EVERY DAY 20,000 messages and 500 new photographs are posted on AnotherFriend.com, an online dating site based in Limerick. It has almost half a million members, most of which are in the Republic. The company has been in business for 10 years and is thriving. “It’s kind of recession-proof,” says Sara Kate Hurley, the site’s community manager.
There is an unchanging quality to the business of introducing people who are looking for love or marriage. Every man and woman who signs up with an online agency, such as AnotherFriend, has many anonymous predecessors.
Lonely hearts notices were born with the newspaper advertisement. In the first days of the printed notice, all kinds of people took to the new form, though the love they expressed within it was not always for a human. In 1660 King Charles II advertised after his dog disappeared – twice. “We must call upon you again for a Black Dog between the greyhound and a spaniel . . . It is His Majesties own dog, and doubtless was stolen . . . Will they never leave robbing His Majestie? Must he not keep a dog?”
Francesca Beauman, who has assembled a history of the topic in Shapely Ankle Preferr'd, notes that from the earliest days advertisers who were looking for human companionship wanted to see themselves in the personal columns on a Monday morning.
“It has always been the case that most ads are placed over the weekend, the result presumably of a long, lonely weekend spent in the company of just a dog and a bottle of cheap red wine,” she writes.
The business of finding love, or at least marriage, was never for the faint of heart or the overly modest. Here is another example of a lonely hearts advertisement, this time published in London in 1695.
“A Young Man about 25 Years of Age, in a very good Trade, and whose Father will make him worth 1000l. Would willingly embrace a suitable Match. He has been brought up a Dissenter, and with his Parents, and is a sober Man.”
This could have been an advertisement from any time over the next 200 years.
It is from a male. The number of such notices placed by women exceeded those placed by men only after the first World War. Even today 55 per cent of the names on AnotherFriend.com’s files are male and 45 per cent are female.
Our early advertiser frankly states his age. Once women took to the medium they were were much more reticent on the subject, although men were usually quite specific about the desired age range of any prospective bride: between 20 and 30.
This advertiser is also typical in emphasising his clean habits, religious practice and sobriety. His optimism about how his worth will one day be increased by his father – presumably on the older man’s death – is a typical boast.
The only surprising thing about this early advertisement is that the man does not specify how much money the woman he is searching for must have.
Money is the constant thread in all early lonely hearts activity. Generally, before the 20th century men looked for women with capital. On the positive side, the men claimed to be confident about what their affectionate parents would bequeath them.
This man is writing in 1875: “The lady required to have means to enable him to start in business, or otherwise as she might wish . . . he lost his fortune by the failure of mining speculation, and is now residing with his parents, who are in extensive business, which will fall to him.”
Other men are blunter still. This man is 60, he says, and has lost everything in the New York stock exchange crash of 1869: “Will any lady lend temporary £250 to establish a home in beautiful Normandy, and she to have the preference to possess it; write to Editor, with 4 stamps.”
Both of these advertisements were printed in Matrimonial News, which first appeared in 1870 and was rapidly joined by the Marriage Gazetteand the Matrimonial Timesuntil there were about 20 papers consisting entirely of lonely hearts columns.
According to Beauman, the period between 1870 and 1900 was the last boom for such advertisements before online dating sites became popular almost 100 years later.
The early boom was only slightly shaken when the editor of Matrimonial Newswas sued for breach of promise in 1890.
The practice grew not just with the newspaper industry, but with the new cities of the industrial age. By 1777 a hard-up actress, Sarah Gardner, had written a play called T he Matrimonial Advertisement. It featured a rich young widow, Mrs Holdfast, who wishes to remarry and uses a hack writer, Mrs Epigram, to compose an advertisement for her. Mrs Holdfast ends up marrying an Irish soldier, Carroll O'Cannon.
The advertisements tracked the development of modern urban life and of the media so faithfully that Charlotte Bronte wrote her own spoof notice, satirising the obsession with money. Almost a century later. playwright Tyrone Guthrie used the subject to look at female loneliness in Britain after the first World War in which so many men had been slaughtered.
Lonely hearts columns have always proved compelling reading. And they have also proved irresistible to the satirist and the tease. In 1740, the Gentleman's Magazineprinted a letter signed by a man called Solomon Single boasting of how he wished to buy himself "a very fine, beautiful, accomplished young Lady". Replies to Mr Single's advertisement were published in the next issue.
Of course such advertisements were – and still are – rich feeding grounds for the conman and conwoman.
In the 19th century, the industry was periodically rocked by what we might call institutional scandal, which allowed a lot of superior sniggering at the people who advertised for love.
In 1895 the proprietors of the Matrimonial Heraldwere charged with conspiring to obtain money under false pretences. The trial lasted four months and most of the witnesses, who came from all over Britain, were lower middle class men whose determination to find wives was ridiculed in court. It turned out that the letters forwarded to these tobacconists, clerks, house decorators and foresters had all been written by the same hand. Three proprietors of the World's Great Marriage Association, a sister organisation of the Matrimonial News, received jail sentences of five and three years.
However the World’s Great Marriage Association also boasted that it had 700 letters of thanks from very satisfied customers who had married happily. No one testified to this effect in court, because there was such a stigma attached to having found a marriage partner through an advertisement.
Hurley of AnotherFriend.com says this shyness persists to this day. “There absolutely still is a stigma about it,” she says.
The successes of the industry are slow to come to the public gaze.
For example it is only now that we know that a young Bavarian couple met through an advertisement, placed in a Catholic newspaper, in 1920. He was a policeman, 43, and she was a cook, 38.
Their happy marriage produced three children who never knew how their parents had met until the youngest son returned to Bavaria in 2006, in his new role as the current pope. Pope Benedict declared himself very touched to learn at last how his parents had found each other.
Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad 1695-2010by Francesca Beauman published by Chatto
