Interludes: Molly, And Others
Sylvia West sees the deep wells of sadness and loneliness hidden in newspaper column personal ads, and suggests a cure for a great deal of unhappiness - hugs.
"If only hugs were mandatory in the world, and everyone was obliged to both give and receive them, can you imagine what a transformation would take place?''
Sometimes the poignancy of it is just too sharp: I’ve browsed through my local rag, the one that comes out every Friday, with inserts on Business and Property Sales, “What’s on”, and “What to do in the Garden”. I’ve checked the obituaries - no, I don’t know anyone there, thank goodness, and I’ve muttered under my breath at the continuing absence of local police at exactly the spot where there are regular break-ins and burglaries. It’s more or less the same every week, give or take the Christmas pantomimes or summer fetes.
But then, I get to the back pages with their ‘Personal Columns’; the lonely ads that are duplicated up and down the land. Not only in the weeklies either, you can find them in the national broadsheets too, though there’s a subtle difference in the way they are phrased.
I’m talking about the cries of desperation, the anonymous achings for someone to care. I don’t mean the usual adjective-saturated sentences: ‘tall, slim, attractive male, solvent, own house, seeks young attractive, sexy female’ etc., etc., etc.
My eyes flick up and down and I am always astounded by the columns of self-deception.
Nobody ever says this: ‘Fat, not very attractive, desperately lonely lady needs a good hug.’
Why not? I would be much more likely to respond to those words, rather than ‘tall, slim, sexy female, likes horse-riding and dining out.’ Wouldn’t you?
This week I saw two adverts that made me want to cry. Here is the first: ‘Molly, very cheerful person, would like to meet gentleman, 70-75. For fun and friendship.’
That was it. Nothing more. Fun and friendship. My heart ached for Molly.
Molly. Nobody calls their daughter Molly these days. I don’t think it’s been in fashion for a long time, rather like Edith and Elsie and Sylvia. If I ever meet another Sylvia I shall be fairly sure she is of my generation. I think it’s the same with Molly, and the fact that she’s looking for a ‘gentleman’ of the Third Age says it all. I bet she’s lovely, this Molly. ‘very cheerful person‘. Who could ask for more? It doesn’t matter if she’s size 16 or 26, and thank goodness she didn’t mention it. I do, do hope she finds her ‘gentleman’ for fun and friendship.
The other advert that caught my eye was just as poignant but in a different way. It was seven columns away from Molly, with endless ‘attractive athletic males’ and ‘slim black single mothers’ in between. It said,‘Unhappily attached male, 59, slim, disabled partner. Urgently seeks passionate lady, any age or nationality, for regular, discreet passion’.
That says it all, doesn’t it? No comment is needed. Such awful loneliness, physical if not mental, as he approaches sixty, and we are not even considering the loneliness of his disabled partner. How desperate he must have been to send out a cri de coeur like that. I wondered if he would have told his partner about the tiny entry in the paper, his cry for help, inaudible among so many. There’s only a link number, and a list of warnings and admonitions in a green box at the top so that you can’t miss it, and you’d have only yourself to blame if you received an unsuitable reply, and then acted upon it.
When I think of the hundreds, no, thousands of people who do send out an S.O.S. in this way, the large proportion of whom wait in vain to be rescued, then the next step is to reflect on the much greater number who don’t.
I recently read a poem written by a man on Death Row in Arizona, an educated, literate man of middle age, fully aware of the punishment being meted out to him, but he was crying out in the secure environment where he was being held, for human touch. Everything was adequate for him as he served out his time: enough food, enough bedding, visits from his pastor. His jailers had provided for all his basic needs, except the most basic of all. Each verse of his poem ended with the same human longing:
“I need a hug, I do so need a hug.”
And finally, “I hope that someone, somewhere, is listening, Because I really do need a hug.”
If only hugs were mandatory in the world, and everyone was obliged to both give and receive them, can you imagine what a transformation would take place? It could make all the difference to Molly, and all the others.
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