Online dating didn’t really begin with the advent of the internet.
The need to communicate to other human beings for love, companionship and sex goes back centuries, with each new technology opening up further avenues and fresh ways to reach out.

Online Dating: A History

Love & Relationships

With the advent of the modern newspaper in 1690, it took a mere five years for the first personal ads to appear in Britain.
One of the very first personal ads was from a 30-year-old man who was seeking young women with a good personal fortune.

The First Personal Ads

LGBT communities took to the discreet personal ads, as homosexuality was banned in the UK till as late as 1967.
The 1700s saw the first ads with coded words, female names as an attempt to find companionship, forbidden by society.

Forbidden Affairs

Englishwoman Helen Morrison, who placed an innocent personal ad in 1727 in the local newspaper, was sent to an asylum for four weeks, as it was insane at the time for women to seek companionship.

The First Female Personal Ad

<ul>
<li>Aristocrats caught on the personal ad trend and started broadcasting their often bizarre desires to the general public.</li>
<li>The matrimonial ad, where a potential husband or wife was sought, was looked down upon initially, but as specific magazines and periodicals focusing on matrimony gained traction, the normalization of the personal ad seeking bride or groom started happening.</li>
<li>Looking at the popularity of the personal ad, making scam artists started preying on the vulnerability of the people who were seeking companionship and love.</li>
</ul>

Matrimonial Ads In The 1800s

<ul>
<li>The rural parts of America started making use of personal ads for matrimony.</li>
<li>Lonely soldiers of WWI sought pen pals using these ads, giving rise to the friendship ads, the whole personal ads trend went mainstream.</li>
<li>The ‘Lonely Hearts’ trend invited prosecution from the British police, due to its suspicious nature.</li>
<li>The internet gave rise to online dating with the world’s first computer date-matching service invented in 1965, where for $3 one could find a match by answering a questionnaire.</li>
</ul>

Matrimonial Ads In The 1900s

Newsgroups and Bulletin Board Services (BBS) gave rise to the second wave of personal ads, with America Online (AOL), Prodigy and later Craigslist providing avenues to singles looking to find companionship.
Match.com was founded in 1997, and in a decade online dating became a top-grossing paid service on the internet.

Online Matrimonials and The Second Wave of Personal Ads

<ul>
<li>It is ubiquitous and many social media sites are personal ads in disguise.</li>
<li>Specialized dating sites exist for every orientation, religion, place and race.</li>
<li>This also makes stumbling upon someone who exists outside the preference bubble harder than before.</li>
</ul>

