Lonely Hearts in the London Review of Books
by Stuart Clark
There’s something quite compelling about the lonely hearts section in newspapers and magazines. It’s like people watching in miniature. The ads are like windows into other people’s lives. And I must confess I’m quite nosy, so for me they make compulsive reading.
It’s mainly because I think they must be really hard to write. For a start, there’s the stigma. Letting the world know you’re (oh God) single and looking for love seems like an admission of failure – as if you’re saying “yes, it really has got this bad.”
Plus, it’s a pretty tough copy brief when you think about it: sum yourself up in 30 words, in a way that makes you irresistible to your target audience. I mean, where do you start?
Well just like writing a commercial ad for a real product, it’s no use resorting to tired old clichés or standard lonely hearts acronyms. For one thing you’ll just sound like everyone else that’s advertising themselves. But for another no one will believe you anyway.
