Not everybody who signs up for dating sites is looking to date. Amanda Lauren, a Playboy and Maxim model, joined Hinge in 2020 to attract Instagram followers, not potential boyfriends. Adam Mann, a British model and semiprofessional soccer player, joined for similar reasons. Each has lately come to value online dating for its intended purpose.…
Elizabeth Conway and Kyle Manley were brought together in an old-fashioned sort of way. Theirs was not a relationship born of perusing profiles online, but rather by the improbable pairing of two people who filled a conversation had by longtime friends who frequently get “on the line,” with each other, as Ms. Conway put it.…
If it were not for Christian Zavala’s spontaneity and bravery, he and John Berno would not have met. The two matched in March 2017 on Scruff. For two months hellos and niceties were occasionally exchanged. “Christian was stunningly beautiful,” said Mr. Berno, 38, a psychotherapist in private practice in Manhattan. “I was intimidated. I dodged…
On the last day of Raquel Smith’s freshman year of high school, in 2006, she found herself on a card team opposing Gavin Hall and his partner in a game of spades. They were at a backyard barbecue in Brooklyn with friends from Brooklyn Tech. It was flirty, Ms. Smith said, and as an experienced…
The soundtrack of Emily Margaret Shakeshaft’s childhood became a means of comfort and grounding as she grew older. One of the songs in that soundtrack that her mother curated was “Babyfather” by the Grammy Award-winning singer Sade. As fate would have it, Sade’s transgender son, Izaak Theo Adu-Watts, sang on that track, and, on April…
We all remember our first childhood friend. The one you were always excited to see. The one who made every play date feel like an adventure. And most important, the one who accepted you completely, quirks and all. For Pardis Parker, the writer of this week’s Modern Love essay, it was the misadventures and seemingly…
When Nick Cugini received a Facebook friend request from Stacey Chen, he was intrigued, and a little amused. The two, who were then teenagers, had met for the first time at the Tournament of Champions, a top-tier debate competition for high school students at Northwestern University. Mr. Cugini, now 30, was a relative newcomer to…
Michelle Lorenzutti and David Alperin began dating in 2019, but in some ways their love story started much earlier, when their great-grandparents arrived in Brooklyn in the first half of the 20th Century. That history turned out to be key to the connection the couple developed decades later. Ms. Lorenzutti’s forebears fled persecution in Russia…
If the April 16 ruse Michael T. Matthews concocted to convince his girlfriend, Amy Marshall, that she would have to deliver a baby on a median at 108th and Broadway demonstrated anything, it was that he knows her well. Ms. Marshall, the senior director of nursing at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, is a former…
Mary Alexandra Kougeas Crowley perked up her ears when Justin Warren Douds sang “I’m just a bachelor. I’m looking for a partner” the winter of 2014 at a karaoke league competition at a Washington bar. Neither, though, was looking for a partner at the time. “I sang Magic Mike’s ‘Pony,’ but I didn’t do the…