Bryony Kinsella can’t tell me the dating app she used to work for as head of strategic partnerships, although she assures me that it was the world’s biggest. I’m not sure how this admission will skirt around the boundaries of the NDA she signed when she left, but Bryony seems confident she’s in the clear.
We meet in her huge corner office at her company’s midtown headquarters, a space befitting the boss of a multibillion-dollar company. Adapt is the first unicorn of the post-Plague world and is now, by user count, the world’s biggest dating app.
“Oh my God, it feels so good to have the numbers we do. When I first started my company, I got so much abuse. Internet access is now back to pre-Plague levels in most developed countries but three years ago we were all still scrabbling around for allotted hours of bandwidth and cell reception was questionable at best, remember? But I knew really early on that I was going to start this. Those infrastructure problems were always going to be solved, it was just a matter of time. The biggest problem of mankind, of all time, was going to need a solution and fast.”
My head spins a little at the reference to the biggest problem of man-or womankind. Does she mean finding a vaccine?
“The great question of our time: How to find love when there are literally no men left? The phrases single women always used to hear like ‘there’s plenty of fish in the sea’ and ‘as soon as you stop looking for love, it’ll find you’ do not apply anymore. The sea is empty. It became the thing to talk about, when you weren’t talking about who else had died: How am I going to meet someone? Even in the apocalypse, human beings have the same needs. We all want to feel loved, to be desired, to feel like we’re not alone in this insane, terrifying world.”
I have to ask what Bryony’s job at the unnamed world’s-former-biggest-dating-app involved. Head of strategic partnerships sounds like a phrase from a TV show about Silicon Valley. Bryony laughs in good humor at my ignorance. “Basically, I made us money and raised our profile by pairing our app with other brands—so I was obsessed with numbers. Data was my life. When did men and women use the app most? When were they most likely to say yes or no to a potential match? For the record, in summer people get choosy and December is easy pickings. What percentage of matches became conversations and what percentage of those conversations resulted in an exchange of phone numbers?”
The thing I really want to know is how that data-driven role led to the big “aha!” moment of knowing she needed to set up a female-only dating site with different settings depending on how much romantic experience a woman has had with other women.
“When the Plague started, the weirdest thing happened. You’d assume that when loads of men are starting to die, men would become a valuable commodity, right? The basic rules of economics would suggest that as the supply of men decreased, the demand for them would increase. From the sharp rise in reports of abusive messages we received—messages with unrequested dick pics, insulting demands for sex, etc.—a lot of our male users thought the tide would turn that way. But it was the opposite. Even at the beginning stages of the Plague when maybe 5 to 10 percent of the male population was sick, women did two things. They started dating less, and if they were dating, they dated women.” She pauses, and waves her hands in annoyance. Clearly, she has been misquoted before. “Obviously not all women. But a significant number. Between March and June 2026, 40 percent of regular female users stopped using the app. In that same time frame, of the women who stayed on the app, 25 percent changed their preferences from ‘Woman only seeking men’ to ‘Woman seeking men and women’ or ‘Woman only seeking women.’ I think it made complete sense—why would you open yourself up to grief and sadness? What’s the point in dating someone who will almost definitely be dead by the following Sunday? For the first time, women could genuinely say ‘Maybe he died?’ about a date that stood them up.”
She sits back, with a triumphant expression to which she is entitled. Bryony Kinsella is the woman who has single-handedly understood and then monetized women’s emotions about romance and dating throughout the years of the Plague. So, after that realization, she knew there had to be a new app?