Online Dating Today

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02/14/2016 08:44 pm ET



Updated
Dec 06, 2017


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</header><img alt="2016-02-14-1455426483-3380496-victorianmen.jpg" src="https://images.huffingtonpost.com/2016-02-14-1455426483-3380496-victorianmen-thumb.jpg" width="570" height="357"> 
Before they went mainstream, personals were a way for same-sex couples to discreetly connect.Has the Internet really revolutionized dating? Or is hijacking tech for love and sex just what humans do?* * * * * Hardly a week goes by without another new think piece about online dating either revolutionizing society or completely ruining our ability to have real relationships. But these hyperbolic pronouncements miss a deeper fact: At its core, “online dating” isn’t something we just started doing 5, 10 or even 20 years ago. Before the Internet, there were personal ads, and before that, lonely shepherds carved detailed <a href="http://www.treehugger.com/culture/archeologists-study-the-worlds-oldest-tree-carvings.html" rel="nofollow" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:5;elm:context_link;itc:0" data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="1" data-v9y="0" dir="ltr">works of art </a>into tree bark to communicate their longing for human contact.Since the earliest days of mass media and technology, people have been finding ways to broadcast their desires and find connections that might have otherwise eluded them. I mean, one could argue that even Voyager 1’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_Voyager_Golden_Record" rel="nofollow" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:6;elm:context_link;itc:0" data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="2" data-v9y="0" dir="ltr">Golden Record</a> is kind of a massive, interstellar personal ad (complete with the recorded sound of a kiss!) out to the universe. It’s as if humanity decided to document all our best features and send them into space with this message:Lonely humans seek extraterrestrial lifeforms in Milky Way or nearby. Open to all body types. * * * * * The modern newspaper was invented in 1690, and the first personals followed soon after. So dating apps are really the latest manifestation of human beings doing what we’ve always done — create new tools to communicate and then turn around and use those tools to find love, sex and companionship. 1695: The First Personal Ads 
According to history professor <a href="http://www.randomhouse.co.nz/books/h-g-cocks/classified-the-secret-history-of-the-personal-column-9780099519492.aspx" rel="nofollow" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:10;elm:context_link;itc:0" data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="4" data-v9y="0" dir="ltr">H.G. Cocks</a> (seriously —The Best Name Ever for an academic) personal ads began as a way to help British bachelors find eligible wives. One of the earliest personals ever placed was by a 30-year-old man, with “a very good estate’, announcing he was in search of ‘some good young gentlewoman that has a fortune of £3,000 or thereabouts.” (£3,000 is equivalent to roughly £300,000 today. #ShamelesslySeekingSugarMomma...)1700s: Personal Ads for Homosexual Safety 
Personal ads were one of the only ways for the gay and lesbian communities to meet discreetly and safely at this time. Less-Than-Fun fact: homosexuality was outlawed and punishable by death in the UK by wife-murderer Henry VIII and continued to be illegal until 1967. During this time, gathering sites for gay men known as <a href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/8/bailey.php" rel="nofollow" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:11;elm:context_link;itc:0" data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="5" data-v9y="0" dir="ltr">Molly Houses</a> were subject to regular raids by law enforcement. (Meanwhile in the future U.S.A., anyone accused of being a “sodomite” doing “buggery” was also legally sentenced to death as of 1776.) Coded words, female names and other signals in personals were channels to privately expressing vulnerability and find companionship that society forbade. 1727: Women Get Smacked Down for Expressing Personal Desire 
In 1727, Englishwoman Helen Morrison became the first woman to place an ad in a Lonely Hearts column. She convinced the editor of the Manchester Weekly Journal to place a small ad stating she was “seeking someone nice to spend her life with.” (It’s radical, I know.....) A man responded to Helen, but it was not the man she was hoping for. It was the mayor, who had her committed to an insane asylum for four weeks. Women asking for what they want — clearly delusional to 18th century dudes.1800s: Aristocrats Catch On 
Always on the lookout for ways to exploit media for their own ends, aristocrats in the 1800s used personal ads to broadcast their interest in romantic engagements that seem scandalous by today’s standards. An 1841 ad in the Journal of Munich tells of a 70-year-old Baron seeking a woman “between 16 and 20 having good teeth and little feet.” (Well... maybe not that much has changed for the one percent? ) Mid 1800s: The General Public Follows 
In the mid-19th century, the need to advertise for a husband or wife was still considered a “failure” and associated with deviant behavior for many judgmental straight, white, middle-to-upper class people. But as magazines and periodicals such as The Wedding Bell in the US and The Correspondent, Matrimonial Herald and Marriage Gazette in the UK hit the newsstands with immense popularity, matchmaking and personals took off as well, creating the first wave of true mainstream normalization for the personal ad. <div>Subscribe to The Morning Email.</div><div>Wake up to the day's most important news.</div>Late 1800s: The Scam Emerges 
