Part of Notes from the Road, our city-by-city series.
The short answer: Craigslist took its Personals section offline in 2018, and no single site replaced it. In Washington, DC, Baltimore, and Delaware, personal ads now live mostly on Reddit boards for Baltimore and DC together, the whole DMV, and Delaware, and also on classified sites such as Doublelist and in text-first apps including AseeksB. Craigslist still runs missed connections, and DC’s are real and recent. We checked the boards and the missed connections on October 14, 2026.
Washington’s missed connections have been about getting around town for a long time. In 1889, the Evening Star carried notices to a woman seen waiting for a herdic, a horse-drawn omnibus, at 18th and G, and to another on the Navy Yard streetcar; in 2013, the place named most in DC’s Craigslist missed connections was a Metro stop. Craigslist’s DC board still works: when we checked on October 14, 2026, every post on it was a real missed connection, all from the past two weeks. In Baltimore, they run in the newspaper too: since September 2025, the Baltimore Banner has published readers’ missed connections in a series called Charmed.
The two cities, about 40 miles apart by road, share their busiest Reddit board, r/BaltimoreAndDCr4r, and the DC boards take in suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia too. On Doublelist, Baltimore leads: “doublelist baltimore” gets about 4,400 Google searches a month, more than “doublelist dc” (about 2,900) or “doublelist washington dc” (about 1,300), and “doublelist delaware” gets about 3,600 (Google Keyword Planner, October 2026). So this page goes place by place.
Here is how each option works, from our checks in October 2026:
We checked the Reddit boards and Craigslist’s missed connections on October 14, 2026. We no longer count escort ads on the classified sites: the pattern has been consistent in the cities we’ve checked, and our Boston and New England page has the most recent counts. AseeksB ads can’t be read without an account. How we check.
AseeksB publishes this page and is included in it. For how each site handles the eight traits that defined Craigslist Personals, see our full comparison.
Coming from Reddit or a classified site? On AseeksB you still write an ad in your own words, but you choose who can see it, by gender and age; someone can send one message per post until you reply; and no photo or real name is needed. Posting, browsing, and replying are free. How AseeksB works.
“doublelist baltimore” gets about 4,400 searches a month, down 33% on last year, and “doublelist delaware” about 3,600, level with last year. “doublelist dc” gets about 2,900, down 47%, while “doublelist washington dc,” at about 1,300, more than doubled. Elsewhere, Frederick gets about 590; “doublelist maryland” 390, up 177%; Ocean City 320, up 85% and busiest in June and July; Alexandria, Virginia, 260, up 52%; Wilmington 210; and Annapolis 90. In DC, Maryland, and Delaware, “doublelist newark de” gets about 480, up 191% (Google Keyword Planner, October 2026). Anyone can see Doublelist’s ad titles, but reading a full ad needs an account. Posting is free for up to 3 posts, and seeing members’ photos takes a paid plan; its help center lists two, Hookup and Hardcore, at $45 and $90 a year. Its pages open with a paid pop-up and carry sponsored links to outside sites; on October 11, 2026, one of them, “Hookup Finder,” led to a page that Chrome blocked as dangerous.
We no longer count its ads place by place, because the pattern has been consistent: in most of the cities we’ve checked, escort ads were among its 20 newest ads. Our Boston and New England page has the most recent counts, from October 12, 2026.
If you’re coming from Doublelist, AseeksB works differently: you choose who can see your post, by gender and age; someone can send one message per post until you reply; admins actively monitor posts; and posting, browsing, and replying are free. For more options, see sites like Doublelist.
Baltimore and DC share their busiest board, and most DC boards cover the whole DMV: DC, suburban Maryland, and Northern Virginia. The numbers below are Reddit’s own, from October 14, 2026.
r/BaltimoreAndDCr4r is the busiest r4r board in the area, with about 68,300 members, 10,000 weekly visitors, and 1,200 weekly contributions, the most contributions of any board on this page. “dc r4r” gets about 260 Google searches a month. Beyond it, we found no separate board for Baltimore or the rest of Maryland, so people there post here or on the DMV boards below, with their town in the title.
r/DMVSwingers, created in 2020, gets the most weekly visitors of the DMV boards, about 12,000, with about 41,900 members and 465 weekly contributions. Couples and single women start the posts; single men can reply only to posts that ask for single men, and a second offense gets a permanent ban; and it keeps a minimum karma for posting that it doesn’t disclose, to keep out spam accounts. For how swinger boards and sites work, see our guide to swinger apps.
r/dmv_fwb, created in January 2026, already has about 9,500 members, 4,400 weekly visitors, and 541 weekly contributions. It welcomes “swingers, singles, hotwives, hothusbands, exhibitionists, kinksters,” asks you to say what you’re looking for, and bans OnlyFans promotion, down to a Telegram username on your profile. r/dmvcasualencounters, created in July 2024 by someone “tired of all of the spam,” has about 7,600 members, 3,700 weekly visitors, and 239 weekly contributions; titles follow “Age [r4r] #Location- Title,” like “40s [M4f] #DC #DMV- LF a Woman,” and posting takes 10 karma and an account at least a month old. The DMV’s biggest adult board by members, created in 2020, has about 69,100 members but only 182 weekly contributions: you can post once a day, you must be from the DC, Maryland, or Virginia area, and you can’t post a Snapchat code, which it calls “the perfect way to get scammed.”
