‘People treat each other as disposable’: Dating columnist turned novelist Annie Lord on love and sex in the age of apps | imaginary

TThis is a scene in Annie Lord’s novel that will be instantly familiar to any young person who has spent time in a bar or nightclub recently. Daisy and Maya, two best friends in their mid-twenties, lament the seedy state of the dating market.

“It’s just bullshit,” Daisy says. “Every time we go out, there’s one respectable single man, and then about 40 gorgeous women with master’s degrees and shaggy haircuts, and what’s the point of trying.”

“This fits perfectly with my experience…dating is so depressing at the moment,” Lorde laughs, as we sit in an east London café. “Something must give!” The 30-year-old writer has built his career by observing the complexities and intimacy of modern dating.

In her mid-20s, Lorde, reeling from a breakup, wrote an article for Vice magazine about the subject. The piece went viral, a book agent reached out, and the resulting memoir, Notes on Heartbreak, published in 2023, was a huge success. Written with the brutal honesty and detail of a memoir, it transformed her from a freelance journalist into one of the most celebrated chroniclers of dating among millennials and Gen Z. Then came British Vogue’s fortnightly dating column, in which she documented the situations, romantic confusion and increasingly surreal experience of trying to find love in London.

“I always say that our breakup was one of the best things that could have happened to me,” she says. “From there, a lot of things escalated.”

And now it has turned to fantasy. Her first novel, The Project, follows Daisy and Maya, two single women living in south-east London who, after years of wading through a sea of ​​terrible dates with terrible men, come to a comedic conclusion: if there are no decent men available, perhaps they should simply make one.

Daisy decides to take a disillusioned but potentially rescued friend named James and give him a physical and emotional fix: buy him better clothes, encourage him to talk about his feelings, and take him to feminist lectures. “Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if he got some girlfriends, went to therapy, got a proper white shirt and read some books,” Daisy says.

The original spark for the novel came after Lorde became briefly involved with a friend of a friend who was “very gentlemanly and a bit of a nightmare”, but deep down a lover. She was writing another book at the time, but her friend joked that her next book should be about reinventing her ejaculation. But she insists that James isn’t just relying on her friend. “It’s a mix of guys I’ve dated or known,” Lord says. “The book is a kind of collage of my life.”

As with her nonfiction writing, Lorde in The Project Lord has an uncanny talent for turning private observations in a group conversation into compelling material. The novel captures the fabric of contemporary dating with anthropological precision, the way Dolly Alderton, Helen Fielding, or Nora Ephron did for previous generations of women.

Under the setting of comic change, Lorde raises the question: Why do so many attractive, intelligent women feel as if the dating market is fundamentally broken?

Lorde, who grew up on romantic comedies, says she internalized a vision of heterosexuality in which men compete for women, but the reality is very different. “You can feel desired all the time. Men call you out, tell you you’re attractive. But then you say, if you’re so desirable, why is it so hard to meet someone?” Continue. “I really hope a lot of single women will read the book and feel less alone.”

Lord grew up on the outskirts of Leeds, and has always had a penchant for confessional writing. At university, she had a column about sex and relationships in the student newspaper. “I’m not a very private person,” she says cheerfully. “I overshare. I don’t get offended easily, I highlight my pain.”

This lack of embarrassment has become unexpectedly useful. For several years, Lorde turned her romantic life into a version of her Vogue column, with essays like “Why Do I Feel Sick When Men Open Up to Me?”, “How Much Can You Never Put Yourself Into a Casual Relationship?”, and “Why Do I Suddenly Feel Insecure in Bed?” It suited her natural inclination toward candor, but it came with complications.

“There were definitely people I was seeing where it made things weird,” she says. “People would kind of learn how I felt about something by reading it online.” Eventually, she realized she wanted a break from being her own hero, and stopped writing the column in 2024. “I decided I wanted to prioritize my romantic life a little more,” she says. “It was really scandalous.”

However, exposure has already become an occupational hazard. When writing Notes on Heartbreak, which she says began life as “a crazy, long, garbled letter to my ex,” she had to navigate the fact that the book’s central character was not fictional.

“There were some things [my ex] “He wanted to take it out,” she says. “I already knew what would make him uncomfortable… He’s a more private person than I am. But it was never a book where I was talking trash to my ex.”

Although The Project is a step away from the proto-biographical territory of Notes on Heartbreak, there are moments of funny personal detail — for example, Daisy finding a piece of toilet paper between her cheeks while in bed with James. “Actually, I think writing novels is more honest for me, because there are things that I would be too embarrassed to attribute to myself that I can just say,” Lord says. “I can write a sex scene and go into a lot of detail because I don’t have to worry about embarrassing someone or violating their privacy.”

The project reaches a moment when the relationship between the sexes itself seems to be going through a public relations crisis. Terms like mutual pessimism have entered mainstream discourse. Dating app fatigue is widespread, and young women, including celebrities like Rosalía and Julia Fox, identify as single. Last year, Vogue published an article titled Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now? It sparked an internet storm, giving voice to a growing sentiment among young women that a relationship is no longer the ultimate marker of success or fulfillment it once was.

“I don’t know if it’s because patriarchy makes women work on themselves too much,” Lord says. “Or because we were raised to be more emotionally intelligent. But women seem to have done all the work and then it’s harder to find someone who matches that.”

Do you think dating malaise is a particularly modern phenomenon? “Dating apps have hacked our brains,” she says. “Even if you don’t meet someone through an app, people often treat each other as disposable because they have an app mentality.” She has pretty much stopped using it herself. “People just flake in the day,” she shrugs.

However, despite spending years documenting the heartache, disappointment, and absurdities of modern dating, Lorde remains optimistic about her love life. “I believe that one day I will meet someone I really love and run off into the sunset,” she says. “I actually feel weirdly more confident than ever before.”