Missed Connections
Pining for the old days of the Internet and voyeurism in the Facebook Mom Group.
When I first moved to New York City in the early aughts, one of my favorite past times was to come home after a long day at work, curl up on my couch with some takeout, and read Missed Connections.
Missed Connections is a Craigslist section where locals can post about someone they saw that day—a guy or gal who caught their eye at the coffee shop, the subway, the grocery store—and Missed Connections was their attempt at, well, connecting. They would read something like this:
Girl With Red Hair Eating a Donut in Times Square
I passed you on 42nd Street today. I was the guy in the plaid button down shirt and handlebar mustache. Brown hair. You were wearing a long knitted scarf and fingerless gloves. We locked eyes briefly, and you were holding a Dunkin’ Donuts bag (or was it Doughnut Plant?). You were about to take a bite of a chocolate sprinkled. Pretty sure I could feel the chemistry between us. Can I take you to the diner sometime? (They have donuts there, too.)
I made all of that up, but that’s the gist. Missed Connections is where all sorts of people digitally gather looking for love. Think of it as the original Tinder. I can still recall one post written by a guy who said he saw a girl across the subway platform and thought to himself, “She’s as cute as kitten paws.” Would I want to date that guy? Probably not. But kitten paws are pretty cute, so I thought that was a nice compliment.
At the time, I was a 20-something transplant living a textbook life as a 20-something transplant in NYC: Southern girl with blonde hair and big dreams moves to the city with hopes of becoming a dancer, but instead works a boring day job to pay the bills while she pines for the creative life for which she knows she is destined. I didn’t scour Missed Connections in hopes of meeting my one true love. I read them because they were the most romantic depiction of everyday New York City life I could think of. And I was a hopeless romantic in love with New York City. I was smitten with every aspect of the place—the sights, the sounds, and yes, even the smells.
This was escapism at its finest. Who needed Sex and The City when you could read real-life proposals of love and lust, right there on the Internet?! The drama! The intrigue! I was a knock-off Carrie Bradshaw, dreaming up tales of chance encounters, wearing mismatching pajamas in my not-Park Avenue apartment, eating my Pad Thai takeout while scrolling through NYC’s most illustrious online meeting place. I loved the idea that, with the click of a button, people could just…meet! fall in love! fall into the sack!
These were earlier, more innocent days of the Internet. Before dating apps ruled hearts and groins. Roughly 2006 or ‘07, pre-Craigslist Killer times, when people could reliably use the platform without fear they’d be hacked into pieces. There was MySpace and Live Journal. The Internet was new and novel, an earnest place where people came to bare their souls without the interruption of 600 advertisements and branded content pieces. (No shade, I write a lot of branded content because a girl’s gotta eat.) It was less performative, more personal. Really personal. Like, awkwardly so. It was the wild west out there.
Maybe I’m just an old millennial, but today, Missed Connections feels sort of creepy. After doing a quick scan, I saw a few tender posts of genuine romantics looking for love in all the wrong places, but it looks like the site is mostly used for hookups and fetishes (which used to be an entirely different category!).
I shouldn’t be surprised, the Internet is a different world today. People can be awful. The delineation between real social circles and cyber ones have blurred. But of all the places I visit on the Internet, there is one that’s more unhinged than the rest. It’s one of the most vicious corners the Internet has ever known: the Facebook Mom Group.
Here is a tidy summation by Taylor Wolfe.
I have never seen anything more accurate in my entire life.
My first foray into the world of Mom Groups came after my daughter was born, when I was tipped off to the Atwater Village mom group. Atwater Village is a cute, well-to-do east Los Angeles neighborhood. Amelia Morris’s novel, Wildcat, about female friendship and one particular incident of the allure, deception, and pitfalls of social media, comes to mind.
This group, another mom friend suggested, will be great for finding local goings-on, getting advice, and meeting other moms. But in reality, it was everything the above video depicts and more. It had crystals! Anti-vaxxers! Judgey Judy’s and Karen’s galore!
My daughter was born at the height of the pandemic, so I thought an online community would be the perfect place to fatten up my new mom-style social life. I intended to engage, to make mom friends, to gain robust knowledge of this whole new world of mom things. But it seemed any well-meaning mom with a sincere question was ripped to shreds the moment her post went live. Like piranhas on small fish, lions on a baby zebra, opinionated and more-experienced moms were quick to pounce on the unassuming.
