Lonely Algerian Singles Break With Tradition by Advertising for Mates : North Africa: A lack of acceptable meeting places and the increasing rejection of arranged marriages makes the anonymous newspaper search for partners a logical step.

Young Algerians frustrated by Muslim social restrictions and a housing crisis are advertising for love and mates, homeowners preferred.

Some newspapers devote several pages to the plaints of the lovelorn and ads placed by men and women seeking marriage. For some, the only qualification is a place to live.

“Single accountant, 26, seeks woman with lodging for marriage, 25-35,” said a recent ad in Le Soir d’Algerie.

In the effort to lure a mate, no resource goes unmentioned.

A woman who identified herself as a 45-year-old social worker, “practicing Muslim but does not wear veil,” offered “lodging plus camping equipment.”

The housing crisis in Algiers is so acute that many families live eight to a room, sleeping in shifts. It is aggravated by the increasing desire of the young to move out and start their own families.

Personal ads are common in the West and a few large Arab cities, such as Cairo, but new to Algeria. For decades before 1990, the country had only one newspaper--sober, politically correct and run by a Marxist government.

Now, papers are numerous and flourishing. They report the news, reveal secrets and serve as an outlet for the lonely.

Zouhir Mebarki, whose weekly Mag 7 was first in the field with its “Contacts” section, said the paper had to arrange for a special postal service to handle thousands of letters and ads every week.

“At the beginning, there was a moment of general surprise” about the section, the editor said. “Now, it’s starting to seem normal.”

Not all Algerians agree.

“I think it’s degrading,” said a single man of 27 who identified himself only as Nabil, an insurance agent. “Love is like death; it doesn’t warn you when it will come.”

Kamel Kedia, a 29-year-old taxi driver, said he would never place an ad for a wife, but might respond to one if it offered lodging and “the woman was a little bit pretty too.”

“A house and charm, that’s happiness,” he said.

Ads and letters reflect the constraints of a Muslim society that leave the young caught between old and new.

A scarcity of socially correct meeting places combines with increasing rejection of arranged marriages to make the anonymous newspaper search for partners a logical step.

“Contact with the other sex is difficult here, beyond the few mixed-gathering places,” A. Said from Bechar wrote to Mag 7. “Thank God there are newspapers where people can write about their misfortunes or their happiness and find a way out of their isolation.”

Le Soir d’Algerie’s “Friendship Club” has a section for people who want to renew contact after chance encounters that went no further because of timidity or the presence of a family member.

“Saturday, Dec. 19, we met each other at the post office on the Boulevard Maata in Oran about 5 p.m.,” one message said. “You were with your sister.” Other letters, never fully signed, recount tales of star-crossed love or the anguish of life behind the veil.

Zakia S. from Bejaia wrote that she was unable to marry the man she loves because her family promised her to a distant cousin.

“When my mother told me, I almost strangled myself,” she said in a letter to El Djazira. “They are selling me to a 50-year-old like a beast.”

In another letter, a “hard-core single man” vowed to remain that way because of the “crazy expenses” of a traditional marriage. He asked parents “not to sell their daughters like cows.”

Mira Benabidi, an assistant to one of the few psychoanalysts in the capital, said young Algerians have deep respect for marriage despite their uncertainty about some aspects of courtship.

Traditionally, the family acted as “a sort of matrimonial agency,” she said. “Now the children want to do it for themselves.”

Mebarki, the editor of Mag 7, dismissed the notion that Algerian singles place less importance on love than on material benefits.

Offering lodging in an advertisement is merely realistic, he said, “a way of saying that the biggest obstacle has been overcome.”

For him, the letters and ads indicate Algeria has entered a new era after 30 years of Marxist ideology.

“The regime smothered individual concerns,” he said. “All human suffering was considered disinformation. When we took the lid off, everything came out at once, and in great disorder.”