“Without my grandfather’s contribution to agriculture reforms in 1912, this nation would currently have to import its turnips,” one personal ad from the London Review of Books in 2002 reads. “While you think about that, I shall remove my clothes. Man. 55.” Personals like this one may feel like a relic—Zohran Mamdani and Rama Duwaji, New York’s mayor and his wife, met on Hinge, after all—but love and lust have been satisfied by column inches since the 1800s.
A personal ad or classified, in its simplest form, is a short notice placed in a newspaper by someone seeking companionship or plain romance—including a few lines of self-description, an explanation about what they’re after, and a box number for replies. The classified had its heyday in the latter half of the 20th century, when a few column inches in the back pages were the closest thing to a dating profile. They faded with the rise of online dating in the early 2000s, becoming casualties of a world that suddenly offered faster, image-driven ways to find love.
