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 – just a stranger named Scott back then. 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 told “stupid jokes” that 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. The pair enjoyed the rest of the flight together, but Darcy said goodbye abruptly when they landed – her boyfriend was picking her up from the airport, and in those days the people you were meeting could come right up to the gate. She saw Scott again by the luggage carousel while her boyfriend was busy smoking a cigarette – 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? Why did he mention the Bee, when her ad was running in the Sacramento News & Review? 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 plane 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 on a plane. Regardless, that is exactly 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, working as a course developer. Her soft, reddish-blond curls bounce as she shakes her head, and she raises her eyebrows behind her glasses. “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. Though 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.
There is no telling whether the woman in question wrote back and became Mrs Reeves, but the fantasy of it seems contained within Samuel’s words. 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 officially christened “missed connections” by the classified ad site Craigslist. The website’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 early February, 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 connection 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 creepily 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 connection 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?
* * *
Jason had never even seen Jeff when he started “frantically searching” for him. As a recent graduate at the turn of the millennium, Jason Hensley placed a personal ad in the local St Louis paper, the Riverfront Times. “I’m just a cute, normal guy seeking same,” he wrote. “Tall, bookish types a plus.” He went on five or so dates with the men who called, but says: “There was literally no chemistry there.” Towards the end of the ad’s run, he finally got a message that excited him: “There was something about his voice.” It was from Jeff Olearczyk, a pharmacology PhD student. In his excitement, Jason pushed the wrong button, erasing Jeff’s message and number for ever.
Before he thought to place a missed connection ad, Jason searched nearby research institutions for PhD students named Jeff – he called a friend at Washington University in St Louis and asked her to look at the grad students on staff. She came up with nothing, but Jason wasn’t ready to give up. He contacted the Riverfront Times again and placed a new ad, addressed to Jeff: “Please give me a call again. I’ll try to work the phone better.”
It was 2001; even after Craigslist went live, people still found each other via local papers. Jeff and his lab mates liked to read the missed connections page aloud to one other – laughing or aww-ing, depending on the quality of the post. Yet at the time Jason placed his ad, Jeff’s lab was on a break.
A month passed – Jason’s ad would soon disappear for ever. And then Jeff returned to the lab, and his friend Jenny picked up the paper. “Um, Jeff,” she said, “listen to this one … ” The first time Jason and Jeff ever spoke on the phone was on Jeff’s birthday, 15 September. They chatted for hours, not even knowing what the other looked like. They have, essentially, been together ever since, and got married in 2013.
It’s wonderful that this is how it worked out, but isn’t it scary to think about how close it came to never happening at all? Jason, now 53 and a director for an affordable housing agency, tears up behind his glasses. “I wouldn’t trade the depth of our relationship for anything,” he says. Jeff, 50, who is in medical science, adds: “There is also this overarching thing, like we were brought together for a reason. Because of all the circumstances, it’s like we were meant to be together.” This, he says, puts any minor arguments that might crop up in their marriage into perspective. Bickering about whether the measuring spoons should be held together by a ring (Jason’s preference) or separated (Jeff’s), is “so insignificant compared with everything that had to happen for us two to be together”.
Michael and Sarah Nobbs feel much the same way. He wrote 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. They 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 she didn’t read the paper on the day it printed his message. “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?” 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 and working in independent financial advice. The couple got married in 2011 and now live in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire. Sarah, 38, a teaching assistant, very much believes in fate. “There was a reason, obviously, why I met him at that time,” she says. Sarah had an eating disorder when she met Michael, and says their developing relationship “near enough cured me”.
The couple’s 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.
Katie McCaskey met Brian Wiedemann at the Ding Dong Lounge in New York. It was 2004 and she was in her 20s, waiting for her date at the bar. The man she had arranged to meet told her to chat with “Ian” before he arrived – that was the name of the bartender who would be able to hook her up with free beer. “Are you Ian?” Katie asked a cute guy sitting nearby. No, he said, he was Brian.