In Northern Virginia, r/NoVAHookups, created in 2020, has about 36,200 members, 5,200 weekly visitors, and 328 weekly contributions. Posts from accounts with less than 100 combined karma, or that haven’t been active for 30 days, are deleted automatically, and anyone who asks for money before meeting isn’t allowed to post. “doublelist alexandria va” is up 52% on last year.
r/DelawareR4R, created in 2017, covers Delaware, Maryland, Philadelphia, and South Jersey, with about 20,400 members, 2,500 weekly visitors, and 177 weekly contributions. It is for “activity partners, groups, dating, hanging out, soulmates, FWBs,” and says it is “not an explicit subreddit.” Posts need at least 50 words, and titles start with your exact age and a tag, like “36 [F4M] Delaware. Just feel like talking.” You can post once every 24 hours; you can’t share contact details, or even name a messaging app; and “sugar” arrangements and any exchange of money, goods, or services are banned. “doublelist delaware” gets about 3,600 searches a month and “doublelist wilmington de” about 210. For Philadelphia and South Jersey, see our Pennsylvania and New Jersey pages.
Craigslist still runs missed connections here, under Community. On October 14, 2026, every post on DC’s board was a real missed connection, all from the past two weeks. In the three months to October 14, Baltimore’s had 20 posts, 6 of them really ads; Annapolis had 9, 2 of them ads; Delaware 7, 1 an ad; and the Eastern Shore 7, 3 of them ads. Frederick had 2, both real, from three months back. “washington dc missed connections” gets about 590 searches a month and “baltimore missed connections” about 210 (Google Keyword Planner, October 2026). That is a snapshot from one day, not a measure of the whole site.
DC has been noticing people on the Metro for a while: in 2013, Washingtonian reported a Psychology Today map of the places named most in each state’s Craigslist missed connections, and DC’s was a Metro stop, Virginia’s the gym, and Maryland’s a park.
In Baltimore, missed connections also run in the newspaper. In September 2025, the Baltimore Banner started Charmed, a series of missed connections that readers send in on Instagram or through a form: a flirt on the water taxi from Canton to Locust Point, chemistry at the aquarium, a dance at the Royal Blue. Each one carries a first name or initial and an age, and if you think one is about you, you reply through the paper’s form, and it passes your message and contact details to the person who posted. For Valentine’s Day 2026, it collected handwritten ones at Dyke Nite, a queer party at the Ottobar, on a board that was full by the end of the night.
AseeksB has a missed connections category too: say where and when, and only the audience you choose can see the post. For how to write one that the right person will recognize, see our guide to missed connections.
Beyond the apps. “baltimore speed dating” gets about 390 searches a month, against about 40 for “baltimore personals.” CitySwoon runs speed dating by age range in DC, in Shaw, Logan Circle, Navy Yard, and the Wharf, with six to eight short dates, each partner picked for you during the event; Little Gay Book runs speed dating in DC for lesbian, bi, trans, and queer singles, starting with a mingle; and in Maryland, Pre-Dating runs speed dating by age range in Baltimore and Gaithersburg, with five-minute rounds, and a Fells Point taphouse has board-game speed dating for singles in their 20s and 30s. For more ways to meet people, with or without an app, see our guide to alternatives to dating apps.
Washington’s missed connections are much older than Craigslist, and in 1889 they were about transit too. The Evening Star ran them in its column headed PERSONAL, and on October 5, it carried this one:
“THE PARTY WHO SAW LADY THIS SATURday morning at 7:30 at 18th and G waiting for herdic, and again saw her transfer at Lafayette park, would like to form acquaintance. ALFRED, Star office.”
Evening Star, October 5, 1889. Read the adA herdic was a horse-drawn omnibus, and the Herdic Phaeton Company’s first Washington line, from 1879, ran along G Street. That April, a man signing NAVY had written to the young lady with a bouquet of pink roses who got off the Navy Yard car at 8th and G Streets Southeast at 6 p.m.; in September, CONFIDENCE wrote to a young lady who changed for Georgetown from the 14th Street car. In 1866, ten months after the Civil War, Anderson asked Sarah Hall, formerly of Richmond, to drop him a line if she was in the city.
