Nerve/Salon personals

The age of the N/S N/K SWF looking for a LTR is over. The future of personal ads involves fully spelled-out words and coherent sentences, with eco-tourism taking the place of walks on the beach. And the Nerve/Salon personals will take us there.

The idea of space-unlimited personals catering to supposedly well-read hipsters intrigues, but I wasn't inspired to try out the site until I read a New York Press article making caustic fun of the kind of Bobos-in-training bound to frequent the place. "You dream of your next trip to Iceland," writes Daria Vaisman. "Belle & Sebastian are pretty awesome. You work for a website, but you know what's up."

Ouch. I wouldn't mind going back to Iceland. I've been known to listen to The Boy With the Arab Strap every now and then. As for working for a Web site, well, not anymore.

Having been so thoroughly described in so few sentences, I felt obligated to go there, to see if the ones advertising themselves were really postmodern dweebs. Pseudointellectual would-be think-tankers. Wannabe sophisticates kicking and screaming all the way down the path to yuppiedom. People, apparently, like me.

The first thing to try when sizing up any Internet personals site is its search feature. Now, Yahoo! Personals lets you search by gender, "relationship type", location and words that appear in the ad. But this is Salon, home of "literate smut." Oh wait, that's Nerve's slogan. But certainly they'll let you search by last book read, pick for best subtitled film or favorite footnote in "House of Leaves".

Wrong. Their search options run more toward height, weight, hair color and astrological sign. And there's no "keyword" search option, although perhaps it's for the best that I'm in the dark about how many times "Iceland" occurs.

The first indication that Vaisman may have hit the mark with her analysis comes when I click on "get matched," for which I have to place an ad. For this I need a personals nickname; in fact, they encourage users to have more than one nickname. I pick the first thing I think of, "cybelesreverie." It's a reference to a Stereolab song; already, this isn't going well. It's taking a while, so I stop it and try it again. It tells me that someone already has it.

Someone already has the 14-character name that I thought was so obscure. There's probably a whole army of cybelesreveries out there, checking the covers of their Stereolab CDs for another enigmatic-sounding song title after they find that another cybelesreverie got there first. Then I realize that I had, in fact, inadvertently registered the name that first time when I'd stopped waiting for it to load.

Somehow, this does little to reassure me. So I go to place an ad.

Emboldened by the "hide my ad" option, I put down a few vital statistics, but don't tell them what my "favorite onscreen sex scene" is, don't describe what you'll find in my bedroom, and don't fill in the blanks for "[blank] is sexy; [blank] is sexier." So they don't have a lot to go on.

My top "match" — can anyone write that without laughing — says he's "going to change art history." He's 32 and he's looking for someone from 18 to 32, weighing between 90 and 120 pounds, with "natural and long hair." This is all pretty retrograde, and makes me think of a search feature that Nerve should have: search by preferences. So, for example, you could screen out all the men who won't consider dating anyone older. You could avoid the ones with strictly delineated weight requirements. Or you could go the other way and search for someone who's looking for exactly, well, you.

The second on the list is nude, but in a dark black-and-white photo. He reads Kundera and listens to Aimee Mann. The third lists his ethnicity as "dwarf" and his religion as "chaotic good."

I also find: 45-year-olds looking for 18-year-olds, McSweeney's fans, a lot of self-described "sarcastic" or "ironic" types. And: near-perfect spelling, well-crafted self-descriptions and — to my chagrin — guys I'd consider dating. Maybe have dated.

But don't expect me to unhide my ad anytime soon. In the words of an un-nicknamed twentysomething Boston-area man seeking a woman, "consummation is sexy; anticipation is sexier."

— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)