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This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, say to language, “Hey, how’s it going?” And language says, “Sorry, do I know you?” And I say, “Yeah, we work together, we see each other every day,” and language says, “Er… Sorry…”
Let’s prepare ourselves for today’s show with a little word history, sponsored by Fallen London. It’s a gothic literary role-playing game set in Victorian London - except the city has been stolen and stashed in a huge cavern a mile underground. Oh, and you start off in prison, but once you bust out, there are more than a thousand things you can get up to. You want to sell your soul to the devil? Fine! Grow a giant carnivorous plant? Sure! Get a job? ...OK! But your choices will affect your character’s future! Like real life. But BETTER than real life, because you can marry a half-human half-squid if you want.
You can play Fallen London in your browser - fallenlondon.com - It’s a free game; you can buy extra stories and character options, but you don’t have to - you can play Fallen London for free forever if you want. BUT Allusionist listeners get a free gift within the game, visit failbettergames.com/allusionist to claim yours.
And thanks to Fallen London, and with Valentine’s Day strutting briskly towards us, here’s the etymology of ‘wedlock’. It has meant marriage since the early 13th century, but it evolved from the Old English word ‘wedlac’ in which ‘wed’ meant a pledge, and ‘lac’ was a suffix that denoted an action, so wedlock was making a pledge.
Nothing to do with actual locks, so put away your old ball and chain jokes: firstly because you’re not living in a 70s sitcom; secondly because just because a word looks like another word, it doesn’t mean they’re related. So let me preempt your question: no, ‘wedlock’ is not at all related to ‘warlock’. What they’ve got in common is having a last syllable that sounds a little bit like ‘lock’ so eventually people were spelling it ‘lock’.
'Warlock' started out as the Old English ‘wærloga’, which meant a traitor or a liar. ‘wær’ meant ‘fidelity’ or ‘vow’, and the ‘loga’ was a lie. So wedlock was making a pledge, and warlock was breaking a pledge. 'Warlock' also used to refer to the Devil, and by extension, it came to mean people who associated with the Devil, and thus by the 1500s it was applied to sorcerers, thus it is now considered by some pagans to be an offensive term. And fair enough - just because you’re a gentleman witch doesn’t mean you’re evil. #NotAllWarlocks.
On with the show.
PROFILE: MAN 1
Hello there, stranger, come on in and welcome to my profile.
PROFILE: WOMAN 1
Heteroflexible woman, single, 5’8”, average build. Never smokes, drinks socially, has dogs. Scorpio.
PROFILE: WOMAN 2
Quixotic, altruistic, kind, professional woman, who likes really good pie, used bookstores, conversations with small children...
PROFILE: WOMAN 3
I’m a nerdy creative type. My passions are boardgames, animation, and over-analysing everything. I love carrying out long intelligent conversations, and I’m always up for something new!
PROFILE: WOMAN 2
...night skies, being soothed by the ocean, world trivia, bale forts, and - perhaps you. Tell me about your mind.
PROFILE: WOMAN 4
Software developer seeking retired astronaut.
PROFILE: WOMAN 5
Outdoorsy nerd, born in northern city, raised in southern city. You’re intellectual, but fun. You’re a funtellectual.
PROFILE: MAN 2
I value curiosity and empathy and a well-made burrito.
PROFILE: WOMAN 1
Happily non-monogamous, in search of a main squeeze.
PROFILE: WOMAN 6
I’d like to date a man who’s affectionate, intelligent and encouraging.
PROFILE: MAN 3
Into other masculine fellows, younger or up to my age; rarely into other bear-y guys.
PROFILE: WOMAN 7
I like books, food, booze, tattoos, and assonance.
PROFILE: WOMAN 3
I’m polyamorous and pansexual, which is pretty cool. I’m looking for another partner on here, or at least a few new friends.
PROFILE: WOMAN 8
Seeking male with record-breaking low standards.
PROFILE: WOMAN 9
I spend a lot of time thinking about:
PROFILE: MAN 2
I spend a lot of time thinking about: how to arrange my bookshelves.
PROFILE: WOMAN 10
I spend a lot of time thinking about: politics, study, work, sex, music, photography, the internet...
PROFILE: WOMAN 9
What the insides of people’s homes look like...
PROFILE: WOMAN 3
...how to get a better job...
PROFILE: WOMAN 9
The impending doom of the human race.
PROFILE: WOMAN 1
How to live the dream.
PROFILE: WOMAN 9
Gentrification...
PROFILE: WOMAN 10
..cats.
PROFILE: WOMAN 11
I spend a lot of time thinking about:
PROFILE: WOMAN 9
Budgeting.
PROFILE: WOMAN 11
- boning.
PROFILE: MAN 1
The first thing people usually notice about me is my brightly coloured socks. Or my height, depending on if they go top to bottom or the other way round.
