n+1 personals

Read all about it: BAD ROMANCE, n+1 ebook

No sex, no adderall, all (uh) mouth-service

I’d like to meet a freethinker of a girl to frolic in the Socratic method with.

Strictly Socratic. Nothing sexual.

This is how it’ll work: we will propose a motion on a topic which we fundamentally disagree on (e.g. religion, capitalism, solving the fiscal cliff, star wars v.s. star trek, etc. etc.) and we will build a wall on each of our respective sides of the argument composed solely from the bricks of reason, logic and facts. Then we will pound away at eachother through dialogue . Vigorously and passionately. Until the climatic moment where our minds orgasm upon arriving at the truth. Afterwards we will turn and leave without further word.

You must be discreet (I don’t want my girlfriend to discover I don’t find her brain voluptuous or stimulating enough) and drug free (no adderall or any study drugs whatsoever). Also, you might think I’m a freak but I would like to do this in public maybe in front of some people that are into watching.

I’m very open minded and down for anything. Therefore if your the submissive type I can talk over you in a condescending manner as I gently but firmly educate you. Or if you’re into sadomasochism I can and will thrust my keeness upon you and spank you with my intellect as I enlighten you hard.

If you enjoy being in control you can interject repeatedly with your scholarly knowledge as I bite my tongue and, soft spoken as ever, ask you to please allow me to finish my point. But if you’re really an intellectrix you can take me in the chasm of your couth (couth not mouth), and tease me with your cognitive prowess until I beg you to allow me to come and wade forth through your effervescent arroyo of brilliance.

Call me kinky but, yes, there’s practically nowhere I’m not willing to go. Except infinite regression.

Not a Wes Anderson film, bro

Suggested in-flight recitation: How Love fled / And paced upon the mountains overhead / And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Native son back in Chicago for the nondenominational holidays seeks winter fling equal parts Yerba mate, Yeats and YOLO. Points if you’ll also make the return trip to NYC, where we can joke about flyover country until our hearts yearn for Harold’s. Me: tall, working writer. You: into that.

Not sure this is a go-to date story, but okay!

One time my sister and I came up with this joke that she would be going on a romantic date with my brother during a family dinner. I insisted she stay in character the whole night. She played footsie with him, and though we didn’t get the one rise out of him, he did get weirded out. We were maybe 11 (her) and (me) 12. He was 9, and presexual, and pissed.

n+personals returns, sort of, until [this intern] goes back to college anyway

It’s Christmas break so lo and behold I see not an angel of the lord looming but boredom—that angel of death! 

It seems, as well, that people were confused by the Issue 15 MISSED CONNECTIONS and took the time to write their own personals. 

I will post them as they come in, per usual.

Feel free to write one and submit it to me. Or just enjoy them, you neutral cold-hearted (single) pleb slaving away at your desk job! 

You said: “No Marxism in the bathroom.” I begged to differ. →

Issue 15 Launch Party MISSED CONNECTIONS: The Bushwick Edition 

In Which Lust Rears Its Ugly Head! [Issue 15 Edition]

It’s that time of year! By which I mean, dear reader, you just went 3/3 on n+1 launch parties and are (1) feeling like you finally found your people (2) thankful to have gotten laid. 

Or you aren’t. And you didn’t. 

This may or may not be your fault. I have a hunch though, that it wasn’t. Let me guess: You spent three hours at SIGNAL working up the nerve to give ‘the protracted glance’. She definitely blinked back! But that white curtain—like all those to go up before it—proved to be a bit of a problem. 

n+1 is here to help: Email the editors your MISSED CONNECTIONS. The best ones will be cross-posted on the n+1 website and n+personals by the end of the week. 

Love in our time! Or whatever.

[At this time I invite you to browse the storied n+1 missed connections archive: Issue 9, Issue 10]

—Kaitlin Phillips

THE END OF LOVE, LIT-ERALLY

This past year, n+1 got in your space. We cried foul on prisons and banks and higher education. Hey, reader! Raise the crime rate! Occupy! Burn that degree! We yanked you out of your cubicle to socialize with Juggalos and J.H. Prynne fanatics and one very sweaty Gordon Lish. (Then we let you slink back, if only to Gchat.) A few readers even woke up to find us between the sheets, when the interns launched this classifieds site to close out one long, hot summer. 

“Welcome to the golden age of internet dating!” the press release quipped, (darkly?) foreshadowing the histrionics to come. Strange bedfellows an n+1 readership does make. (Sample internal email during this time: I am ready to wield my digital pen like a mighty sword, castrating any and all weirdos that threaten to ruin our bastion of love!) But we came to forgive—or at least allowed ourselves to be entertained by—those whose psychic space our city feeds with an endless deluge of people to, well, fuck, marry, or kill. 

At the best of times, an n+personals mixer was even entertained—dance me to the end of love, etc—but who are we to externalize our readers’ discontent? At this rate (responses average 5-6 a week; more than 50% of ads get one contact request), we could continue the personals into perpetuity. If, well, we had some perpetuity. 

