I could go on, but I won’t because my editor already made me cut that paragraph down. This article is not going to be like my usual writing. Although, everything I’ve done over the last few years has been unusual, so maybe that’s an unnecessary caveat. I’ve scared the world witless, gotten my old editor fired, interviewed a billionaire scientist and, as some of you might remember from a few months ago, discussed dating and love with Bryony Kinsella. She told me in no uncertain terms that she felt the great question of our time is how to find love when there are no men left.
The response to that article showed me that lots of you agreed with her. So many of you, in fact, that I have never gotten a bigger response to a story in decades of writing. Lots of you asked me to speak to women who had used Adapt, and see what they thought. Lots of you told me you had found love on Adapt, which made for a wonderfully optimistic inbox on a gray winter morning.
I reached out to women I know—acquaintances, friends of friends—and found an array of experiences. Jacinda, thirty-six, went on a few dates through Adapt but found that it wasn’t for her. “I’m just not attracted to women. I wish I was, I miss having relationships, and sex, but I can’t force it. I’m hoping to meet a guy, and maybe even have kids. But if I don’t, that’s going to be okay.”
Olivia （not her real name）， a twenty-five-year-old intern at an advertising agency, met her girlfriend on Adapt and is “happier than I’ve ever been. Maybe because I assumed I would never get to have a relationship so I appreciate it. Falling in love is the best feeling in the world. We’re going to be together forever.” Ah, to be twenty-five again.
I couldn’t write this article without telling Jenny’s story. Jenny is a lawyer from Chicago, and the Plague hit the city the day before her wedding. “I was sitting in a suite in the Four Seasons, watching the news with my family as it reported that all the hospital ERs were closing to men and flights were being canceled. My wedding dress was hanging on the back of a door. Two of my four bridesmaids had already canceled, and my fiancé’s parents were supposed to be flying from Canada but they were terrified of being stranded in the US.”
I asked Jenny about her parents; how were they reacting? “I told my dad we should just cancel the wedding and he was horrified. ‘I didn’t spend all this money for it to go to waste!’ he said. I think they found it easier to focus on the wedding rather than acknowledge what was happening.”
Jenny and her fiancé, Jackson, got married the next day. “The wedding was terrible. The officiant didn’t turn up. Fortunately, there was a pastor staying in the hotel. A quick-thinking hotel employee asked him to perform the wedding. He had a Southern accent and wore his coat the whole time. Maybe it was kind of wonderful. I remember looking at Jackson and thinking, ‘Remember every second of this, Jenny. It’s never going to be this good again.’ Thirty people came to the wedding in the end. Jackson’s parents weren’t there. We didn’t leave each other’s sides all night. A reception with an abundance of shrimp and champagne can be amazing or a complete disaster. Ours was a bit of both.”
After their wedding, Jenny and Jackson hibernated in their apartment. Jackson survived for another two months. Jenny says she hated the inevitably of the Plague; men will die, women will live. “It was a spectator sport. We had to watch and wait, the sexist notion of womanhood writ large by a disease. It was like in the movies when a woman says, ‘Oh, darling, stay here. Don’t go out there, it’s too dangerous! Don’t leave me behind!’ And yet that’s all I wanted to say to him. Please don’t leave me behind. Please don’t leave me behind. Please.”
Jenny first tried Adapt eleven months after Jackson died. Her friend Ellerie told her to try it. She filled in the dating app profile （nervously, having never dated online before）， swiped right on a few people and organized to meet a woman with dark, curly hair whom she thought had a nice smile. Her date arranged dinner at an Italian restaurant and when she turned up, she met me.
That was three years ago. On that first date, Jenny and I talked for seven hours. She made this heartless crone feel hopeful about the future, and I’m reliably informed I made Jenny “feel like something good might happen after a long time when everything felt hopeless.” Reader, I married her.