The same column carried proposals. Just above ALFRED’s notice, J. B. N. wrote that his was “only for the humbler classes”: he wanted a lady between thirty-five and forty with “a small farm of land or place of her own,” and had “an income of $400 a year for life and money in bank.” In January 1887, PALMER wanted an honorable Christian young lady, 20 to 25, “in height not over five feet,” and added, “No trifling.” In February 1890, a bachelor wanted to meet an agreeable widow, and a middle-aged professional gentleman a lady of some means; that day, the two shared the column with an offer of suburban property on the Metropolitan Branch, civil service exam questions and answers for 10 cents, a clothing dealer buying second-hand clothes, and two private detective agencies, one of them listing “shadowing a specialty.” Later, the Star’s readers advertised for a shorthand study partner, in 1932, and for anyone who plays Skat, in 1944.
Other Washington papers carried them too. In 1872, the New National Era, the weekly Frederick Douglass had taken over in 1870, ran a lady’s request for a gentleman of “cents and refinement.” The National Tribune, a weekly for Union veterans, had a column headed “Want to Get Married.” On November 9, 1893, it carried two soldiers’ widows from Aurora, Illinois, 33 and 41, who wanted to correspond with “comrades of good standing and some means,” a Missouri man looking for “some comrade veteran’s widow or daughter,” and William P. Bane of Nineveh, Pennsylvania, who was “seven feet tall” and wanted a young lady at least six feet six inches. The Library of Congress has asked whether Bane was the tallest soldier of the Civil War; it found no evidence that he ever married.
In Baltimore, the Sun had a PERSONAL column of its own. On April 20, 1865, five days after Lincoln died, WILL DE WITT wished its readers “GOOD MORNING, LADIES” and offered “an agreeable correspondence, with a view to matrimony,” with cartes de visite, small photographs on cards, exchanged “to make it the more interesting.” Just above it, a cousin asked for news of Thomas Byrne and his sister, from County Mayo, Ireland.
The Washington Blade, DC’s LGBTQ paper since 1969, ran personals from the early 1970s: text only, full of abbreviations like “GWM, 34,” with separate sections for encounters and for relationships. At their peak, in the late 1990s, men’s ads filled a full page and women’s half of one. A missed connections section, Glances, carried notes like one from 1993 for someone seen at the Smithsonian’s Baird Auditorium. Then, the Blade’s classifieds manager told the paper in 2019, Craigslist and phone services “took us out of the pie.” More in our history of personal ads and The Personals Archive.
The DMV spans DC, Maryland, and Virginia, and several boards here ask for your location in the title, because one board covers all of it. Every AseeksB post shows how far away it was posted, and anyone can search by distance.
One honest difference: AseeksB ads can only be read inside the app after signing up, unlike Craigslist’s missed connections and most of the classified sites above. That is the trade for choosing exactly who sees each post.
Every post makes AseeksB busier for the next person in DC, Baltimore, and Delaware. Post what you’re looking for, and if there’s a feature you’d want, tell us through the app, from the profile tab; we’d love to hear it.
Text-first personal ads for DC, Baltimore, and Delaware, from the DMV to the beaches, in your own words, with distance and other controls in Supporter.
Craigslist took its Personals section offline in the US on March 22, 2018, after Congress passed FOSTA, including in DC, Maryland, and Delaware. People there now post on Reddit boards for Baltimore and DC together, for the whole DMV, for Northern Virginia, and for Delaware, on classified-style sites such as Doublelist, in Locanto’s personals section, and in text-first apps such as AseeksB. The options differ mainly in who can read your ad and how replies reach you.
Yes. r/BaltimoreAndDCr4r covers both cities and is the busiest r4r board in the area, with about 10,000 weekly visitors in October 2026. For the wider DMV, there are boards for casual encounters, friends with benefits, and swingers, and r/NoVAHookups covers Northern Virginia.
No. Craigslist took Personals offline across the US on March 22, 2018. It still runs missed connections, under Community: on October 14, 2026, every post on DC’s board was a real missed connection from the past two weeks, and Baltimore’s had 20 posts in three months, 6 of them really ads.
Craigslist’s Baltimore board had 20 posts in the three months to October 14, 2026, 6 of them really ads. Since September 2025, the Baltimore Banner has also run Charmed, a series of missed connections sent in by readers, and AseeksB has a missed connections category too.
Yes. AseeksB is a free personal ads app for iOS and Android. Every post shows how far away it was posted, anyone can search by distance, and Supporters can also set a maximum distance on their own posts. A free account keeps one active post, and someone can send one message per post until you reply.