You know, someone’s always got to ruin the party. The popularity of personals paved the way for grifters who soon realized that they could prey on the vulnerability of people seeking love. Scam artists caused a scandal that many newspapers ran with, and personals disappeared practically overnight as public attitudes became more cautious. Phishing, fake profiles, and ads for escorts continue this tradition today. Early 1900s: The Lonely Rural Farmers, Ranchers and Shepherds 
Around the turn of the last century, personal ads enjoyed a renaissance of popularity, especially in the Western US with low populations and the harsh realities of rural life without a partner. (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBrEZ5LJXlM" rel="nofollow" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:19;elm:context_link;itc:0" data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="11" data-v9y="0" dir="ltr">Farmers Only</a> continues the legacy to find “where all the country girls are” today.)Some very pragmatic examples of early 20th century personals:<BLOCKQUOTE>HOUSEKEEPER: 18 to 30 years of age, wanted by widower, 40. Have prominent position with the rail company, have 75-acre ranch also house in town; object matrimony if suited; have boy 13 years old, would not object to housekeeper having child. Can give best references.</BLOCKQUOTE><BLOCKQUOTE>Young woman, reared in luxury, having lost everything and earned her living for the past eight years, is tired of teaching and wishes a home: would like to meet a well-to-do businessman who would appreciate refinement and affection in a wife. Object: matrimony. 
</BLOCKQUOTE>If only these two had found each other’s personals then.....1920s: Lonely WWI Soldiers Seek Pen Pals 
Personal ads went mainstream again in the early 20th century, when social pressures to get married by 21 (and thus, expectations for relationships) were much lower, thankfully than their earlier incarnations. Many of the postings were simply calls for friends or pen pals. These kinds of ads were especially fashionable among lonely soldiers during World War I. 1960s: Counterculture and Computer Love 
Removed from the context of wartime, old stigmas crept back in. Like the Internet today, lonely hearts ads were suspected of harboring all sort of scams and perversities. Because they were often used by homosexuals and sex workers, British police continued to prosecute those who placed personals until the late 1960s, when ads became part of the burgeoning youth counterculture.Meanwhile, a new technology was emerging. In 1965, a team of Harvard undergrads created <a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/08/tech-time-warp-ibm-1401-dating/" rel="nofollow" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:26;elm:context_link;itc:0" data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="12" data-v9y="0" dir="ltr">Operation Match</a>, the world’s first computer dating service. For $3, users could answer questionnaires and receive a list of potential matches, a process that is still used by many dating sites.1990s-2000s: Second Wave of Mainstream 
The explosion of the Internet in the mid-to-late 1990s created a new context for personals, and by the end of the decade, they had become relatively acceptable. Even before the Web itself, bulletin boards and newsgroups hosted a variety of ways people could use technology to meet others with similar interests, including dating. Services such as America Online, Prodigy and eventually Craigslist offered chat rooms, forums and online classifieds of use to singles. By the time Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan AOL’d each other in <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/youve-got-mail-trivia_n_7309240" rel="nofollow" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:27;elm:context_link;itc:0" data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="13" data-v9y="0" dir="ltr">You’ve Got Mail</a>, it had become clear that the Internet was going to change every aspect of our lives forever — including love and romance. Match.com was founded in 1995, and by 2007, online dating had become the second highest online industry for paid content. (....Can you guess what’s #1?)2010 - Today 
By 2010, different dating sites existed for virtually every city, sexual orientation, religion, race and almost every hobby, making it easier to find exactly what we’re looking for and harder to stumble on someone who exists outside our pre-defined bubbles of identity.In 2002, Wired Magazine predicted, “Twenty years from now, the idea that someone looking for love won’t look for it online will be silly, akin to skipping the card catalog to instead wander the stacks because ‘the right books are found only by accident.’” Online dating is the new norm for introductions, replacing the role of traditional personals and in many cases, merging with the functions of social media. If we are going to improve the way people meet one another, we’re going to have to do so by questioning the existing paradigms of online dating and figuring out how to do it better. One thing is certain: the tenacity with which human beings will seek each other out with any tool available is inspiring. Ultimately, we use the technology of online dating because we crave connection and that desire alone timeless and connects us always.<div data-ab="huffpostPlusMidEntryCta3" data-ab-b-title="Last chance to become a HuffPost founding member!" data-ab-c-title="Last chance to become a HuffPost founding member!">Calling all HuffPost superfans!</div><div data-ab="huffpostPlusMidEntryCta3" data-ab-b-desc="Sign up and help shape HuffPost's next chapter" data-ab-c-desc="Sign up for membership and help shape HuffPost's next chapter">Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost’s next chapter</div>