Instead, we’re opting to kill this site, and a little more than half of what it stands for. We’d like to thank n+1, the New York Review of Books, and all our readers. You have until September 30th to submit or respond to existing ads!

Readers are encouraged to get your daily dose of n+1 in a more n+1y format: the issue!

—Kaitlin Phillips

Oh just take her to bushwick country club already

Me: female, recent liberal arts graduate, a Midwesterner now in Manhattan. A bookworm devoted to and working in public education. Proud to call Georgia my birthplace and my favorite font. Raised on and devoted to NPR, fantasizes about marrying a younger Tom Stoppard (this need not be you. This is for a distant – and unlikely – future).

Likes: fruit tarts, red wine, dissecting pop culture and international goings-on and the links between. Zadie Smith and Milan Kundera and Julian Barnes and now Karen Russell. Wondrously awful horror movies. Photojournalism blogs, partly because I fear inurement to the tragedies within print news. The word groundswell. Warm rain alongside sunlight. Dislikes: The Office, Jonathan Franzen, the word organic outside of (and often inside) the supermarket.

You: male, maybe older than me but still concretizing your adult life. Willing to accompany me to book readings and inventive bars, to spend Sundays in bed dividing the weekend paper before exploring.

At least it’s not running through the Louvre

Pretty Asian American physician, 35, seeks well educated, intelligent man, 30-45, for wild romp through the Morgan.

10

I don’t have to read JR, I lived through the 80s and sat there drinking while my 26-year-old benefactor fumed about the idiots who couldn’t manage to crank a grand piano up to the 19th-floor apartment. As if his high-rise UES building had one of those furniture hooks they have on the outside of Amsterdam houses. Also, I had a locker and made my first beady-eyed investment at age 12. Conclusion: the music teacher’s a wanker, and jammed prose is for uptight midwesterners who’re embarrassed by rhetorical excess and almost everything else. But I like Middlemarch. But I don’t like it as much as I like The Sheltering Sky and Under the Volcano and A Sport and a Pastime.

I had a boyfriend who killed himself, and he was probably more talented than you are, also smarter. Awards ceremonies and fumbled Ivy PhD and NPR slumming and all. Points for you, though, if you’re less drunk and crazy. Less suicidal, anyway. I also have a kid you probably won’t meet. So much for all your highbrow Marxist ways.

Can you read? Have you got a fancy prose style? Can you fuck like you were born to it? Are you brighter than me, quicker? Do you write accomplished crank letters? And are you old enough to look hollow-eyed at the end, and realize that not only have you missed the starting gun, but that you’re hopelessly behind, and may as well find a woman, a shack on a bit of land, a library card, and a bar? Have you got enough sense to know you shouldn’t advertise the fact that you’ve grown a garden as if tomatoes count as some kind of redemption? You’ll do it anyway; I don’t care about that, so long as you have to avoid remembering it afterwards.

Me: Aging, a grownup, a mother (but not yours), small, Jewish, no serious vices outside territoriality and describing people to themselves. I have no money and am buried in the midwest. If you’re the right guy for me I will not depress you by telling you about my nice-girl middle-class athletic derring-do, and I will believe what you say you did at the gym when you were actually having a smoke and thinking about heading for the bar.

Seeking reader of Lowry, not Lowry per se

Evade a bear, romp with the dog, stroke the big white cat, walk on two feet of hard crusted snow, pick blackberries in the fall, rhubarb in the spring, and strawberries and raspberries in the summer. Cook a goat cheese pizza and mushroom pizza on the floor of the iron oven, sit on the dock in the summer with forest behind and in front of you, sweat in the sauna, swim in the indoor pool. You are a physically and financially healthy 55- to 75-year-old male who is politically left leaning, concerned about the future of the world, intelligent, probably well traveled and may have given up on romantic love and will settle for warm companionship. You are looking for a quiet life and a mutually loyal relationship with simple pleasures in a pristine environment near a very eclectic small town in Canada. You are happy with a fifty/fifty partnership. The “yin” of the equation is well traveled, well educated, early 60’s, creative cook, active, non-drinker, healthy diet. And yes, we have access to high speed Internet and the latest books.

I Was Sitting on My Patio This Guy Appeared I Thought I was Hallucinating (But It Was Just My Internet Boyfriend)

Newish Chicago lady resident looking for a fellow (male, mid-twenties) introvert with whom to quietly observe the city around us, preferably while enjoying brunch on some patio or another. Must be willing to laugh at my post-modernism references (and occasional puns).

wine-drinker, thinker

Female art historian, though increasingly identifying as an intellectual historian, given to short affairs and long digressions, just reached the age at which time stands still in deference, according to Frost, seeks 30ish man with literary inclinations and good provenance to look broadly at culture, drink wine, and debase popular scholars who impulsively append “meta-” to various discourses.