter’s characters live in an Idaho where the divine smacks up against the banal, where their expansive worldviews create a profound disconnection to their quotidian surroundings,” writes Adam Greenfield, director of new play development at NYC’s Playwrights Horizons. “They’re as lost within Idaho’s suburban sprawl as they are within the cosmos, each one struggling with a fundamental part of his or her self — whether it’s religion, sexuality, ethics, or a cocktail of all these things — that doesn’t fit into their surroundings or daily lives.” 

American culture is certainly a part of the topography Hunter is mapping, but he’s not writing “issue” plays. Although he weaves topics like obesity, the Rapture, and gay conversion therapy into his scripts, as literary manager Douglas Langworthy of The Denver Center Theatre Company puts it, “they are never about these issues.” Rather, at the forefront of Hunter’s plays are his emotional and spiritual misfits — drawn with sensitivity — mirroring back to us their experience of Middle America today.  


John M. Baker is a dramaturg and the Artistic Leadership Fellow at The Lark, an international theatre laboratory based in New York. He is also the associate producer of Partial Comfort Productions in NYC, interim literary manager and dramaturg at Long Wharf Theatre and has formerly worked at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. Versions of this article originally appeared in playbills for productions of REST at South Coast Repertory and Victory Gardens.