This is the one that started it all:

Last May, I stumbled upon the enchanting classified ads that are Craigslist’s Missed Connections and searched for postings in my hometown of Glencoe, Ill., just 20 minutes shy of Northwestern.

The idea that fathers are trolling my elementary school’s open house for MILFs was semi-disturbing, but the fact that they’d post sightings on the Internet in hopes of future escapades was fascinating. The possibility that beneath the most innocuous sighting could run a romantic undercurrent (imagined or otherwise) that would later air in a public forum intrigued me. That’s what led to my fascination with the site.

Whether happening upon a quirky, light-hearted posting or more sincere relationship ruminations, the site’s an instantly accessible, diverse, and often heartbreakingly honest forum for users to make connections, or rue connections missed.

That innocuous visit to Missed Connections has revolutionized my time-wasting on the Internet: I read Craigslist Missed Connections like I read the news. Since May 30, 2006, I’ve saved more than 200 postings in Chicago and consider myself a connisseur.

Craiglist itself is just a database of personal and classified ads. Founded by Craig Newmark in 1995 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Craigslist soon spread to urban areas across the nation. The website now represents 450 cities worldwide.

While there are paid job ads in select cities that pull in the website’s revenue, Craiglist remains by and large free to the public. Whether you are looking to sell a couch, rent an apartment, or, as I quickly found most appealing, find love (or variations of love), Craiglist is the online community to check out.

People post in nine personal ad categories: “strictly platonic,” “women seeking women,” “women seeking men,” “men seeking women,” “men seeking men,” “misc. romance,” “casual encounters,” “rants and raves” and, my favorite, “missed connections.”

Aimed at people who regret missing an opportunity to greet, talk, or exchange contact information with the object of their casual affections, users can post details of their possibly-requited loves in hopes that those people will see the post, recognize the missed connection and reconnect.

Many posters, though, provide few details and are probably not even seeking a connection. Within the Missed Connections forum one finds a wide array of communiqués, some bona fide missed connections, but also rants condemning strangers or even inanimate objects.

Admitting that a classified ad database ranks high on my bookmark bar isn’t something I’m ashamed of. I was lured in this past spring, before final exams but after a breakup, while I was mopey and half-seriously considering a 30-day guaranteed membership on Match.com.

Traditional online dating sites are like the transit facility where buses go once they’re done with their routes: They’re aimed at people’ve reached the end of the line, so they can’t go anywhere worthwhile anymore, but they’ve got to settle somewhere and at least there are other people there, too.

Match.com and other similar dating websites smack of desperation. The advertisements capitalize on its consumers’ hopelessness. Watch the commercials featuring the lucky middle-aged couples who have found love and have “completed” themselves. They finally found The One. At long last, they’re finally done. Don’t you, lonely consumer, want completion, too?

Missed Connections seems more like a means to an end in the internet dating spectrum rather than as a complacent destination. The candid hopefulness smattered all over Missed Connections, as opposed to the hopeless resignation spackled all over traditional online dating, appealed to the idealist in me.

While job listings and most other ads remain on the website for a month, missed connection ads stay up for only seven days. There’s a sense of urgency in many of the messages, a realization of the missed connection sliding away, and a desperate need to catch the connection before it slips away for a second time.

The forum’s anonmity and instant posting facilitates a rare, impuslve honesty that wouldn’t exist anywhere else.

“The online community offers a sense of anonymity,” said Kerry Dobransky, an NU doctoral candidate in the department of sociology. “It allows a screening process, anonymity, and social distance.”

This social distance allows posters to hide behind their treatises of affection, putting their tender sentiments into the open while keeping themselves heavily shielded.

When used in its purest sense, Craigslist Missed Connections is the modern internet-age equivalent of putting a message in a bottle and throwing it out to sea. It’s possible that the subject of the message will find the message, read it and respond — but it’s also pretty unlikely.

Despite these logistics, some posters use the Craigslist Missed Connection forum as a way to communicate with each other, either by acting on hunches from clues within the ads or by discussing a possibly shared Missed Connection.

Cafes, bookshops, and public transportation comprise the bastions of Missed Connections. Generation Y-saturated Wicker Park coffee shop Filter (1585 N Milwaukee Ave) regularly produces many a Missed Connection. Full of tables and organic foodstuffs, Wicker Park hipsters flock in droves, their Macbooks and people-watching skills in tow.

It became a running joke between me and my friend Carolyn that Filter was the place to go to incite the type of unrequited, passive lust needed for a Craigslist Missed Connection. We half-jokingly went there in November to exercise our Missed Connection ambitions, sat there for a few hours looking pensive yet alluring, but to no avail.

Judging by the amount of Missed Connection activity in Evanston and the Northwestern Community in general, however, we may not have to go far to land in Missed Connection territory.

This past November, Medill freshman Bill Pulte and McCormick freshman Jon Drake created NUlist.org, a Craigslist-like online marketplace with a “special emphasis on books,” Pulte said.

Strictly an online marketplace at this point, when asked if they had considered adding a classified, Missed Connection-like section to NUList.org, Pulte said: “We’ve had some people list dating…We’re always thinking of new ways to improve the website, to keep competitive.”

To be clear, while I read Chicago’s Missed Connections every day, I’m never consciously looking for my Missed Connection. Missed Connections allow me to people watch without having people around me — like people-watching practice. The hope inherent in these messages is palpable, but not personal.

There have been three occasions when I’ve spotted a post where I knew the recipient. For example, I worked in Northwestern Library’s Multimedia Center full time this summer. On one after-lunch break my heart jumped as I saw a post meant for a fellow library employee.

This posting was like a message from a Craig himself. I took this as a directive to put my passive observation into action. I passed by this foxy Interlibrary Loan Guy every day on my way to the Multimedia Center. I saw him flipping through books, photocopying, and talking to patrons. Little did you know, Mr. Anonymous ILL man, that some grad student has got the hots for you, that is until Missed Connections Fate and Laura Mayer stepped in. I showed my supervisor the note and she said she’d pass it along.

I like to think that by putting the ball rolling in a Missed Connection I’m helping the irrational hand of internet fate work. I’m doing my little part to strengthen this niche community by keeping the Missed Connections alive and perhaps building my own karmic pile of Missed Connections in the process. A girl can dream!

I thought I received a missed connection once. I was too embarrassed after all of the screenshots I’ve taken to catalogue the Missed Connection that might have been for me. Chronicling my own possible place in the MC community seemed somehow too self-indulgent. I just as well assumed that chicks like me are a dime a dozen, or that my roommate had something to do with it.