Katie Flagg moved to Vermont when she was 18 to attend Middlebury College and fell in love at first sight — with the state. But after she graduated

Dating App Fatigue? In Vermont, Personal Ads Still Thrive.

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2024-11-25 17:30:15

Katie Flagg moved to Vermont when she was 18 to attend Middlebury College and fell in love at first sight — with the state. But after she graduated and moved to a farmhouse in the middle of rural Addison County, she had a sudden pang of doubt: Would she live there alone forever?

It was 2008. Dating sites were still a bit taboo, and she wasn’t sure how else to meet people in a place where they were not many people around.

So she turned to a publication that many Vermonters have long turned to when they were looking for love: Seven Days, an alternative weekly that is one of the last bastions of newspaper personal ads.

For decades, the ads have been reliably quirky, surprisingly effective and, well, very Vermont. Nowadays, Seven Days has a thriving online personals section to go with the print version. In a recent entry, one man in his 70s boasted of his several hundred maple sugar taps.

Ms. Flagg’s online profile in the Seven Days personals section featured a photo of her in sunglasses and a “faux hawk.” It caught the attention of Colin Davis, whose username on the site was “patternlanguage.”