PROFILE: WOMAN 11
The first thing people usually notice about me: bitch face.
PROFILE: WOMAN 12
Most private thing I’m willing to admit section: I’ve been working on a long-term painting project in my room without ventilation, which may or may not have been the best idea.
PROFILE: MAN 4
The most private thing I would willingly admit: I can’t swim or whistle.
PROFILE: WOMAN 11
I’m in love with my therapist. Transference is pretty common, so there’s no need to be jealous.
PROFILE: WOMAN 9
Most private thing I’m willing to admit? I left that section totally blank.
PROFILE: MAN 5
If you’ve read this far, I’m going to give you a high five.
PROFILE: WOMAN 6
Let’s get to know each other.
PROFILE: WOMAN 13
There’s a good chance I’ll swipe right if there’s a dog in your profile.
PROFILE: WOMAN 3
I’m really interested in non-binary people, couples, and other trans folk. Cis women as well. Any other folk can feel free to talk to me also.
PROFILE: WOMAN 10
Don’t send me a message that just says “Hi” and nothing else.
PROFILE: WOMAN 14
Please don’t message me if you’re a couple looking for a third; I’m really only interested in one-on-one relationships.
PROFILE: WOMAN 15
Not sure if I want romance, but if I do, it won’t start because a guy texts me, “My sausage wants a date in your knickers.
PROFILE: MAN 3
Much as I like penises, I’d rather see a pic of your face, thanks.
PROFILE: MAN 2
You should message me if: you like burritos.
PROFILE: MAN 6
My dating profile is just one sentence, it says: “Just looking for a nice girl to sit in a dark room and think about death with.” Gotten some pretty weird responses to that one.
HZ: Those are all real dating profiles of Allusionist listeners, and they’re the online iteration of a tradition that has been around a lot longer than the internet. A LOT longer.
FRANCESCA BEAUMAN: I found them going right back to 1695, which gives one a good 300 years of evidence about how humans find a mate, which is amazingly revealing and hilarious.
HZ: Francesca Beauman is a historian, and the author of Shapely Ankle Preferr’d: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad. And that first lonely hearts ad, which appeared on 19th July 1695, on page 3 of a pamphlet being sold around London:
“A gentleman about 30 years of age that says he has a very good estate would willingly match himself to some good young gentlewoman that has a fortune of £300 or thereabouts, and he will make settlement to content.”
FB: There’s actually an even more revealing ad a few lines down in the same magazine in 1695, it says:
“A young man, about 25 years of age, in a very good trade and whose father will make him worth £1000, would willingly embrace his beautiful match. He has been brought up a dissenter with his parents and is a sober man.”
FB: Also important to be sober, I suppose.
HZ: And dissenting.
HZ: Professional and amateur matchmakers had been around for a very long time. So why did the people of Britain start looking for partners in the newspapers?
FB: As soon as one got the first newspapers and magazines, one got the first lonely hearts ads. They all emerged together. In the 1690s in London, suddenly the streets were full of newspapers and magazines; print really took off in a big way.
So as soon as you got those, people really saw the opportunity for advertising. Also at the same time, lots of people were moving to the city, facing all the problems we face today: they were working really hard, working really long hours, too busy to meet people; they didn’t have their mum or sister around to introduce them to the girl next door.
HZ: So if men wanted to meet someone, they had to come up with another way. And women were allowed to spend more time with newspapers than they were with single men. Meanwhile, what was in it for the newspapers?
FB: Selling more copies. Very quickly, newspaper owners spotted the entertainment potential of lonely hearts ads. Which means, within a few short decades, lonely hearts ads started appearing on the front page of the paper. When the Times newspaper appeared in the 1790s, it had lonely hearts ads on its front page from the beginning.
They’re hilarious, they’re sad, they get people talking: “Did you see that ad on the front of the paper? Who do you think placed it? What will happen?” There’s a great sense of intrigue and romance surrounding these ads. They’re these chunks of people’s lives right there. There’s so much in there, people’s innermost needs and desires, right there in the newspaper. It’s a brilliant way of selling more newspaper copies.
HZ: These ads document what Brits have been looking for in a partnership over the past 300 years.
FB: Certainly in the beginning, the ads were pretty simple. A man wanted a woman who was young, and ideally had some money. A woman wanted a man who had some money, and that was it.
Lots of the language men will use in their ads is just different ways of saying ‘fertile’. They’ll say healthy, glowing, young - and a lot of the language women use is different ways of saying ‘has money to support offspring’.
There were certain criteria that did reappear in the ads, because in an evolutionary sense, that’s what people look for. In an evolutionary sense, men did look for women who were fertile, and women did look for men who had resources. The evolutionary needs of that do often trump all the many other romantic factors.
