LIVING CLASSIFIED ROMANCE

IT WAS THE deepest hour of the night. The air outside the window was cool and numb as the air in an old cave. Leaning forward in his chair, his face bathed in the orange glow of an Osborne Executive computer screen, Larry Stevens was on the verge of human ecstasy. He was, in fact, as close as he had ever been to understanding the essence of everything that romance in Dallas, Texas, has ever stood for.

Stevens, 32, was writing to a woman he had never met. He wasn’t even sure of her name. All he knew was what he had read in a 40-word personal ad that she had placed in the Dallas Observer.

The advertisement had read: “Dorothy from Kansas seeks Tin Man. Are you an incurable romantic?” She then went on to describe herself as a “5-foot-8 brunette, hazel eyes, long and leggy lady in late 20s (with zest for life) seeks sensitive, intellectual, spontaneous gentleman with sense of humor, who is trim, 25-40, self-aware.”

Stevens was hooked. He had written letters to women who advertised in the Observer before-sometimes as many as 12 an issue. But he knew right from the beginning that this one was different. One could, after-all, consider Stevens, a local voice talent who makes a living reading radio commercials, to be an expert at the art of dating through personal ads. He had purchased a computer, in part, to make his letter writing more efficient. He kept files. He pored through the Observer’s personal ads section the way some people go over baseball box scores. He underlined his favorite ones. He made notes beside the ads. He sent his picture with each letter. As a result, he had gone out with dozens of Observer women. The personal ads were his own way of tumbling into the glorious world of love.

Which made Dorothy from Kansas all the more important.

“Dorothy, Dorothy. Wake up, Dorothy!” Stevens began. “Don’t go looking over your rainbow for your Tin Man. He’s in your own back yard. Hi! My name is Larry and I’ve come to get you (and your little dog, too).”

It was a moment, Stevens said later, that he wouldn’t forget. “One of my best letters,” he says. “And I’ve written hundreds in the three years I’ve been answering ads.”

But, alas, romance does not come without its pitfalls. Stevens, who thought he had a masterpiece, was scorned. Dorothy from Kansas, leggy as she may have been, never replied. Once again, true love proved itself to be the most treacherous of emotions-and yet Stevens knew it would only be a matter of time before he returned to his computer to try again.

“Well, sometimes you’re disappointed,” he says. “But it’s all a numbers game-just like sales and marketing. Just like life, for that matter. You throw enough up against the wall, and something has got to stick.”

Obviously, thousands of others believe in these modern valentines. The Dallas Observer runs nearly 350 ads ($10 for 50 words) in each biweekly issue, which is double the number published two years ago. The other significant outlet for personal ads, a monthly magazine called The Single’s Exchange runs about 120 ads (around the same price), per issue. Together, the Dallas Observer and The Single’s Exchange ads bring in an estimated 6,000 responses a month.

But even more impressive is the way the market has changed. The Dallas Observer, once regarded as the bastion of the sexually innovative advertiser (“Would you like to play adult games on my backyard swingset? Then write me.”), has undergone a stunning transformation. Although the publication is still a connoisseur of the funky school of journalism (one recent front-page story was “Ernest Hemingway Goes to Confetti”), the ads now cater to Harvard lawyers, bankers, flight attendants, executives, models, doctors, down-to-earth suburban mothers who are divorced with two children, world travelers, schoolteachers and nice little guys who would absolutely keel over with embarrassment if their co-workers found out what they were doing. All their lives are boiled down to a summary with a post office box number at the end.

You can still find the odd request in the Observer (a recent issue ran an ad in which a North Dallas couple was looking for another couple to play canasta with them in their underwear) but those now seem to play the role of the light aside. What’s going on here is an intense search for the right partner. Advertisers have specific requests. They don’t beat around, and they are sometimes poignantly honest. People are gravitating to the personals like flowers to sunlight.

“When I first started doing this,” says Marge Young, advertising director for the Observer’s personal ads, “I was repulsed. There were all these sex ads, gay ads, ads from people wanting extramarital affairs. At one point, I wanted to go screaming out the door. I just didn’t understand what had happened to everyone’s lives.

“But then I began to understand that this was just a part of life that wasn’t going to go away. And soon, more regular people started coming out of the closet. Now, if you look through the pages, there’s something for everyone.”



