Craigslist Casual Encounters: What It Was and Where Everyone Went

If you were a single guy in an American city between about 2004 and 2017, you knew what CL CE meant, even if you never once said it out loud. Craigslist casual encounters was the busiest, messiest and most talked-about corner of the old personals section. I spent more late nights on it than I'd like to admit. This is what it was really like, how it went bad years before it was shut down, and what people use now that it's gone.

Two Words in a Column of Blue Links

On any city's Craigslist page, the personals column was a short stack of links. Strictly platonic. Women seek women. Women seek men. Men seek women. Men seek men. Misc romance. Casual encounters. Missed connections. Rants and raves.

Casual encounters sat right there in the middle, same font, same blue, same size as everything else. That was part of the charm. It didn't look like anything. You could have it open on a work computer and a passerby would think you were shopping for a used futon.

Inside, though, it was a different animal from the regular women seek men section. W4m was where women posted for dates, for relationships, for someone to go dancing with, sometimes for something more but usually framed gently. Casual encounters dropped the framing. People posted there when they wanted sex without a relationship and they said so right in the title. The category codes were the same ones from the rest of personals, w4m, m4w, mw4m, w4w and a dozen others, but the tone was blunter and the posts were shorter. If you've ever wondered what all those letter combinations meant, there's a full breakdown of personals abbreviations that'll catch you up.

Craigslist w4m casual encounters posts, the ones from women seeking men, were the reason most guys clicked in. They were also the rarest thing on the page, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the whole section worked.

How to Read a Classic CE Post

CE had its own shorthand, and if you came in cold it read like a ransom note. Here's a made-up post, but one that's a fair composite of a hundred I read, with how a regular would have read it.

"Tired of games - w4m - 38 (Westside). Divorced, kids with their dad this weekend. Looking for NSA fun with someone normal. Can host. Be D&D free, under 50, and able to spell. Real pic gets mine. Put your favorite beer in the subject so I know you read this."

Line by line. NSA meant no strings attached, so not a date, not a relationship, and please don't text her good morning for six weeks. Can host meant she had a place, which also told you she was probably serious, because fakes and ad posts rarely claimed to host. D&D free was drug and disease free, which was the closest CE ever got to a health conversation. Real pic gets mine meant send a face photo first, she'd decide after. The beer in the subject line was the most important part of the whole post. It was a filter. She knew most replies would be guys who never read past the title, so she hid a password in the text.

A good reply to that post looked something like this: subject line "Yuengling," then four sentences. Age, height, rough part of town, one line saying you're also not looking for anything serious, and a recent photo of your face. A bad reply ignored the beer, said "hey," and attached a picture of something that wasn't a face. I'd guess she got fifty of the second kind for every one of the first. If you ever want to write your own post in that style somewhere that allows it, I've got notes on how to write a personal ad that actually gets read.

A Weeknight on CE, Around 2008

Let me paint the picture, because I don't think people who came along later really get it.

It's a Tuesday. Maybe 10:45pm. I was living outside Philadelphia then, so I'd have the Philly page open and the casual encounters list sorted the only way it could be sorted, newest first. The page shows a hundred titles at a time. The vast majority are m4w. "m4w - 35 - Anyone up? (Delco)." "m4w - 28 - Hotel tonight, discreet. (Center City)." "m4w - 42 - Married but looking (KoP)." Row after row of guys saying more or less the same thing.

Then every once in a while, a w4m. "Can't sleep, need a distraction - w4m - 31 (Fishtown)." I'd open it. A couple of lines. Something like: "Bored and restless. Looking for a guy who can hold a conversation first. Be under 45, be clean, tell me what you look like. No pic no reply." That was it. No photo of her. The reply button gave me a relay address, a long string of gibberish at a craigslist.org domain, and I'd write something and hit send.

Then refresh. Refresh again. Check email. Refresh.

That was the experience for most men, most nights. A lot of reading, a lot of replying, and mostly nothing back. When something did come back, though, it could move fast. I met a woman from that exact kind of post on a Thursday night in 2008. We emailed back and forth maybe six times, traded photos, met at a diner off the turnpike, and ended up seeing each other on and off for most of a year. She was a nurse who worked weird hours and had no interest in dating apps (which barely existed then anyway). Casual encounters fit her life. That's the version of CE people are nostalgic for, and it was real. It just wasn't typical.