Their ensuing hour-long chat was “so easy and carefree”, but when Katie’s date finally arrived the conversation ended and Brian disappeared. Katie couldn’t stop thinking about him in the following days, so she posted a Craigslist ad, not because she thought it would work, but because: “I have to get this idea out of my mind.”
Entitled “Brian (not Ian) last Friday night” and posted at 11.30pm on 20 July 2004, Katie’s post said: “Thank you for the beer and conversation – you were so sweet … Just wanted to say thanks, and hopefully we’ll run into each other again.” Brian replied a day later. The couple got married in 2009 and they now live in Washington DC.
“I work for the Federation of American Scientists, with a lot of smart, rational people. And I think even people of that persuasion of rationality and cold calculation would say that there’s magic,” Katie says, tearing up. “There’s just these moments that … you can’t explain them.”
As romantic as it all is in hindsight, when Brian first replied, Katie did briefly wonder if it was “weird and creepy” that he read missed connection posts for fun. She thought: “Maybe there’s something wrong with him that I didn’t notice?” 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 connection posts: “I had one posted about me from a guy who came into my bar. It freaked me the eff out”; “He told me he was old enough to be my father and still sends me creepy emails”; “He kept pushing for my phone numbers or saying he ‘was going to be around my work’.”
Perhaps this is why many missed connection websites, such as Subway Crush and Kizmeet, have died out over the years – and perhaps this is also why it’s hard to get behind dating apps like Happn, which “lets you find everyone you have crossed paths with”. Yet even as Craigslist succumbs to ever deeper creepiness (one recent post reads: “Hi ladies I’m on here looking to pamper your tired sore feet”), there is one man and one website still out there, fighting to keep missed connections alive.
***
At first, it was pure business. 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 dot-com 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. Were I describing him in a missed connection column after we met on Zoom, I would say: he was wearing a mustard zip-neck jumper, and has salt and pepper hair and a goatee.
While there are very 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”; “I met the most lovely foundation-year fashion design student called Maddy on Sunday 7th January, on a packed train between Sheffield and Leeds”. Swaab sought out the European market because of Craigslist’s dominance in the US, and he bans users who make obsessive or inappropriate posts. There is genuine poetry on his website: “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.”
iSawYou.com allows people to use their GPS location to find nearby posts, arguably increasing the odds of a match. And yet it’s entirely possible that no one has ever found the person they were looking for on Swaab’s website, which gets between 15,000 and 60,000 visitors a month. “I knew you were going to ask me that,” Swaab smiles when I ask how many people have connected via his site, “and the answer is I have no idea.” When people reply to a message, their details are emailed to the poster – but Swaab has no way of knowing if this leads any further.
Still, Swaab keeps going because, “missed connections encourage a more human and romantic way to meet others. They’re a perfect blend of the real world and the internet.” He has a vision that missed connections could “be used to kickstart an entirely new communication medium on the scale of text messaging” – people would use GPS to locate recipients by location and see who responds – but he knows he needs to start small. So now: “Instead of trying to catch the whole world with a giant net, I want to catch one fly with one net at a time.” Swaab plans to partner with specific nightclubs, bars, coffee shops and restaurants to make them iSawYou hotspots: posters would alert customers who had a missed connection there to the service.
“There is nothing better than just good, old-fashioned eye contact,” he concludes. “Younger generations are so focused on their phones, they’re so focused on social media, they’re so focused on all this negativity that’s being pumped out at them constantly, 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 – who met her husband, Scott, on a plane 24 years ago – concurs. Their 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. In 2013, they got married at Christmas, though Scott hadn’t really proposed; he said something about how being married would save them money on their taxes. “It wasn’t romantic. It’s not great story stuff,” Darcy says.
But their first meeting is great story stuff, the kind of thing that seems impossible outside romcoms and romance novels. While she understands that everyone needs their quiet time, especially on public transport, Darcy believes that we need to keep our eyes and our hearts open more. 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.”
