Dating on Craigslist

Thinking of Craigslist as a dating service is like thinking of a pair of scissors as a lawn mower; you can eventually cut your grass to an appropriate height, but it’ll be a slow, painful ordeal and you’ll build up a deep resentment toward both lawns and scissors in the process.

For anyone who’s unfamiliar with Craigslist in general, it’s primarily an online version of the classified ads. If you were born after the death of newspapers, classified ads are organized into categories and often concern the buying and selling of things. For example: auto parts, baby+kids (no babies or kids for sale, just their stuff), beauty+hlth, cars+trucks, cds/dvd/vhs, cell phones, and so on. There’s a region-specific version of Craigslist for many major urban areas so you can find people selling used DVDs across town rather than across the country.

There’s also a section for Personal Ads, and here, too, we see some categorization to aid the uninitiated:

• strictly platonic (no sexytime, just looking for some friends)
• women seek women (girl-on-girl action)
• women seeking men (as advertised, plus a lot of escorts)
• men seeking women (as advertised, plus a lot of horny, horny dudes)
• men seeking men (guy-on-guy action)
• misc romance (no-strings-attached sexytime, less sleazy than “casual encounters”)
• casual encounters (no-strings-attached sexytime)
• missed connections (longing, lusting, crushing and pining)
• rants and raves (“funny” comments about dating and associated ephemera)

Within some categories there are further subdivisions based on you and who you’re looking for. W = Women, M = Men, T = Trans(gender/sexual), WW/MM/WM = Multiple partners, 4 = for, to the left of the 4 = you, to the right of the 4 = who you’re seeking. To wit: w4m  m4m  m4w  w4w  t4m  m4t mw4mw  mw4w  mw4m  w4mw  m4mw  w4ww  m4mm  mm4m  ww4w  ww4m  mm4w  m4ww  w4mm  t4mw  mw4t.  Got all that?

One of the pitfalls is a large (and by large we’re talking kajillions) number of people posting in the personals section who aren’t people at all. They’re software programs which are set up to try and lure people (OK, guys, mostly) to register with fee-based websites in a pointless attempt at finding True Love (or at least True Lust + a side of potential affection.) Here’s how these clever little cretins operate:

1. The operator of a dodgy website uses the software program to create multiple personal ads on Craigslist purporting to be various people (OK, cute/hot, available girls). These ads are generic enough to be applicable to multiple geographic locations and usually short (2-3 sentences). This is because it’s hard to write a long personal ad that applies to a wide range of guys. Eventually you’re going to slip up and mention really liking something specific and half the rubes reading the ad will give up, thinking “Oh well, she’s into Star Trek, not Star Wars. Not the lifemate for me. Dang.”
2. A lonely person (OK, a guy) replies to the ad, thinking he’s starting a conversation with another lonely and motivated person who just wants to meet “someone real, sincere, kind and funny”
3. The website operator, pretending to be the girl from the ad, replies back using a combination of lies, misdirection and playing coy to entice the guy into visiting a website to see hot sexy pictures of her in various states of undress
4. Once at the website, the lonely guy must surrender his credit card information for “age verification purposes” (you know, to protect the children from all the smut on the Internet)
5. The lonely guy gradually realizes there was never a real person at the other end of the email conversation. Also, that Russian mobsters now have his credit card number.

Bummer. Sometimes being lonely makes you do stupid stuff.

There are exceptions to the rule, of course. Many people who are too busy or too disinterested in signing up for a dating website will post a short ad on Craigslist in hopes that the lightning bolt of love will strike them with a bare minimum of effort. To put this in perspective, imagine if you had never played the lottery before but suddenly chose to mail a single one dollar bill to a nearby 7-11 in the genuine hope that someone at the convenience store would open the envelope, divine your intent (because you forgot to include a note), purchase a lottery ticket on your behalf and mail it back to you (at their own expense.) Then, on the day you discover the winning lottery ticket in your mailbox, Congress passes legislation that doubles your money and cancels your taxes. You’d be fantastically lucky for all those circumstances to occur just for your benefit, right? Expecting love from Craigslist isn’t far off from that ludicrous ideal.

Note: If you’re wondering why so many ads read:

This posting has been flagged for removal. [?]

(The title on the listings page will be removed in just a few minutes.)

It’s because someone with more sense than you alerted the moderators on Craigslist that this ad was fishy in some way and they took action to protect you from yourself. Just let it go and move on. Or the ad might have been offering “escort services” a little too obviously. Rather than a fake person looking to get your money in exchange for nothing, you stumbled across a real person looking to get your money in exchange for sexual favors.

Keep in mind there’s nothing wrong with seeking out a hot sweaty pal (or pals) with which to have hot sweaty sexytimes. If you’re searching for a quick-and-frisky hookup with the definite chance of an STD for no extra charge, then browse away. But if you’re looking for something a little more “Join me for dinner and a walk along the esplanade?” and less “Drug/disease free? Great. Pants off; it’s go time.”, then Craigslist might be a tricky place to start.