When a co-worker told me how she found love, I began rummaging through my memory, scrutinizing every eye-lock, bump-in, and passing stranger for a trace of some vital but missed connection.
It all started at brunch one afternoon. She was sitting at the bar eating bacon and we were talking about the weather. She said, ‘Good thing I have a boyfriend because I never leave the house,’ and I said, ‘Oh really, since when?’ She looked at me, dumbfounded. She couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard the story.
What ensued sounded quite like a movie my mother would enjoy.
My co-worker was getting coffee when she and a stranger wearing a bright-colored scarf, arrived at the cream and sugar table simultaneously. They had one of those blundering moments where both reached for a raw sugar packet, bumped hands, and then in unison insisted, ‘No, you go ahead.’
Both staggered away, wishing they were just a little more suave. I know these moments all too well.
She wanted to say hi, but a pang of awkwardness drove her out the door.
Unsure of what to do next, she told her roommate the story. ‘There was a real connection, but I completely missed my chance,’ she said. Although she was skeptical, her roommate convinced her to post an ad on Craigslist’s missed connections.
Here’s how it works:’ After having a ‘missed connection,’ or chance encounter with a stranger, you log onto the site, post a description of the person and the incident, along with your e-mail address.
If you’re lucky, your mysterious love-from-afar will log on, spot your post and the two of you will embark on a life-long relationship.
My co-worker got lucky. Two days later, after creating her post, she received a three-paragraph e-mail from the sexy scarf boy. The rest is history.
It was astonishing to me, bizarre, in fact. Still, as I digested the story, the back of my mind was rampantly screaming, ‘What weirdoes!’
Why would anyone choose to date someone with a mild stalking habit? Or, for that matter, someone who sits around reading missed connections in the wee hours of the morning?
But of course, later that night, as I sat bored and in search of some menial addictive behavior, I found myself web-stumbling within this archive of encounters.
As I ambled through this world with its host of colorful characters, my fascination grew stronger.
A ‘gentleman with glasses’ in the DVD section of Target wants to take ‘whimsical dream girl in a red dress’ to a movie.
Another guy wrote ‘I think I’m in love,’ with the ‘cute mousy girl’ who works at Diesel Cafe. ‘I want to paint a new picture of you every day for the rest of my life.’
My mind began to wonder.
Since when did people pay attention to the details of a stranger’s outfit, remembering with acute precision the color scheme of a strangers’ paisley-printed head scarf? And why would they post that information?
But as I continued to make my judgments, one question kept floating to the forefront of my mind:’ What if one of these is me?
I began to keep an eye out for locations I frequent and looked for descriptions of a ‘blond in a purple coat,’ ‘awkward lady with long limbs,’ or perhaps an account reading ‘your bony elbow stabbed me on the T.’
However, each semi-fit I found contained a foreign detail like, ‘You drove my shuttle bus,’ or even ‘We made out in the Harvard Coop bookstore,’ to which I had to sadly decline.
Needless to say, I had no luck in finding the man of my dreams, or even a man who dreams of me.
But here’s the thing I realized:’ I should stop my pretentious scoffing at all this mess because I am guilty, and so is everyone else, of this infatuation with the ‘what-if.’ We all have that little inkling in us that lusts after love at first sight. It’s what we’re spoon-fed from the time we hear our first fairy tale. And thus, we all secretly wonder, each time we feel that raw connection to a random individual, if maybe it’s something more.
This site gives us the opportunity to explore those connections and perhaps let them flower into something more. Ultimately, we all hope to find that flawlessly flattering post of ourselves with an equally perfect person at the other end. The reality might seem slim but there’s always the possibility that we’ll rediscover that missed connection.