The First Advertisement

Online dating is routinely described as unprecedented. It is not even close.

English newspapers were carrying matrimonial advertisements by the 1690s. A man with an estate and no wife would place a notice; a woman with a portion and no husband would answer it, sometimes through an intermediary to preserve discretion. By the Victorian period the lonely hearts column was an established institution, slightly disreputable and widely read, and it stayed in roughly that form for a century and a half.

What is interesting is not that the ads existed. It is what they asked for.

For most of that history, matrimonial advertisements specify circumstances. An estate, or a portion, with figures. An age, or an age range. A situation: a trade, a living, a position. And temper, which covers disposition in the broad sense of being easy or difficult to live with.

What they almost never specify is personality in any modern sense, and what they never specify is compatibility. There are no shared interests. There is no sense of humour. Nobody is looking for a best friend.

This is not because the writers were unromantic. It is because the advertisement describes the position being filled. A marriage was a household: an economic unit, a site of production, a way of holding property and raising children who would inherit it. Describing an estate and a temper is describing what the job requires.

Compatibility arrives as the thing you advertise for when the marriage stops being primarily a household and becomes primarily a source of personal fulfilment. That shift runs through the nineteenth century and completes in the twentieth, and you can watch it happen in the ads: the money gets vaguer, the character gets more detailed, and eventually the interests show up.

There is a second thread running alongside, and it is the embarrassment.

Placing a matrimonial advertisement was mildly shameful for almost its entire history. Not scandalous, but faintly pitiable, on the grounds that anybody who needed to advertise had failed in the ordinary channels of family, church and neighbourhood. Victorian lonely hearts columns were read with a certain amusement at the advertisers.

That stigma survived into online dating's first decade essentially unchanged. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, couples who had met online frequently invented a different story, and the invention was expected.

Then, in roughly five years in the 2010s, it collapsed.

The thing to notice is that the stigma was never about the technology. Newspapers, agencies, personal ads, websites, apps: four or five distinct media and the same embarrassment, continuous across all of them. What was shameful was admitting in public that you were looking, which is a much older and much more interesting embarrassment, and it is about not wanting to be seen to need something.

What broke it was not a better product. It was scale. Once enough people were visibly doing it, the admission stopped carrying information about you.