Always on the lookout for ways to exploit media for their own ends, aristocrats in the 1800s used personal ads to broadcast their interest in romantic en...

Love & Family

Before they went mainstream, personals were a way for same-sex couples to discreetly connect. Has the Internet really revolutionized dating? Or is hijacking tech for love and sex just what humans do? * * * * * Hardly a week goes by without another new think piece about online dating either revolutionizing society or completely ruining our ability to have real relationships. But these hyperbolic pronouncements miss a deeper fact: At its core, “online dating” isn’t something we just started doing 5, 10 or even 20 years ago. Before the Internet, there were personal ads, and before that, lonely shepherds carved detailed <a data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="1" data-v9y="0" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:5;elm:context_link;itc:0" dir="ltr" href="http://www.treehugger.com/culture/archeologists-study-the-worlds-oldest-tree-carvings.html" rel="nofollow">works of art </a>into tree bark to communicate their longing for human contact.

Since the earliest days of mass media and technology, people have been finding ways to broadcast their desires and find connections that might have otherwise eluded them. I mean, one could argue that even Voyager 1’s <a data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="2" data-v9y="0" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:6;elm:context_link;itc:0" dir="ltr" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contents_of_the_Voyager_Golden_Record" rel="nofollow">Golden Record </a>is kind of a massive, interstellar personal ad (complete with the recorded sound of a kiss!) out to the universe. It’s as if humanity decided to document all our best features and send them into space with this message:

Lonely humans seek extraterrestrial lifeforms in Milky Way or nearby. Open to all body types. * * * * * The modern newspaper was invented in 1690, and the first personals followed soon after. So dating apps are really the latest manifestation of human beings doing what we’ve always done — create new tools to communicate and then turn around and use those tools to find love, sex and companionship.

1695: The First Personal Ads According to history professor <a data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="4" data-v9y="0" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:10;elm:context_link;itc:0" dir="ltr" href="http://www.randomhouse.co.nz/books/h-g-cocks/classified-the-secret-history-of-the-personal-column-9780099519492.aspx" rel="nofollow">H.G. Cocks </a>(seriously —The Best Name Ever for an academic) personal ads began as a way to help British bachelors find eligible wives. One of the earliest personals ever placed was by a 30-year-old man, with “a very good estate’, announcing he was in search of ‘some good young gentlewoman that has a fortune of £3,000 or thereabouts.” (£3,000 is equivalent to roughly £300,000 today. #ShamelesslySeekingSugarMomma...)

1700s: Personal Ads for Homosexual Safety Personal ads were one of the only ways for the gay and lesbian communities to meet discreetly and safely at this time. Less-Than-Fun fact: homosexuality was outlawed and punishable by death in the UK by wife-murderer Henry VIII and continued to be illegal until 1967. During this time, gathering sites for gay men known as <a data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="5" data-v9y="0" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:11;elm:context_link;itc:0" dir="ltr" href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/8/bailey.php" rel="nofollow">Molly Houses </a>were subject to regular raids by law enforcement. (Meanwhile in the future U.S.A., anyone accused of being a “sodomite” doing “buggery” was also legally sentenced to death as of 1776.) Coded words, female names and other signals in personals were channels to privately expressing vulnerability and find companionship that society forbade.

1727: Women Get Smacked Down for Expressing Personal Desire In 1727, Englishwoman Helen Morrison became the first woman to place an ad in a Lonely Hearts column. She convinced the editor of the Manchester Weekly Journal to place a small ad stating she was “seeking someone nice to spend her life with.” (It’s radical, I know.....)

A man responded to Helen, but it was not the man she was hoping for. It was the mayor, who had her committed to an insane asylum for four weeks. Women asking for what they want — clearly delusional to 18th century dudes. 1800s: Aristocrats Catch On Always on the lookout for ways to exploit media for their own ends, aristocrats in the 1800s used personal ads to broadcast their interest in romantic engagements that seem scandalous by today’s standards. An 1841 ad in the Journal of Munich tells of a 70-year-old Baron seeking a woman “between 16 and 20 having good teeth and little feet.”

(Well... maybe not that much has changed for the one percent? ) Mid 1800s: The General Public Follows In the mid-19th century, the need to advertise for a husband or wife was still considered a “failure” and associated with deviant behavior for many judgmental straight, white, middle-to-upper class people. But as magazines and periodicals such as The Wedding Bell in the US and The Correspondent, Matrimonial Herald and Marriage Gazette in the UK hit the newsstands with immense popularity, matchmaking and personals took off as well, creating the first wave of true mainstream normalization for the personal ad.

Late 1800s: The Scam Emerges You know, someone’s always got to ruin the party. The popularity of personals paved the way for grifters who soon realized that they could prey on the vulnerability of people seeking love. Scam artists caused a scandal that many newspapers ran with, and personals disappeared practically overnight as public attitudes became more cautious. Phishing, fake profiles, and ads for escorts continue this tradition today.

Early 1900s: The Lonely Rural Farmers, Ranchers and Shepherds Around the turn of the last century, personal ads enjoyed a renaissance of popularity, especially in the Western US with low populations and the harsh realities of rural life without a partner. (<a data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="11" data-v9y="0" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:19;elm:context_link;itc:0" dir="ltr" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBrEZ5LJXlM" rel="nofollow">Farmers Only </a>continues the legacy to find “where all the country girls are” today.)

