It pays to advertise

Some personal ads are pretty funny, intentionally or otherwise. The last time I saw Laurence Clark's comedy show, he got some of his best laughs out of those people who choose to advertise in Disability Now. Meanwhile, the one of the most popular gifts last Christmas was a book called They Call Me Naughty Lola, an anthology of the weird and wonderful lonely hearts ads from the London Review of Books.

Of course, the days are gone when only sad and desperate people resorted to adverts to find a partner. Now everyone's doing it, and it's a pretty good strategy too. Rather than hang around bars or hope to meet someone through work or mutual friends, you can target other single people, check them out, and hopefully maximise your chance of finding love. But wording a good, succinct advertisement is rather an art form. Any day now, someone will start offering evening classes in it.

I speak from experience here, because I have both answered and authored lonely hearts. I was rather disappointed that my own advertisement from 1997 was not considered witty enough to get into the LRB anthology: "Jimmy Stewart seeks Grace Kelly, good bedside manner essential". (It's a reference to Hitchcock's classic film Rear Window, because I was stuck in bed with a bad back at the time.) A few years earlier, I tried Guardian Soulmates with "Quaker seeks oats" - on the theory that it's best to be short and to the point. I admit that both efforts generated new friends, rather than lasting relationships, so perhaps I was right not to opt for that career in advertising.

If you're going to avoid specialist websites or magazines, disabled advertisers in mainstream publications face a difficult disclosure decision. When do you explain that you are, well, different from the average? I happen to believe that I am pleasant, witty and easy on the eye - a promising potential life-companion, in other words. But there's no getting away from the fact that I'm not like other men. It's not so much my lack of hair as my lack of inches that's the problem. And I'm talking about height here, not the trouser department, before you get any ideas.

Do you mention your disability in the few lines of text available to you, like our honest advertiser with multiple impairments? You might put people off, or even attract others for the wrong reasons. Do you mention it in your first email or letter? Or do you wait until the correspondence has developed before dropping the bombshell? If I told someone before we met, they might decide that they didn't want to pursue the friendship, whereas if they met me, they might realise what a charming fellow I was. Or run away screaming. You see the dilemma.

I could tell people I was short, but they might not quite understand what I meant. After all, I'm not averagely short. I am particularly, unusually, short. Now I don't think that's such a big deal, and nor have the people with whom I've had relationships in the past. After all, folk come in lots of shapes and sizes.

But if you take a look at the lonely hearts pages, you will quickly come to a different conclusion. I don't know if you've checked out any of these adverts recently, but the one quality that every heterosexual female advertiser stipulates is "tall". For some reason, it's the first thing that single women think about when they are imagining their prospective spouse. Not personality, looks, employment status or sense of humour - but stature.

Where does this heightism come from? I think it's one of the great unsolved mysteries of the world. Is it a cultural taboo about a man being shorter than a woman? Is it an association of height with money, fitness and success? Is it something to do with evolution? And above all, how - given this seemingly well known quirk of female psychology - did Woody Allen and Dudley Moore end up having such success with the opposite sex?

Whatever the reason, it does explain why the Radio 4 audience were wrong to laugh at that disabled advertiser. You see, there was one other word he included in his advert, a word that would have trumped his other disadvantages and ensured he got at least some replies. That word, of course, was "tall". However unusual you might be, as long as you can prove that you're not short, you've got a head start in the dating game.

Postscript

I hasten to add that I am now happily married, and in the case of my wife no advertising was involved. The good lady in question is hardly going to complain about my height, because she's even shorter than I am. Now my only problem is: what on earth am I going to get her for Valentine's Day?