Craigslist is shutting down its personals section.

The service announced on Friday it will no longer operate the portion of its website that allows individuals to seek encounters with strangers.

Full story here.

Wow. Just wow. Right as we started to appreciate the depth, mystery, darkness, tragedy, inspiration, and all around romance of the Craigslist missed connections section, it disappears. This is classic blog curse. First i make fun of posting a missed connection because this girl stands in front of a missed connection billboard on Valentine’s day like a fucking idiot. Naturally, the next step in the equation is that I experience a missed connection myself, and have to stoop so low as to depend on the thing I spent 500 words and 10 minutes of a podcast shaming.

In the humiliation of being a hypocrite, I discovered an unknown beauty that lurked deep within the dilapidated alleys of Craigslist missed connections. Sure people typed out super creepy descriptions of people they jerked off to on the train, but there were also people checking to to see if anyone had heard from an acquaintance who’d moved to the city from somewhere far away, others sent notes to former lovers who still occupied a space in their hearts, never reaching anyone but spinning out in the void, existing in the universe. Classic blog curse, making me love what I had before found hideous, and then destroying it.

If the internet had decided to annihilate the craigslist personals section a month ago, I wouldn’t have fucking cared. Sure maybe I would have whipped up a blog that lamented an experience I never had, but it wouldn’t have had any heart in it; it wouldn’t have had any loss. But now I’ve come to love this thing, this cacophony of sorrow, unrequited love, community, and ultimately, hope; and now it’s gone.

It’s fucking gone; ashes to dust and all that shit. Take your missed chances elsewhere, world. No more m4w, no more m4m, no more t4t, no more of the mythical w4m, no more anything. I did this to us. I got close to something and I killed it. The blog curse is real.  I was a craigslist skeptic guy. Then I was a craigslist guy. Now I’m just a guy. Everything I touch dies.