Aboard public transport, my go-to facial expression is a stern, furrowed brow. Not that any of this has stopped me from posting missed connections myself. That there exists a digital town square where lonely hearts can declare their feelings without fear of public rejection is both lucky and improbable, but the hit rate, by all accounts, is low. Still, if it seems strange that a quirky section of a website that prides itself on an aggressively dial-up-era design has gained such traction in popular culture — all in spite of the scarce likelihood of finding love — look no further than the motivations of gold miners or oil prospectors.
It may have been my own failures to connect that spurred me to take a closer look at the habits and behaviors of other posters. It also could have been the odd voyeuristic appeal of the whole missed connections section, putting those private and vulnerable declarations of affection into a ruthlessly public, yet anonymous, context.
Finally, I suspect it was also rooted in my old psych grad school mentality, making the promise of a large data set, untainted by the specter of observer effects, too tempting to ignore. Who were these people who posted hundreds of messages each day? To see, I gathered the missed connection postings from the nine largest US cities and got to work.
I analyzed the language, the people who looked and whom they looked for, the days they posted, the words they used, their ages, and a dozen of other points of comparison. And so, without further ado: the missed connections.
New York seems to be a city manufactured for missed opportunities to meet strangers. There is the pervasive reach of the subway, the relatively scarce number of drivers, the never-ending throngs of people. Indeed, of all the cities New York had the highest number of missed connections.