For so many centuries, marriage had just been a business transaction. There was one in the Dorset County Chronicle in 1824 that said, “I want a woman to look after the pigs while I’m at work.” So it’s not just about the money in a basic sense; it’s about everything that surrounds money, like the labour costs, property costs, all of that: people were very straightforward, because that was important.
HZ: It strikes me that at this time, the men placing the ads were looking for something long-term, whereas the women responding to them needed a solution to an immediate problem. Single women were very limited in what they could do, how they could live, what they could earn and own, whom they could spend time with. Marriage opened up far more possibilities, even if those possibilities were looking after someone else’s pigs. But, as time goes on, the ads show that people did start expecting other things from marriage.
FB: They really reflect the rise of romantic love in the 18th century. It’s not just a business transaction to benefit the community. So with this the ads become more intimate, more detailed about what people are looking for, whether they way they look, or they must be into playing the piano, or dancing. In terms of physical appearance, the language used changed a lot, so in the 18th century you get people asking for a woman with a shapely ankle, or a man with a well-shaped head. You don’t get that so much with online dating today.
HZ: I wonder what is a well-shaped head.
FB: I think it was all tied up with phrenology, where the shape of your head determined your character.
Also because you paid by the word, it was in the interest of the advertiser to keep them short and to the point. There was an ad, “She must be under 40 and not deformed,” and that was it! Those were the only criteria.
Whereas with the advent of the internet, where ads are not charged by the word, that changes enormously. You can write the longest laundry list of what you’re looking for in a man or woman, and there would be no drawbacks to that, except it exposes how much choosier people are when looking for a mate.
HZ: There were a couple of important developments in the 19th century: 1. the advent of mass education and therefore mass literacy, so advertisers weren’t just men from fairly high social strata, and more women could read them; and 2. the notion of marrying for love really caught on. The marital bliss of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert made a lot of their subjects think they could, and should, seek happiness and personal fulfilment. Although being more emotional didn’t necessarily come easily to the Victorian Britain.
FB: Love and marriage had always been a very private entity. It all happened behind closed doors. Throughout the 19th century it became of course more public: there it is on the front page of the newspaper, people expressing their innermost needs and desires about what they look for in a man or a woman. That made people uncomfortable. The Victorians weren’t as private as I think history has made them out to be; but certainly there was a sense that this might cause the social order to break down, and that caused a lot of fear and panic amongst newspaper proprietors and all the way up to government, because there was a sense that marriage was the bedrock of society. So if the way that people got married collapsed or took a different form, then what? Where would we be? Chaos! So it was very much about keeping people in their place.
HZ: Lonely hearts ads were SO popular, in April 1870 the first newspaper launched that was entirely filled with them. The Matrimonial News announced itself with the statement: “Civilization, combined with the cold formalities of society and the rules of etiquette, imposes such restrictions on the sexes, that there are thousands of marriageable men and women, of all ages, capable of making each other happy, who never have a chance of meeting.” And it took hardly any time for imitators to launch, too: The Matrimonial Gazette, the Matrimonial Post, the Matrimonial Times, the Matrimonial Register, the Matrimonial Chronicle, the Matrimonial Courier, Matrimonial World...
FB: The ads were at their most popular in the 1890s; London alone had 20 matrimonial newspapers, newspapers entirely devoted to Lonely Hearts ads, thousands and thousands of ads.
HZ: Including rather a lot of fake ads. The matrimonal papers had pages to fill and expectations to falsely raise! And anyway, since the beginning, fakery had been a characteristic of the lonely hearts ads. Here’s one from the Times in 1786:
“A gentleman of very considerable fortune, about the age of forty. Though he possesses an excellent and unimpaired constitution, is afflicted with an incurable weakness in his knees, occasioned by the kick of an ostrich in the East Indies.”
HZ: You know this dreamboat is too good to be true, because there were no ostriches in the East Indies at the time. Unless ‘East Indies’ is a euphemism?
In the first couple of hundred years of lonely hearts, advertisers might have used words like ‘respectable’ or ‘delicate’ to describe the woman they wanted, but by the early 20th century, the vocabulary had become more lively.
“Lothario, London West, 30, ex officer, wants cuddlesome girls, fond of rivers, dancing, pleasure.”
FB: ‘Cuddlesome’ is brilliant. It really shows the range of human desire, I think, in terms of the different things people look for.
HZ: And the early 20th century woman was looking for different things, too. Many were rejecting the Victorian ideal that they should be wedlocked baby-machines, and upturning courtship conventions by pursuing, rather than waiting to be pursued, and maybe wanting nothing more from a suitor than sex and fun, and they’d make that clear in their ads with terms like ‘bachelor girl’ and ‘sporty’.
And some of the words in the ads were code to indicate they were seeking same sex relationships, which back then they couldn’t do openly because homosexuality was still a prisonable offence.
