March 3, 2005

Web Site Connects People Who Missed the First Time

Jared Bibler saw Elisa Stead for only a minute on the T before his stop at Kenmore Square in Boston. But in that minute, he noticed the Chanel quilted denim skirt with the unfinished edges, the camel-colored turtleneck sweater, and most importantly, the tall girl with auburn hair who happened to be wearing her “cool outfit” that fall Tuesday in 2003.

More than a year and a half later, Stead is moving to Reykjavík, Iceland, where Bibler, 30, is currently a software developer for Iceland’s financial sector. That fateful minute on the T was transcribed into an Internet posting by Bibler looking for Stead on Craigslist.org’s Missed Connections forum, and within 24 hours, the two turned a missed connection into an actual one.

“Girl on the Green Line ‘D’ train 7 p.m. tonight,” he wrote. He described Stead as “tall, in a cool denim skirt and curvy brown sweater, great hair and intelligent blue eyes,” even noting her grocery bag from Trader Joe’s and the tin can she was trying to open.

Stead had the same idea about writing a post to look for Bibler. Instead, she found his post the next day. “He was so specific,” Stead, a 25-year old project manager for Environmental Data Resources in Boston, remembered about the post. “It was the stop, the line, the time. I clicked on it, thinking it would be an interesting read even if it wasn’t me.”

Stead and Bibler are two of the 7.6 million visitors who search Craigslist’s Web communities each month to look for roommates, used furniture or in Bibler’s case, a soul mate. Craig Newmark, the 52-year-old founder of Craigslist, said Missed Connections receives 33,000 posts per month from users trying to find a second chance in a fleeting glance or a drunken night at the local bar by writing personal-ad styled entries that are viewed as many as 900,000 times each day.

“Sometimes it’s better to have a long-shot chance than just dwelling on a missed connection,” said Newmark, a self-described romantic. He created the forum under the Personals section of Craigslist in 2000, and through it, has united two neighbors with their current boyfriends.

Craigslist, which was started by Newmark in 1995, divides communities by major cities, such as San Francisco — home of the original Craigslist, Boston and New York to create local forums. Within each city’s Craigslist page are sub-communities for activities, like job postings, sales of concert tickets or voicing an opinion. Missed Connections, known as “MC,” is Craiglist’s fourth most visited community behind jobs, housing and for-sale items.

“I checked them a few times a day from work. I really liked the idea of meeting someone this way,” Bibler said in an e-mail from Iceland. He liked the idea of a secondary market where people could have a second or better chance of meeting that person who got away, he said.

“I remembered the way he looked at me,” Stead recalled. “It was an excited, distracted look, and I thought, oh, I’ll just sit in front of him then.”

Although both were in relationships at the time — she with a touring polo player who was around for the summer, and he with his girlfriend in Seattle — they exchanged lengthy e-mails and met for their first date the following Monday. When Bibler drove two hours to Vermont, where she was staying with her family for Thanksgiving, Stead said it was impossible to deny their mutual attraction despite other romantic attachments.

“This guy really likes you. He can’t take his eyes off you,” Stead remembers her mother saying. Bibler and his girlfriend ended their relationship soon, while Stead’s boyfriend left her on New Year’s Day 2004 when she visited him in South Africa. But Stead was far from heartbroken.

“We fell in love in December,” Stead said of her relationship with Bibler. “He was taking care of my plants when I was away. When I got home, he had filled the house with presents and flowers.”

This isn’t the first time Stead has found luck in Craigslist. Last year she traded a pair of jeans for a hard-to-find pair of cream-colored sandals to wear to a wedding. The girl who responded to the trade has since become a close friend.

“I got a pair of shoes, a good friend and a boyfriend from Craigslist,” Stead said. “Now I check Missed Connections every day out of loyalty to the magic of Craigslist.”

Not everyone is so lucky. Toni Leonard, a 28-year-old advertising executive from Brooklyn, N.Y., recently ended a month-long relationship with a man she met through Missed Connections. The two sat next to each other on a bus from Boston to New York but didn’t exchange phone numbers. “Even though it didn’t work out, I would use it again,” she said. The break-up was amicable, she added. “It was getting serious, and neither of us were prepared to go down that road.”

Bibler and Stead were ready for that road.

“We’re getting closer. We’re both saying that we’re the person we want to spend the rest of our lives with,” said Stead, who is preparing to move to Reykjavík in May to join Bibler. “It was such a short moment and such a slim chance that we both happened to be on the MC board that we feel like some sort of cosmic dating service must have been at work.”

“I found him on a train,” she said. “Just be aware of what’s happening around you. And have an awesome skirt to wear on the train.”

Bibler and Stead at Gulfoss Falls in Iceland. Stead, who last visited Bibler in Iceland in February 2005, plans to move to Iceland later this March.

Bibler and Stead vacationing in Martha's Vineyard, Mass. before Bibler left for Iceland.


Both photos are credited to Elisa Stead and Jared Bibler.