Not to say that my twenties have been a bastion of maturity. A few years after Jeff and the zombies, I found myself stuck between a few different men. One in particular seemed to be using my feelings for him as a petri dish for experiments in cruelty, and, tired of being played, I decided I needed to feel like a player.

So I asked Craigslist if anyone wanted to come over to my house and drink a bottle of wine with me. Not just any wine, though: Klingon Blood Wine, a souvenir picked up from the Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas.

That ad didn't get as many responses as I would have liked. (My friends figured that really nerdy guys had been too intimidated to respond.) But I did meet Michael, a sweet giant of a guy who sent a witty reply and equally witty follow-ups. After a first date in a public place, I invited him to my place for a night of Star Trek movies and the afore-promised wine. The wine, we finished. The movies, we didn't — thanks to my booze-fueled pounce upon him. It was one of the few moments in my life when I've felt completely confident in myself and my sexuality.

What's always been a defining factor of my Craigslist use is this — I never respond to more than one or two replies, picking out the respondees who trigger just the right feeling. This kind of makes me an asshole, I suspect, someone who added to the heaps of rejection men experience across all dating sites. But it's also given me a certain confidence in my own judgement, confidence I'll admit that I was lacking before I first turned to the site.

And it made a romantic of me, oddly enough, a believer in fate as well as my own judgment, this ability to read some text and get a good sense of the person who wrote it. That sort of certainty gave me the confidence needed to approach Charles, when I first saw him across the room at a friend's birthday party.

It had never happened to me before in person, that kind of instantaneous recognition. But Craigslist had given me a taste of what it was supposed to feel like, the knowledge that I'd found what I was looking for in someone else. And that's what let me trust it that day, let me flirt heavily, meet his eyes, strongly hint at how much I liked it when nice young men invited me out for a drink and a chat.

I was still sleeping with Michael then, as casually as when we first began four months earlier. I liked him enough, but his also being a writer meant that our dates frequently devolved into shop talk, and the sex was never that exciting. He'd become someone I would call on Friday nights when I didn't have plans, a back-up option for my social life (with perhaps an orgasm at the end of the night). I told him it was over the day after I'd slept with Charles for the first time, and just like with Jeff, it was a clean break, almost emotionless.

Over a year and a half later, Charles and I are still together. It's love, and I know that because I know what a relationship without it feels like.

In my single days, Craigslist represented possibility. With the control and freedom made possible by the bulletin board, I was able to reach out to what felt like the entire world, asking just one person out there to like me. It never worked out with any of my Craigslist men, in the end — too many neuroses and not enough chemistry eventually cured me of my addiction. But for teaching me about the opposite sex, about how to woo and be wooed, about the value of having confidence in myself, I owe them all a huge debt.

Even the ones who sent pictures of their dicks. Even them.

Photography by Lisa Stefaniak.