THE SINGLES EXCHANGE, with an estimated readership of 42,000, is the more tame of the two publications. The advertisers tend to be middle-aged and not as flashy as the Observer crowd. One woman, in her introduction, wrote, “Loved traveling in a motor home, over the country I surely did roam.”

Many advertisers are non-smokers and are church-oriented. Also included in the magazine are horoscope columns, nightclub reviews and a rather remarkable Hollywood gossip column (“Actress Jane Alexander was an ardent student of ballet until her toes grew too long”).

“I know our ads might not be as spicy as a best seller,” says editor Kristene Seher, 26, who, appropriately, majored in family relations at Texas Tech University. “To be honest, last month we did have to cancel one of the first ads we’ve ever canceled after a man made a reference in his ad to ’enjoying group activity.’ We thought someone might take it the wrong way.”

Still, despite the perils of chance, the ads seem to work. Week after week, people return, pencils in hand, to look at strangers’ ads and search out traces of romance. Critics might scoff that human beings aren’t meant for such haphazard methods of discovering love, but in a society that practices being single, has therapy about being single and writes books about being single, this seems like just the thing. The personal ads section has become the Sears catalog for the lovelorn.

“Which is exactly the reason I decided to try it,” says Gary Kaston, 40, a divorced man who was married for 17 years and is the father of an 11-year-old daughter who lives with him in Piano. “When I saw the personal ads for the first time,” says Kaston, who works for a custom home builder, “I thought, ’What kind of people are these? Is this their last chance before they go under?’”

It took him six weeks to finish his first ad. It was 300 words long and came close to describing his entire life. Young called it one of the longest ads in the history of the Observer.

Within three weeks, Kaston had 45 responses. One of his first respondents, trying to pinpoint the most depressing things in her life, wrote in languid handwriting, “My negatives are macho men, bossy people and liver.”

Kaston went out with 20 of the women who wrote him. He brought a stuffed bunny rabbit on most of those first dates. “I thought it would be a comical way of recognizing me,” he says. “I was nervous. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

Kaston, his letters spread out before him on a table, tries to explain the impact of the personal ad. “Listen, I’m almost embarrassed by all the response. Look at this. I don’t know what to do. I like monogamy. I don’t want to go out with as many women as I can. I’m going to have to drop the ad.”

Another person inundated with responses was Pamela Lamb, 29, a Dallas saleswoman who wrote in The Single’s Exchange that she was looking for a gentleman “who is enjoying life, semi-aggressive, who thinks his personality and looks are okay and has goals in his life.”

For five months, she dated a wealthy oil man she met through the ad. His first words to her were, “I’m too old for this.”

“I have to admit that it was exciting,” Pamela remembers, “because being from Iowa, I didn’t know if those kind of men existed.”

But she also got a suggestive letter from an editor of one of those grocery-store tabloids. She got pictures of men-some of them nude, some of them with their shirts unbuttoned, some of them sitting timidly on a couch, all of them trying to smile like Tom Selleck. She also got a lot of letters “from men who thought that I wanted something sexual just because I wrote that I liked men who had goals in their lives. Where do these people come from?”

That’s a difficult question to answer. A quick perusal of the personal ads makes one realize that the greatest wonder isn’t Dallas’ sky-high divorce rate-it’s that some people ever find one another at all. The ads range from a man with herpes who is looking for a woman who weighs less than 100 pounds to a woman who writes that she is addicted to liberal causes and playing the kazoo. One man wrote that he was “reasonably divorced.” Another wrote that he was a “reasonably attractive Jewish CPA.” One woman described herself as “reasonably patient with men who can only cook steaks.”

Only a few are willing to make the ultimate confession on paper-that they are lonely-and several apologize in their ads, writing that they’ve never done such a thing before. Many advertisers ask to meet for what they call a “noncommittal drink,” and a great number use the same phrases to describe themselves: “financially secure,” “looking for the right relationship,” “height proportionate to weight,” “nice smile,” “good listener,” “sense of humor.”

Young estimates that for every 30 answers a male advertiser receives, a woman gets 60. But at The Single’s Exchange, it’s almost the opposite. “We think women write more because it’s the only time they feel they’re more in control,” says Seher.