In the wee hours of nursing my daughter, I’d scroll the horrors: attacks spanned everything from breastfeeding vs. formula, vaccines vs. not, nannies vs. daycare. It was a circus of vitriol and privilege—and I loved it. The drama! The intrigue! I was thrown back to the early days of my Craigslist literature when I may as well have curled up with a bag of popcorn and a Coke.
When we relocated to the Triangle area in North Carolina, I reluctantly joined a few of the Facebook Mom groups. We only had a handful of friends, only one or two of them with children. I needed resources. I needed to know the best public parks. Where people entertained their tiny monsters on the weekends. But most of all, I needed to know what sort of world I was entering.
Facebook Mom Groups will tell me the zeitgeist of the town, the people, the era. Could I make friends here? Who are these moms anyway? Boy, did I find out.
I’ve never really understood the kind of people who pose deeply personal questions in a Mom Facebook Group. Questions that essentially boil down to: Should I leave my husband? Or does my child have autism? My first thought is, “Don’t you have…friends that you could talk to?” Or “Shouldn’t you see…a doctor?” But what’s more interesting than people trying to make major life decisions based on the input of a bunch of strangers is the discourse that happens in the comments.
Just the other week, a mom posted a photo of some gummy blue bits—potentially plastic, potentially a chewed-up fruit roll-up—explaining that she’d picked them out of her son’s vomit after he got home from a birthday party where he drank a Prime drink (yeah, this is the content we’re working with). WELL. Quickly the conversation turned to how vile the Prime drinks are, insinuating that you’re a wretched whore for allowing your child to consume this putrid liquid, made by Satan himself.
“Do not let your children drink those, they are AWFUL,” said one mom.
Then another mom chimes in, “It’s only the energy drinks that are bad, the Hydration ones are just like Gatorade.”
One comment elicited 13 other comments about whether or not Prime is OK to drink, whether it’s actually banned or not in Europe, whether or not you should go to hell for buying them, etc.
At night while I’m nursing my son, I’ll scroll eagerly through the group, looking for the most offensive comments. They’re usually under the post that starts out with something like, “OK, please don’t judge me…” Oooh, I think. This is going to be good.
But for as much as I like to throw shade at these several thousand well-meaning moms, I will say, I have been inspired once or twice. When a mom wrote the group complaining that her husband refused to play with their three kids at the end of the day, told her he didn’t find her attractive anymore, and that she was at her wit’s end, the Mom Group came out swinging.
“Leave him! You don’t deserve this!” they cried from behind their torches.
“This is not a marriage! Get out now!” they typed furiously.
When another work-from-home mom posted that she was desperate to put her two young children (both under two years old) in daycare because she couldn’t get any work done while still trying to care for them, but that her husband really didn’t want to, the Mom Group showed their fangs.
“You tell him to work from home with two kids!” they clacked feverishly on their keys.
“Yeah, give him three hours with the kids and then see how he does,” they smirked.
By the end of the comment section, this woman was heralded a hero for even attempting to work and parent her children at the same time and, hopefully, was well on her way to telling her husband to shove it.
This is why we come to the Internet. It may not be the Missed Connections of yore, but here are women being vulnerable, honest, and yeah, sometimes awful. It may be one of the few places on the Internet in which people are still earnest and, at their best, optimistic. If we’re lucky, we’re just one post away from returning to simpler times, when you could share a photo of your meal with the Lomi-fi filter and call it Internetting.
The Facebook Mom Group is a melting pot of race, class, culture, religion, and politics. The lines between a real social life and cyber one are blurred, where women think they should ask actual advice to this peanut gallery of both puppies and wolves.
Even still, it’s less performative, more personal—and it’s a peek into my future. Because honestly, what do you do when your seven year old is still sleeping in a pull-up? How do you manage the social dynamics of middle school tweens? Where can a mom get a good massage and what do I do if I suspect my husband is cheating? I won’t be asking those questions to the Facebook Mom Group, but it’s nice to know they’re there, on call with a fresh opinion should I ever need it.
Love this!
I'm OLD!! Didn't even know this existed but I can see how it could be helpful and entertaining!