The Ratio Problem

Every city I ever browsed had way more men than women on casual encounters. I can't give you an exact number and I'm suspicious of anybody who claims they can. I can tell you that on a typical night, the w4m posts were a thin slice of the list and the m4w posts were most of it.

That imbalance shaped everything. A real woman who posted a w4m ad might get dozens of replies in the first hour, many of them a single line, a lot of them with photos she never asked for. Women I talked to later described it as opening a fire hose. Most of them posted once or twice, picked someone, and then got off the site because the inbox was exhausting.

For guys, it meant your reply had to stand out from a pile of terrible ones, which honestly wasn't that hard if you tried at all. More on that below.

It also meant something worse. When there are that many men competing for that few real posts, you've built the perfect environment for fakes.

How It Went Bad

I'd put the turning point at 2010, and I'm fairly confident about that.

Craigslist used to have a section called erotic services, separate from personals. After pressure from state attorneys general it got renamed adult services in 2009, and then in September 2010 Craigslist shut it down in the US. For a while a black bar reading "censored" sat where the link used to be. I wrote more about that whole episode in the history of what happened to Craigslist personals, but the part that matters here is where the displaced posts went. A lot of them came straight into casual encounters.

The company didn't go quietly, for what it's worth. That August, CEO Jim Buckmaster had written publicly that the site "aggressively combats violent crime and human rights violations, including human trafficking and the exploitation of minors," and PBS NewsHour pointed out that the section Craigslist shut down was a profitable one, which was unusual for a site that gave most things away. Closing it cost them money. It didn't make the people posting there disappear. It just pushed them into the free sections next door, and CE was the obvious next door.

There's a research footnote to this that I find hard to shake. Economists Scott Cunningham, Gregory DeAngelo and John Tripp studied the erotic services section as it opened city by city, and their working paper, which Econlib wrote up in January 2018 under the headline that Craigslist reduced the female homicide rate by over one sixth, argued the section made sex work safer by letting women screen clients and work indoors. The published version later put the drop in female homicides at somewhere between 12 and 18 percent. That paper was making the rounds about two months before the Senate voted 97 to 2 for FOSTA. I'm not saying a single study should decide national law. I'm saying it was there, and from what I can tell almost nobody in that debate wanted to talk about it.

You could feel it within months. Posts with odd phrasing about "generous" guys. Posts with "roses" in them that had nothing to do with flowers. Posts that were obviously ads, written in personals clothing. And alongside that, the bots got smarter. By 2012 or so you'd reply to a w4m post and get an answer within thirty seconds that read like: "hey sexy, i'm interested but i need to make sure you're not a creep, just verify on this site real quick, it's free." It was never free. Those "verify" links went to paid adult sites that would happily take your card number and give you nothing. I fell for a version of that exactly once, in 2011, and cancelled the charge with my bank the next morning feeling like an idiot.

Then there were the copy-paste posts. The same text, word for word, in Atlanta and Tampa and Phoenix on the same night, with only the neighborhood swapped. The same photos, too, if they had any. Once you started noticing it you couldn't stop.

The flag button was the community's only tool. Readers could flag posts as prohibited or spam and enough flags removed them. Some regulars took it seriously and flagged junk all night. Others flagged real posts they didn't like. And sometimes legitimate posts just never appeared publicly at all, the ghost post problem, where you could see your ad but nobody else could. Between the bots, the ads, the scams and the flag wars, by about 2014 the real w4m posts on CE in a big city were a small minority of what you saw. Most regulars I knew had given up or only checked out of habit.

I kept checking. Habit's a strong thing.

What Actually Worked When I Answered Posts

I answered, conservatively, a few hundred casual encounters posts over the years, and the replies that got answered had a lot in common. This still applies anywhere you're reaching out to a woman who posted first.

Respond to what she actually wrote. If her post said she was tired after a double shift and wanted someone low-key, say something about that. Women told me over and over that most replies were clearly sent without reading past the title. Just proving you read it put you in the top tenth.