Some very pragmatic examples of early 20th century personals: HOUSEKEEPER: 18 to 30 years of age, wanted by widower, 40. Have prominent position with the rail company, have 75-acre ranch also house in town; object matrimony if suited; have boy 13 years old, would not object to housekeeper having child. Can give best references. Young woman, reared in luxury, having lost everything and earned her living for the past eight years, is tired of teaching and wishes a home: would like to meet a well-to-do businessman who would appreciate refinement and affection in a wife. Object: matrimony.

Some very pragmatic examples of early 20th century personals: HOUSEKEEPER: 18 to 30 years of age, wanted by widower, 40. Have prominent position with the rail company, have 75-acre ranch also house in town; object matrimony if suited; have boy 13 years old, would not object to housekeeper having child. Can give best references. If only these two had found each other’s personals then.....

1920s: Lonely WWI Soldiers Seek Pen Pals Personal ads went mainstream again in the early 20th century, when social pressures to get married by 21 (and thus, expectations for relationships) were much lower, thankfully than their earlier incarnations. Many of the postings were simply calls for friends or pen pals. These kinds of ads were especially fashionable among lonely soldiers during World War I.

1960s: Counterculture and Computer Love Removed from the context of wartime, old stigmas crept back in. Like the Internet today, lonely hearts ads were suspected of harboring all sort of scams and perversities. Because they were often used by homosexuals and sex workers, British police continued to prosecute those who placed personals until the late 1960s, when ads became part of the burgeoning youth counterculture.

Meanwhile, a new technology was emerging. In 1965, a team of Harvard undergrads created <a data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="12" data-v9y="0" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:26;elm:context_link;itc:0" dir="ltr" href="http://www.wired.com/2014/08/tech-time-warp-ibm-1401-dating/" rel="nofollow">Operation Match </a>, the world’s first computer dating service. For $3, users could answer questionnaires and receive a list of potential matches, a process that is still used by many dating sites.

1990s-2000s: Second Wave of Mainstream The explosion of the Internet in the mid-to-late 1990s created a new context for personals, and by the end of the decade, they had become relatively acceptable. Even before the Web itself, bulletin boards and newsgroups hosted a variety of ways people could use technology to meet others with similar interests, including dating. Services such as America Online, Prodigy and eventually Craigslist offered chat rooms, forums and online classifieds of use to singles. By the time Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan AOL’d each other in <a data-rapid-parsed="slk" data-rapid_p="13" data-v9y="0" data-ylk="subsec:paragraph;cpos:27;elm:context_link;itc:0" dir="ltr" href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/youve-got-mail-trivia_n_7309240" rel="nofollow">You’ve Got Mail </a>, it had become clear that the Internet was going to change every aspect of our lives forever — including love and romance. Match.com was founded in 1995, and by 2007, online dating had become the second highest online industry for paid content. (....Can you guess what’s #1? )

2010 - Today By 2010, different dating sites existed for virtually every city, sexual orientation, religion, race and almost every hobby, making it easier to find exactly what we’re looking for and harder to stumble on someone who exists outside our pre-defined bubbles of identity.

In 2002, Wired Magazine predicted, “Twenty years from now, the idea that someone looking for love won’t look for it online will be silly, akin to skipping the card catalog to instead wander the stacks because ‘the right books are found only by accident .’” Online dating is the new norm for introductions, replacing the role of traditional personals and in many cases, merging with the functions of social media. If we are going to improve the way people meet one another, we’re going to have to do so by questioning the existing paradigms of online dating and figuring out how to do it better.

Bite‑sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

The History of Online Dating From 1695 to Now

Online Dating: A History

The First Personal Ads

Forbidden Affairs

The First Female Personal Ad

Matrimonial Ads In The 1800s

Matrimonial Ads In The 1900s

Online Matrimonials and The Second Wave of Personal Ads

Online Dating Today

The Ugly Truth About Online Dating

Online Dating 101

A Brief History of Romantic Love and Why It Kind of Sucks

Bite‑sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

The History of Online Dating From 1695 to Now

Online Dating: A History

The First Personal Ads

Forbidden Affairs

The First Female Personal Ad

Matrimonial Ads In The 1800s

Matrimonial Ads In The 1900s

Online Matrimonials and The Second Wave of Personal Ads

Online Dating Today

The Ugly Truth About Online Dating

Online Dating 101

A Brief History of Romantic Love and Why It Kind of Sucks

Bite‑sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career