Francesca reckons there may have been gay lonely hearts ads for as long as there have been lonely hearts ads, but it’s difficult to prove because the advertisers had to be so guarded and the code words might only have been recognisable to others in the same situation. But some of the code is easier to spot. Adjectives like ‘unconventional’, ‘Byronesque’, ‘theatrical’.
FB: Code words that would be thought of as very cliched, and playing up to stereotypes. “Artistic man looks for somebody who loves Oscar Wilde.” That today would seem very stereotyped. But in the early days, when gay culture was fighting its way out of a very constrained world, these ads were necessary and did play a very important role.
HZ: But the clandestine gay ads also contributed to the scandalous reputation of lonely hearts. They had always been quite inflammatory, summoning fears of respondents being financially or emotionally defrauded, and they had been implicated in murder cases, money thefts, bigamy and cult recruitment. And this negative perception of the ads was further reinforced because you never really heard about the ones that had a positive outcome with no drama, whereas the newspapers loved printing bad news stories.
FB: "Two people meet through a lonely hearts ad, fall in love and live happily ever after” - who’s interested in that? What people like to read about over breakfast is a tragic story of a man defrauding some innocent young woman on Piccadilly Circus.
HZ: The bad reputation was one of the things that nearly scuppered lonely hearts in the 20th century. Of those matrimonial newspapers that had started up since 1870, all but two of them were gone by the end of World War II. For one, the World Wars irrevocably changed the social order and human connections were becoming somewhat easier to make in person. Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, marriage agencies became more popular than lonely hearts ads because they were seen as more trustworthy. But although they were no longer on the front page, there were still ads in newspapers and magazines- - and in the 1970s the word-limit-saving acronyms arrived, like GSOH and WLTM. And that’s also the time when gay and lesbian ads could start to appear openly, and people were being far more frank about what they were seeking sexually or romantically.
FB: There was one in Private Eye in 1973 that said, “£50 for temporary relationship resulting in pregnancy,” super straightforward. And others that were very sexually liberated: they want someone who is freedom-seeking or radical, there was something for everyone in there.
HZ: Advances in technology shaped the form as they so often do: newspapers began to offer phone messages, then video messages, and then in the mid-90s along came the first online dating sites. Launched in 1995, Match.com usually claims the credit for being the first proper dating site. And now there are thousands, from Academic Singles to Zoosk. Thanks to digital photography, a lot of online dating now emphasises the visual over the verbal, but the words still matter.
FB: There are amazing statistics about eg how if you put that you like walks on the beach, you’re more likely to get responses.
HZ: So hackneyed! I suppose you seem unthreatening if you put that.
FB: It’s such a weird thing to put, in a way. ‘Walks on the beach’, who doesn’t like walks on the beach?
HZ: Also, unless you live on the beach, how often are you going to have them?
FB: Exactly! Not often at all! So it’s a meaningless thing to put in the profile.
HZ: Odd, this disconnect between trying to be truthful in order to find someone to love you whom you can love, but on the other hand having to lie to do that.
FB: ‘Lie’ is a bit strong, but certainly show one’s best self, as Oprah would say. All sorts of advertising is based on some sort of white lie or half truth. No one places an ad that says, “I’ve got giant thighs and I just lost my job, and I can’t cook.” We all want to present our best selves.
HZ: Presenting our best selves - I’ve got an absolute humdinger of an episode about that, so you’d better come back next week to hear it.
Francesca Beauman has written several books, including Shapely Ankle Preferr’d: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad - and now she’s working on a sequel, about lonely hearts ads in the USA. Apparently they’re a bit less coy than Victorian Brits. What a surprise.
This episode was sponsored by Squarespace.com. You want to build an online gallery or store or blog or podcast - you can do it all through Squarespace, because they make building a beautiful website idiot-proof. Well, not entirely idiot-proof: my husband just built himself a new website using Squarespace, and he forgot to get a 10% discount for the year by entering the code ALLUSION at checkout. Don’t be like that guy. Squarespace.com. 10% off your first purchase. Use the code ALLUSION. It’s really not difficult.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Martin Austwick, Matthew Crosby for his voice, and particularly to all the listeners and friends who shared their online dating profiles.
The Allusionist is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the finest podcasts in the world, including Strangers by Lea Thau. The new series is just about to launch, but you can while away the minutes until it does by listening to the recent update to 'The Waxing Virgin', where four years ago Lea met Becca, a bikini waxer who’s in her 30s who had never had sex. Well, Lea just spoke to her again and a lot has happened over the past four years. You can find the show, and all the thirteen Radiotopians, at Radiotopia.fm.
Radiotopia is possible thanks to the generosity of you magnificent listeners, the Knight Foundation, and Mailchimp. Mailchimp’s randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
extraposition, noun, grammar: the placing of a word or group of words outside or at the end of a clause, while retaining the sense, eg ‘it’s no use crying over spilt milk’.
Try using it in an email today.
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