“To the lady on the train...”: the romance of missed connections
Missed connections adverts have been placed in newspapers since at least the 1700s. Amelia Tait meets couples whose lives were transformed by a chance encounter
In the beginning, Darcy had a boyfriend and an aisle seat. It was 29 March 2000, and she was the last person to board the plane from Atlanta, Georgia, to Sacramento in California. Hot, sweaty and tired from running to catch the flight, she was frustrated to see that someone else was in her seat. “I’m sorry,” the stranger said, “do you mind switching with me?” The thing was, he explained, his wife was afraid of flying – he wanted to sit by her. Darcy McGaffic is 6ft tall – there’s a reason she had booked to sit in the aisle of the exit row. The stranger gestured to his seat, right at the back of the plane. A middle seat. Darcy said: “Fine.” She laughed, made her way back, sat down, and then another stranger opened their mouth. “I wouldn’t have done that,” the man next to her smiled.
That man was Scott Germond. They spoke for the entire five-hour duration of their flight; Darcy, who was in her 30s, told him about her job sorting out the “instant replays” for sports tournaments, and the pair made each other laugh. At one point, Scott asked Darcy if she was dating anyone. She hesitated. Technically she was, but she had already decided to break up with her boyfriend the night before, because they had been on the phone and he hadn’t stopped talking about his ex-wife. Darcy stumbled over Scott’s question. She couldn’t tell him the truth: “Well, I’m dating somebody, but I’m thinking about dumping him because I might like you.”
Scott got the hint and changed the subject. They enjoyed the rest of the flight together, but Darcy said goodbye abruptly when they landed – her boyfriend was picking her up from the airport. She saw Scott again by the luggage carousel, and they shared a look. Then they shared another look. He left and turned back to look at her one last time. For weeks afterwards, Darcy couldn’t believe that she had just let him walk away.
For so many Darcys and Scotts, this is where the story ends, a frisson that fizzles out into a could-have-been. But, after breaking up with her boyfriend, Darcy couldn’t stop talking about “the plane guy”, so her mum told her to place a call-out in a local paper, the Sacramento News & Review. Darcy thought, “Those things never work,” but she did it anyway, addressing an ad to “Scott, Who’s a Foreman”. The person from the paper said it wouldn’t be printed for another week, but a few days later Darcy got a call. “I knew you were cheating on me!” raged Darcy’s ex-boyfriend. “What are you talking about?” she replied. “I saw the ad in the Sacramento Bee.” Darcy hung up and called her mum. What was going on? How could her ex have seen her ad when it wasn’t even out yet? Darcy’s mum ran to get the other paper and frantically flicked through to the classifieds. “Darce”, one ad began – Scott knew her name but not how to spell it – “Met you on a flight from Atlanta, and I need a replay. I hope you feel the same.”
Perhaps the odds aren’t so long; perhaps a mathematician somewhere could say that it’s not so remarkable that two people placed two separate “missed connection” ads about each other in two separate papers after they sat next to each other on a plane. Regardless, that is what happened, and Darcy and Scott might have missed each other all over again – thanks to their differing reading habits – if it hadn’t been for that call from Darcy’s jealous ex-boyfriend. They might never have ended up married. Their 18-year-old twins, Lottie and Paul, might never have been born. “I don’t know that it’s fate,” says Darcy, now 62 and still in Sacramento. She raises her eyebrows behind her glasses. “But I do know that we were very driven to find each other.”
“‘I don’t know that it’s fate,’ says Darcy, who met her husband on a plane. ‘But I do know that we were very driven to find each other’”
It would be nice to know the very first time someone did it: liked the look of someone, missed a chance to get their details, and so searched for them instead through printed words. Although he may not have been the first, Samuel Reeves did it in 1709. Writing in the British periodical The Tatler, Reeves sought the attention of a woman he had helped out of a boat. He “desire[d] to know where he may wait on her to disclose a matter of concern”, he said, and provided an address where he could be reached. Over the centuries, advertisements like this have appeared in countless newspapers – 150 years ago, E. Roberts posted a similar appeal in a New York City paper. “Will the young lady that got out of a Fifth Avenue stage, with a gentleman with a cap on, at 10 yesterday, at Forty-Sixth Street, address E. Roberts, New York Post-office”, he wrote.
In the year 2000, these printed pleas were christened “missed connections” by the classified ad site Craigslist. The site’s CEO, Jim Buckmaster, has said that, “Missed connections give people that second chance” and “represent persistence in the face of long odds”. The odds seem only to have got longer. Two centuries ago, the person you met eyes with at the theatre probably read the same high society journal that you did. Today, what are the chances that the girl on the train platform also uses Craigslist, and will check it at exactly the right time, not before, but
after you’ve posted? What are the odds that she doesn’t look for you on another, similar site, such as iSawYou.com?
Still, it’s not impossible to connect after a missed connection – and the possibility, however remote, is the entire point. In February, the American actor Colman Domingo made headlines when he recounted the story of how he met his husband at a Walgreens pharmacy in 2005. “I see this guy and we look at each other,” he told The Graham Norton Show. “I wave, but he just keeps going.” A “dumbfounded” Domingo looked at his watch and resolved to return to the store at the same time the next week. A few days later, he was looking for a used computer on Craigslist, and decided to place a missed connections ad. He started reading the recent ones. “Saw you outside of Walgreens,” began the post from his now-husband. It was just two hours old.