Answer her questions. If she asked for age, height and a face picture, give her age, height and a face picture. Not a body shot. Not "ask me." Not a novel. When a post said "no pic no reply" and a guy didn't include a pic, that was the end of it, and she was right to move on.

Be brief. My best replies were four or five sentences. Something like: "Hi, read your post. I'm 36, about 5'11, live near the park on the east side, and I'm about as low-key as it gets. Pic attached, it's from last month. Happy to grab a drink first if that's easier." That's it. No pickup lines. No list of everything I wanted to do.

Don't push. If she didn't answer, she didn't answer. The guys who sent three follow-ups were the reason she'd never post again.

I've written a whole thing on this in how to message women online, and there's more tactical stuff specifically for the casual side in the casual encounters guide for men.

Safety Was Mostly Luck

I want to be honest about this because nostalgia smooths it over.

There was no verification on Craigslist casual encounters. None. You had a relay email, maybe a photo that could have been anyone, and whatever instincts you'd developed. Most meetups were fine. Some were awkward. Some were people who looked nothing like their pictures. And now and then there was a story in the local news about a meetup arranged through Craigslist that ended in a robbery or worse. Those stories weren't common, but they weren't invented either, and they're a big reason I won't romanticize the old way too much.

The basics I learned the hard way: first meeting somewhere public, tell a friend where you're going, drive yourself, and leave if anything feels off. They sound boring until the one night they matter. There's a full rundown in staying safe meeting women online.

March 2018

By the time FOSTA-SESTA came along, casual encounters had been limping for years. The Senate passed the bill on March 21, 2018, and on March 22 Craigslist pulled its entire US personals section, CE included. Their notice said any tool or service can be misused and they couldn't take the risk without jeopardizing their other services. They said they hoped to bring it back some day.

They didn't. More than eight years later, there's no casual encounters on Craigslist in the US.

People sometimes ask me whether the courts ever weighed in. They did. A group led by the Woodhull Freedom Foundation challenged FOSTA in 2018, and the EFF, which represented the plaintiffs, lost the final round at the D.C. Circuit in July 2023. The court kept the law but read it narrowly, closer to aiding and abetting a specific person's prostitution than to hosting a board where adults arrange hookups. If that reading had existed in 2018, maybe somebody at Craigslist would have argued to keep CE. It came five years late, and by then nobody was waiting.

I've heard people say Craigslist killed CE because of the bots, or because of bad press. I don't think that's right. They tolerated the bots for years. It was the law that changed the math. Before FOSTA they were mostly shielded from what users posted. After, they weren't, and casual encounters was the single riskiest category on the site. Of everything they pulled that night, CE was the one nobody at the company was going to fight to keep.

What Replaced Casual Encounters

Short answer: nothing replaced it cleanly. The crowd scattered.

The most direct casual encounters Craigslist replacement, at least in look, was Doublelist, which showed up around 2018 with the same kind of layout and categories. A lot of former CE regulars tried it in the first year. Experience varies wildly by city, and the same fake post patterns that plagued late Craigslist came right along with the format. I'm not going to make specific claims about its current setup because I haven't used it seriously in a while, but the general rule holds: open, anonymous boards attract bots.

Reddit's r4r boards were another landing spot. Reddit banned some adult communities the same week Craigslist closed personals but left r4r up, and city and state r4r subs still have casual posts. It feels more like old CE than any app does, honestly. It also skews young and male. My notes are in the guide to r4r personals.

Then there are hookup apps of various kinds. Some are fine. Some are mostly fake profiles and credit systems built to keep you paying to message women who don't exist. I wrote about how to tell the difference in the local sex app guide. Short version: if a profile is pushing you toward a link or a payment before you've exchanged three real sentences, it isn't a woman.

And a lot of people just went back to the old analog methods, bars, friends of friends, people from work they probably shouldn't have. Not the worst outcome.

Whatever you try, the same fake post tells from CE still apply, and this guide to spotting fake personals profiles lays them out better than I can in a paragraph.

