A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 28
This is the fifth year in a row I’ve run this series in April.
Today’s story: The matchmaker for the mentally ill.
It’s been 10 years since James Leftwich first created No Longer Lonely, a dating website exclusively for people with mental illnesses. Leftwich spoke with me about the challenges of running the site and about why he believes forming loving relationships should be recommended more frequently than pills.
Why did you create No Longer Lonely?
It was one of those things where I looked for something and it didn’t exist. I thought, this is a really logical thing. This should exist. People with mental illness tend to band together. It’s kind of an unsympathetic world.
How did No Longer Lonely start?
Around 2004 it was underway but it wasn’t as big as it is now. A dating site is something that has a critical mass where it’s not very effective until you get a certain amount of people. I’m still facing that challenge but it’s a big world.
No Longer Lonely has chat rooms, forums, and places for people to post their art. Why did you design it like that?
I did model it after the major dating sites, but I added certain categories too, like housing options for Section 8 or ‘I live with my parents’ or ‘I live in a halfway house.’ I thought it was important to have a category for ‘Do you own your own transportation?’ because that can be a big deal among people that are mentally ill. Most of them don’t have their own car or anything like that so that makes a difference. The artwork — that’s an area that didn’t take off as much as I thought it would. There are a lot of talented people with mental illness that have great creative potential and I thought that would be an important way to let people connect and share on that level.
How many users does No Longer Lonely have?
I have over 30,000 users. A sizeable percentage of those probably haven’t been on the site for a while. I do occasional purges to get rid of older profiles. But who knows? That person might get a message and come back. The big stat is the amount of marriages that I’ve had with the site. And these are only the ones that I’ve been told of, but there’s been more than 30.
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What are some of the mental illnesses that your users have?
I didn’t create the categories, it’s just what the major ones are: schizophrenia, schizoaffective, but I may have to remove that as an option. Bipolar, depression, anxiety. Another one that’s gone is Asperger’s. Asperger’s doesn’t exist anymore, now it’s an autism spectrum disorder. There really aren’t that many categories of mental illness. But I don’t think people identify themselves that much as, ‘I am that or this.’ I am somebody who struggles with [a psychiatric] diagnosis and I take medicine for it.
As recently as 1989, it was possible to come out with a straight-out comedy like The Dream Team which had this premise: “On the way to a baseball game, sanitarium patients get stranded in New York City after their chaperone is hospitalized and they’re being pursued by criminals.”
Nowadays, I doubt that would fly. But we have at least two other movie associations which do suggest a pathway in terms of genre and tone: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and As Good As It Gets, the former a drama with some moments of humor, the latter more of a drama-comedy.
Given the frame of a drama or drama-comedy, three things interest me about this idea. First, the blurring of the line between being mentally ill and mentally normal, a dynamic that can be explored with certain characters. Second, the people involved with the dating service, both the clients and the operators. Three, exploring the stigmas attached to mental illness and a couple (or couples) who struggle to nurture a romance amidst a society which sees them in a negative or fearful light.
The Spectacular Now provides a helpful touchstone re tone, dealing with alcoholism in a compelling, but also at times humorous way, at its center a burgeoning love story between two significantly different personality types.
I’ve got nothing more than this and a vision of a young couple on a park bench with the Fox Searchlight logo on the corner of the poster.
There you go: My twenty eighth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!
What would you do with it?
Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.
See you in comments (hit Reply to join the conversation). And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.
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