These are the kinds of stories that make us swoon, but they sit in sharp contrast to the odd, sometimes desperate and often objectifying posts that populate Craigslist: “Asian Beauty in purple Docs”, “Fun-sized cutie with the blue coat”, “Looking for Henry – your beautiful feet”. A number of posts aren’t actually missed connections at all, and are more akin to lonely (or rather, horny) hearts ads. Other posts are well-intentioned, almost poetic, but tragic in their futility: “Hey denise its jeff from a long time ago.” How have missed connections evolved over the years, and, in the age of algorithmic dating, what is their future? At the time of writing, there are zero Craigslist missed connections posts for the whole of London, and only two recently posted anywhere near the UK capital, in Wolverhampton and Southampton. Is the medium dying? What might we lose if we let it go, like a stranger rounding an airport corner?
Michael and Sarah both liked the look of each other on their morning train. “He was the only one that used to smile back at me on a whole train of carriages,” Sarah says. Michael recalls: “When I first saw my wife, I had an instant realisation that I’d always want to be with her.” Because Michael has a stammer, he lacked the confidence to approach Sarah, and wrote her a missed missed connection, meaning Sarah never saw the words he wrote to her in the “Rush-Hour Crush” column of London’s Metro newspaper in 2008. “Train lady with dark-brown hair. I’m the dark-haired stranger on the train but I’m too shy to come over,” it said. “Would you like to meet up?” She didn’t read the paper on the day it printed his message; then Michael’s working hours changed and he started taking a different train.
He could very easily never have seen Sarah again, but three months later they randomly bumped into each other in the street. They arranged to meet for a picnic. “If I hadn’t gone that way, then I wouldn’t be with my wife, which is a weird thing to think about,” says Michael, now 44. The couple got married in 2011 and now live in Bedfordshire. Their nine-year-old daughter, Rita, pops her head around the door. Does she know how her parents met? “On a train,” she smiles, enjoying an ice-cream. “It’s crazy.” As happy as their origin story is, seeing how different the world is for her daughter does sometimes worry Sarah. “It’s really sad that Rita may never have the opportunity to meet somebody this way,” she says. “It’s all technology-based.”
Today, missed connections are an unusual mix of the offline and online. You still have to see or meet someone in real life to experience one, which means you get the fizz of mutual attraction that is missing from dating apps. But then – perhaps because you’re shy, or because you didn’t catch someone’s surname – the experience suddenly becomes akin to online dating after all. In 2016, data journalist Ilia Blinderman analysed 10,000 Craigslist missed connections for the online magazine Vox and found that posts written by men far outnumbered those by women – in LA, the ratio was 5:1. The most commonly used phrases by men seeking women included “eye contact” and “long shot”, but also “parking lot” – it’s not hard to imagine that some women found these encounters less romantic than the posters did.
As far back as 1872, this gender imbalance attracted mockery: “If a lady allows her face to wear a pleasant expression while glancing by the merest chance at a man, she is very apt to find some such personal [ad] addressed to her,” warned one New York City guidebook. Today, on Reddit, anonymous users complain of creepy missed connections posts: “He told me he was old enough to be my father and still sends me creepy emails.” Yet even as Craigslist succumbs to creepiness, there is one man and one website still out there, fighting to keep missed connections alive.
In 1997, store owner Varen Swaab was having lunch with his accountant, who was reading the missed connections section of the local Seattle newspaper. It was the middle of the dotcom bubble, and a switch flicked in Swaab’s head: “That could be a really fascinating idea for a business on the internet.” He bought the domain iSawYou.com and started putting together business plans. Venture capitalists were interested and Swaab secured funding – and then the bubble burst. Even though he lost all of his funding, Swaab launched iSawYou in 2003 as a “hobby” – one he has maintained ever since. “I work on it in all my spare time,” says Swaab, now a 62-year-old retiree living in Port Townsend, Washington.
While there are few UK-based missed connections on Craigslist, there is a steady stream of them on Swaab’s website: “Bumped into a guy wearing a gorgeous cream-coloured hooded jacket in M&S Foodhall Lordship Lane East Dulwich on 10th Feb”. There is genuine poetry here: “You were just another lady on another train. And yet you were unlike any other lady on any other train I’ve seen before. Or since.” Swaab keeps going because, he says, “missed connections encourage a more human and romantic way to meet others. They’re a perfect blend of the real world and the internet.” There is nothing, he adds, that is “better than just good, old-fashioned eye contact. Younger generations are so focused on their phones, they’re so focused on social media, they’re so focused on all this negativity ... and they don’t look up … You need to look up. There are people around you; maybe someone thinks you’re cute and you would never know.”
Darcy – from that almost missed connection on the plane – concurs. Her and Scott’s first date was at a restaurant; Darcy remembers stepping on Scott’s toe and hitting her head on the lamp hanging over their booth. Five years later, they had their twins. She doesn’t think her and Scott’s meeting was destiny – “To me, it’s less about fate than choice.” They chose to speak to each other on the plane, “risking rejection or boredom or even irritation”. Darcy urges others to make similar choices, to be more open to random encounters. “Even when they’re not necessarily a love story,” she says, “it might be a different kind of story.”
A longer version of this article appeared in The Guardian © Guardian News & Media Limited
“In 2016, a journalist analysed 10,000 missed connections and found that posts written by men outnumbered those by women by 5:1”