If what you're really asking is "is there a new craigslist personals," I covered that separately in the piece on the new Craigslist personals and its imitators.

Sizing Up a Casual Encounters Replacement

When a buddy asks me where to go now, I don't give him a site name first. I give him four questions, because the answers tell you more than any review.

Who posts first? On old CE, the w4m posts were the whole value. A place where women write what they want and men answer is a w4m casual encounters replacement. A place where men swipe on a grid of photos is a different thing, even if it's useful.

How do you know she's real? On CE the answer was "you don't." Look for a concrete answer here. A checkmark you can't explain doesn't count. An ID check or a live video check does.

What does a message cost? Free to browse and pay to reply is common. That's fine if the women are real, and painful if they aren't.

How local is local? CE gave you a neighborhood in parentheses. A state and city at minimum is what I'd want.

Here's how that played out for me once. Same Friday night, two options open on my laptop. On the open board, 30 new w4m posts in my area in two hours, and when I checked, 11 of them shared photos with posts in other states. On a verified site, 4 listings in my city, all of them women who'd gone through a check to be there. Thirty sounds better than four until you do the math on which ones are people. I'd take the four.

Where I Ended Up

Fair warning, I'm one of the people behind W4M Maps, so I've got a horse in this race.

The thing that made craigslist w4m casual encounters good in its early years was simple. A real woman, nearby, saying plainly what she wanted, and men answering. The thing that ruined it was that you could never be sure she was real. We kept the first part and tried to fix the second. Every woman who lists on the site is verified with an ID check and a live video call before her listing goes up. Men browse by state and then city, the same way you used to pick your Craigslist city.

It is not a free-for-all board, and it won't feel like 2008 CE with a hundred new posts an hour. I'm fine with that. I spent enough of 2013 replying to bots.

If you're in the Southeast, start with women seeking men in Georgia or the Florida listings. If you're a Philly-area guy like I was, Pennsylvania is the obvious place.

Casual Encounters Questions, Answered Fast

Does Craigslist still have casual encounters? Not in the US. The category went offline on March 22, 2018 with the rest of personals and never returned. Only missed connections came back, under the community section.

What did CL CE stand for? Craigslist casual encounters, the personals category for no-strings sex and hookups, as opposed to the w4m and m4w dating categories.

Why did casual encounters get so many fake posts after 2010? When Craigslist closed its adult services section in September 2010, a lot of that activity moved into the free personals categories, and spammers followed the traffic. CE was the easiest target.

Is it illegal to post a casual encounters style ad now? FOSTA was written to go after websites that promote or facilitate prostitution and trafficking, not consenting adults looking for each other, and the 2023 appeals ruling read it even more narrowly. What changed was what websites were willing to host.

What's the best w4m casual encounters replacement? I'm biased, but I'd look for anything where women post what they want and are verified before you see them. Run the four questions above on whatever you find.

If You're Coming Back After a Long Time Away

I talk to a lot of men who used CE in their twenties or thirties, got married or got busy, and are now back in the mix at 45 or 50 wondering where everything went. A few things I'd tell you over a beer.

The thing you remember is gone, and chasing a perfect copy of it will mostly lead you to scam sites wearing its clothes.

Casual still exists. Women still want no-strings arrangements, short flings, an ongoing thing with someone they like and don't want to date. That part of human nature didn't get shut down by an act of Congress. It just moved. If you're after something recurring rather than a single night, the friends with benefits guide is probably more useful to you than anything about one-offs, though there's also a one night stand guide if that's genuinely what you're after.

Be the reply you'd want to get. Read the post, answer the questions, include a real picture of your face, keep it short, and don't push. That worked in 2006 and it works now.

And if you're over 40 and feel like everything about this changed while you weren't looking, you're not wrong, but it's less intimidating than it looks. I wrote casual dating for men over 40 mostly for the version of me who came back in 2018 and had no idea what to do.

Casual encounters was a weird little corner of the internet, and I mean that mostly with affection. I'm glad I was there for the good years. I'm not sure I'd want it back exactly as it was. What I wanted from it, real people being honest about what they're looking for, is still out there if you browse women seeking men near you somewhere that checks who's real.