Barbara Resnick, 26, a personnel administrator for a large Dallas industry, has slowly revised her ad over the last two years. She admits that her ads were rather dry when she started. She wrote that she was fun and that she liked dinner and movies. The first letter she received from a man began, “My special lady.”

“There was this one guy who came to pick me up for a date,” Resnick says. “He sat down, opened up my Cosmopolitan magazine and started asking me the questions to a six-page sex questionnaire. I was so embarrassed I didn’t know what to do. I found myself answering them.”

But what insight we glean from the experience of the personal ad-Resnick’s ads now mention honesty and self-confidence. She now feels she has more control over dates. “At the least, I’ve gotten a couple of free dinners out of the whole thing. And when I’m bored, I can always read my letters. All my friends like to read them. My friends who are too scared to. advertise always ask me for my leftover letters.”

Yet she refuses to respond to ads “because I always have this vision that I’ll write to some guy who once wrote to me through my ad. And knowing my luck, it’ll be the same guy I once turned down because I thought he was a dork.”

One recent Saturday afternoon, 60-year-old Cal Hull, who is on the engineering staff at SMU, looked across the living room of his small apartment and stared at the woman of his dreams – a longtime nurse named Audrey Amundson.

“I wore out that Single’s Exchange for two months, reading it up and down,” says Hull, “before I decided to try. It had gotten to the point where I’d come home from work, go to the little bar down the street to have a beer, then I’d get disgusted and come home. And then I’d get more disgusted, and I’d go drive around before coming home again.”

Hull, divorced, and Audrey, a widow, felt caught in that familiar trap that many older people have experienced: There’s no place to channel their needs for romance. After her husband died, Audrey even moved from Wisconsin to Dallas to find a better life.

They’met through the personals. “I figured I had lost my mind doing this,” says Hull. “The first date I had, this woman said she was 5-foot-4 with brown hair and weighed 135 pounds. Well, we met for a cup of coffee, and her hair was as gray by God as it could be. I just looked at my coffee cup and thought, ’What the hell have I done?’ This woman might have weighed 135 pounds, but that had to have been 30 years ago.

Then he met Audrey, who, in her soft voice, explained that most of the men she had met since her husband died “were flat-out SOBs.”

“In other words,” says Hull, “we realized we were perfect for each other.”



BUT THEN THERE are the heartbreaking ads, usually found under the miscellaneous section of the Dallas Observer. That’s where one can find the married men and women who are looking for affairs. Almost all of the ad writers mention how they feel so close to their spouses. And yet something is wrong.

One afternoon, Young was walking out the door of the Observer office, when a handsome middle-aged man came up and handed her an envelope. He kept his head bowed and whispered to her. He was a prominent well-known businessman. Young never changed expression.

“I used to see men coming in, advertising their infidelity,” she says, “and it would kill me. I wanted to ask them, ’Why are you so unhappy? Why stay in the marriage?’ They would just seem so sad, as if the ad was their last resort.”

Young pauses. “There are a lot of people’s problems out there that I just can’t understand. And you know, a lot of them end up coming through my office.”

“I’ll tell you the saddest thing,” says Ann Seher, Kristene’s mother, who acts as the publisher of The Single’s Exchange. “It’s when someone advertises and gets back only a couple of letters, if that. Well, you see, they have just gone out and put their life on the line. They have done their best to explain who they were. And wham! Nothing.”

But in an age where few singles have the time to hunt down a mate, don’t know where to look or recognize how easy it is to blow a potential relationship on the first meeting with one wrong word, then the ads are like hidden jewels.

In retrospect, the whole thing is very touching. It’s because of the details: the idea of a man or woman sitting alone at a table, attempting, many for the first time, to describe themselves.

Elaine Neal, 31, a local classical violinist, wrote in an ad that her interests were “physical fitness, flea markets, astrology, metaphysics and jogging.” A unique combination, perhaps, but she got more than 50 replies in two issues, all from men who wanted to have a serious relationship with her.

And she found one. After meeting inventors and college professors, she found Bryant Stavely, 36, a computer systems analyst. Within one year after the ad ran in the Dallas Observer, they were married.

“I just feel so grateful,” says Stavely. “I had never done anything like that before. It was my very first letter. I feel-seriously- that some spirit was moving in the deep.”