You glance at someone across a room or share a moment – and then they're gone. It's called a 'missed connection', and there are a growing number of websites to help you find them again, writes GRACE WYNNE-JONES.
EVER WISHED you’d talked with an adorable stranger who gazed at you on a train? If the answer is yes, what has happened to you is a “missed connection”. Sudden attraction can, it seems, happen almost anywhere.
Messages sometimes make it into print. For example London's Time Outmagazine has had a "Once Seen" classifieds listing for many years and the London Paperhas a section called "Lovestruck".
But now, thousands of people around the world are deciding to follow up on these intense, though brief, encounters with the help of the internet. Some specialised websites have cropped up to cater for this romantic trend. The Gumtree and Craigslist websites have popular Irish missed-connections bulletin boards and there are other online listings too. Compared to, say, cities such as New York, missed connections messages from Dubliners, are less voluminous. However, Gumtree’s Irish missed connections are quite diverse and often include messages from people who want to locate someone they have lost touch with.In them, people describe who they met and where and urge them to make contact.
The term, of course, has its own Wikipedia entry. It is “an occurrence where two or more people are unable to exchange contact information or the information that is exchanged is lost”. In many countries, missed connections are usually, though not always, of a romantic nature.
Even the paris Transport Authority has taken an interest in the subject. It conducted a survey of 600 internet messages and discovered the majority of missed connections declared online by Parisians involved strangers on the Metro. A second study found that 12 per cent of Parisians had formed lasting relationships, as lovers or friends, with a person they had met on the underground. Physical proximity naturally played a part in this – perhaps the Dart could start its own dating service.
One of the reasons why missed connection messages are so popular is that they can be anonymous and you don’t have to approach the person directly. But it’s also a long shot because who knows if they’ll read your message and reply to it.
Are missed connections the ultimate form of speed dating? In a way, yes, because they prove how quickly we can form impressions about someone’s desirability. Researchers at Ohio State University found participants in a study decided on the type of relationships they wanted with each other within minutes of meeting. “Romantic relationships begin with people making judgments very quickly,” says Professor Artemio Ramirez, the study’s co-author.
BUT WHAT MAKES someone feel such tenderness for a total stranger? Dr Glenn Wilson, a London-based psychologist who is Honorary Senior Lecturer at King's College London, is the co-author of The Science of Love(Vision Paperbacks) and he believes missed connections have "a certain romantic overtone that some of the mating and dating sites don't have". He adds: "Love at first sight does happen – more often to men than women."
Apparently, humans subconsciously carry around a blueprint of their ideal partner. “A large component of it is formed by the age of three,” says Dr Wilson When we see someone who resembles this image, the yearning to make contact can be intense.
Dr Wilson believes that, in the male, attraction “is partly based on an imprinted image of the mother, and they will find physical resemblances to this imprint arousing in later life”. Apparently females “usually imprint information about their fathers and take on board more diffuse things. Women are concerned about bonding with an individual and want to see the idiosyncrasies of a potential provider.”
Dr Wilson also points out that “when you look at someone, you may see a passion in them that awakens your own interest”. However, “the initial chemistry of attraction is not often a good guide to the long-term prospects of a relationship”.
Yes, falling in love (or lust) is, it seems, relatively easy. But if you want to stay in love, you’ll need a certain level of compatibility. So if you do track down a missed connection, Dr Wilson suggests you both check your “compatibility quotient” on matchology.com. It’s a free service and he helped to design it. But if you’ve already got touchy feely with your missed connection, you may feel it is unnecessary. This is because you will already be producing bonding chemicals which “hook you to a person chemically”, according to Dr Wilson. These are very exciting “but of short duration”. And, of course, if you do decide to get to know a stranger better, you should take the usual precautions, which include initially meeting in a public place.
Dr Ed McHale is a Dublin-based family therapist and clinical psychologist with a special interest in intimate relationships. He believes that “when somebody sees a person they are attracted to without actually talking with them or getting to know them better, they have identified something that is pleasing and beautiful. But also I think we pick up cues of personality from a personal posture, facial expression and movements . . . a view of the kind of person they are.”
He says we all have aspects of ourselves that we readily own and express in the world. But we also have other aspects that are not as developed or recognised by us, so the person we are attracted to usually has some of these qualities in a more pronounced way.
This creates “a mutual sense of completion”. We may sense these qualities in someone very quickly. As for missed connections he says “sometimes these are mutual experiences . . . when they get to know each other the relationship may have a future. Attraction can be instantaneous.”
RE-CONNECTIONS
Here are some of the attempts by Irish people to track down a missed connection
- Are you this beautiful stranger? We see each other in Ballymount most mornings. (Gumtree)
“We see each other pretty much every morning, I drive past you in a black car as you are walking through Ballymount, we always stare and smile, mail me back or a least jump in front of the car to stop me.”
- 45 Bus this evening around 7pm 28th April. (Gumtree)
“I sat beside you, we were both on our phones. I was very impressed, a massive long-shot but if you see this drop me a line and we can see if were thinking along the same lines.”
- Girl walking dog in Ranelagh Easter Sunday morning. (Gumtree)
“Hi. Are you the girl walking dog in Ranelagh Easter Sunday morning? We walked past each other near Starbucks and smiled!”
- A quirky offering: I see her everywhere. (Gumtree)
“Ive always been nervous in crowds, so I keep my head down.
They say that your periphery vision is a mirage.
But when I walk through the streets,
I see her everywhere.
On the bus, giving out the Metro.
Judy Dench
Judy Dench
Judy Dench
Help me please.”
- We were waiting for the Dublin flight, I caught your orange juice . . . wish I'd caught you instead! Friday, April 3rd, 2009 11.30pm (missedconnections.com)
“You know what happened . . . everyone saw it, you were so embarrassed but recovered well. After both waiting all that time (yes, I spotted you across the concourse, waiting for your friend) why did the flight have to arrive just as we got talking? Why did I not come back for your number? Why couldnt you have followed me out to the car park where I was pacing back and forth trying to decide whether we really had a moment, or was it wishful thinking? You were so pretty, and had a lovely accent.”
Some Missed Connection websites – not all have Irish listings yet.
www.craigslist.org
www.isawyou.com
www.look2meet.com
