Last month in Los Angeles, John Fulton reported the following: Cafe Stella has not only reopened—it also might get a pool. Maru needs baristas for its Los Feliz location. The Salkin House, gorgeously restored, has found a buyer. Oh, and a 38-year-old guy who dislikes Los Angeles Police Department helicopters is single and open to dating.
Fulton is the publisher of a year-old Substack newsletter called The Eastside Rag, which focuses on the goings-on in a collection of L.A. neighborhoods, including the trendy Silver Lake, the upscale Los Feliz, and the quickly gentrifying Atwater Village and Highland Park. He returns to certain scenes, themes, and characters again and again—celebrity sightings at Canyon Coffee (Echo Park), the sex appeal of the delivery guys at the east-side restaurant Bub and Grandma’s (Glassell Park), sales at the hipster apparel store Mohawk. What he wasn’t expecting, when he began his project, was that he would also become a relationship matchmaker—and that his newsletters featuring personals would become subscriber catnip (his readers now number in the thousands).
But when you think about it, the development—call it “hyperlocal dating”—is sort of obvious. It seems that every few weeks, someone predicts the death of dating apps. The apps won’t disappear anytime soon, though they may get worse, what with their growing reliance on AI, which threatens to further alienate users from anything resembling authentic human experience. More and more people may be trying to swear off machine-made love matches, but when they do, the question becomes: How in the world to meet someone?
[Read: The doomed dream of an AI matchmaker]
Just do it IRL, people might say, but that can be harder than it sounds. With far more people staying home than in previous generations, those seeking romance face tough odds if they’re hoping to simply walk out the door and stumble into a meet-cute. Singles mixers and speed-dating events have been around for decades, but at best they feel contrived, and at worst they stink of desperation. (One mixer I went to with friends was so cringe-inducing that five minutes into the event, we parked ourselves at a far-off table and made it a girls’ day out.) Professional matchmakers are expensive—and unreliable. They offer no guarantee of success, and working with one can be demoralizing, especially when money doesn’t translate into excellent matches, or any matches at all.
In this environment, newsletter-based personals have a lot going for them. As you might imagine, readers of The Eastside Rag are likely to have a good deal in common with one another. They probably live on L.A.’s east side and have access to a fair amount of disposable income. In many cases, newsletter readers may also be somewhat like-minded. Consider the subscribers of the Substack run by the multi-hyphenate artist Miranda July, who earlier this year announced that she would begin featuring a profile of a date-seeking reader roughly once a month: Her audience tends to be made up of feminist, creative types. Ava Huang, the proprietor of Bookbear Express, attracts subscribers drawn to her commentary on books, technology, human behavior, and love. Last year, she began running her own (paid) matchmaking service—because, she wrote, she realized that “my writing might be a way not only for me to meet people, but for other people to meet each other.”
Of course, there are downsides to dating in a circumscribed community; you might miss out on encountering interesting, exciting people who are very unlike you. But the appeal of these new personals is pretty clear, Camille Sojit Pejcha, the Brooklyn-based writer of Pleasure-Seeking, which explores sexuality and desire, told me. Because newsletters typically draw readers with similar tastes and worldviews, prospective daters may start from a stronger baseline of compatibility than singles who meet at a random mixer. (Pleasure-Seeking doesn’t yet have a personals element, but Sojit Pejcha said she is thinking about it.)
Newsletter “dating,” such as it is, tends to feel both more grassroots and more curated than the newspaper-based personal ads of yore. People’s profiles are chosen by someone whom readers view as a vetted, trusted individual. They also read less like advertisements and more like a careful introduction. “I mean, people want to be introduced by their mutual friends,” Sojit Pejcha said—so why not be introduced by “your mutual parasocial crush?”
[Annie Joy Williams: Canceled by Hinge]
July calls her dating venture “Beguiled”: Romance seekers who want to be featured fill out a “looong” questionnaire, which asks for biographical details (gender identification, kid status, pet status) and their comments on, say, why they’re single, their morning rituals, and what an ex or a friend might have to say about them. Interested readers can then fill out the same questionnaire, which gets sent directly, privately, to the profile-ee.
The artist and TV creator Lisa Hanawalt, who was spotlighted in July’s inaugural “Beguiled” column, told me that July chose her after she “made a little joke” in the newsletter’s comments section: “I’d love to date a guy who subscribes to Miranda July.” Hanawalt had been fatigued by dating apps and figured she might as well try a different approach. “I think it feels more intimate,” she said, “like one step away from asking friends to hook you up with someone.”
In March, buoyed by the success of his personal ads, Fulton, the Eastside Rag writer, decided to take things one step further and host a singles event at Los Candiles Night Club in Glassell Park. I went to check it out, and I can report that the gathering was well attended: At its peak, more than 300 people filled the room. “People were talking to each other; people were going up to strangers and striking up a conversation,” he told me. “It felt so, sort of, magical and rare.” It’s unusual these days, he said, for people to approach a stranger out in public, with no entrée. “I think this party gave everyone an excuse to talk to whoever they wanted to and not feel weird about it.” He’s planning more events, he said, after getting “tons of requests” from his readers.
As for Hanawalt, she’s dating someone exclusively now. She didn’t meet him through “Beguiled,” but he did offer to fill out July’s questionnaire, a gesture that she found super romantic. “He answered every question,” Hanawalt said. “He texted an ex; he texted a friend.” In response to one prompt—“Photo of the inside of your fridge?”—he produced “a picture of his fridge where he drew little guys inside the fridge.”
In their way, newsletter personals have the potential to delight and influence all sorts of readers, even those not participating in the experiment directly. For one, they provide entertainment (“I own four mullet wigs. So I hope you don’t hate 80s rock,” an ad in The Eastside Rag read) and useful conversation starters (I love July’s “How important is cuddling to you?”). But they also offer heartening evidence, to anyone eavesdropping, that people are out there, not too far away, looking for someone who might be—to quote Mister Rogers, that great philosopher of love and community—just like you.
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