modern love essay contest

The Main Takeaways From the NYT ‘Modern Love’ College Essay Winners

“You can blame it all on Percocet.” This is the opening line of the winner of The New York Times “Modern Love” college contest. Out of 2,000 entries from college students from all across the country, there was one winner and four finalists; all of the essays were published in The New York Times .

The winning essay, “The Physics of Forbidden Love”, by Malcolm Conner of Trinity College, is a great resource for familiarizing yourself with what success looks like in an essay. The four finalists’ essays are great reads as well, and we encourage you to read, re-read, and learn from them before beginning the process of penning your own essay for college, the college admissions essay! One gem you can definitely glean from these essays is how to get the reader’s attention with your opening line. (See the first line of this blog. I want to know more; don’t you?!)

There are many takeaways from these essays. Here are just a few of them:

Tell the story only you can tell.

Your story should be unique and offer insight into your life and background. Admissions Officers are looking for students who authentically stand out from the crowd, and these teens did just that, stand out. For example:

The winning essay is about a transgender man who falls in love with an Indian heritage woman in his physics class. One of the finalists, “My (So-Called) Instagram Life”, is a story about a woman who tries unsuccessfully to live up to the image she’s created for herself online. Another essay, “White Shirt, Black Name Tag, Big Secret”, is about a Mormon missionary and his journey to reveal a secret, only to find that the other missionary carries the same secret, too.

Details, details (and more details, please).

These winning essays and your winning essay should be filled with specific details to help the reader see, hear, and feel what’s happening in the story. Here are a few examples from the college essay winner and finalists:

“Except for the pain in his eyes, he looked good: tan and wiry with wild blue eyes and an all-in smile. It was weird to see him not wearing his white shirt, tie and black name tag, but it was just as weird for me not to be wearing mine.”

“There was a time when I swore in front of my friends and said grace in front of my grandmother. When I wore lipstick after seeing “Clueless,” and sneakers after seeing “Remember the Titans.” When I flipped my hair every way, ate ice cream out of anything, and wore coats of all types and colors.”

“With my Midwest accent, ratty Packers sweater and frozen-tilapia complexion, I was the antithesis of the son-in-law they hoped for.”

We at CEA love helping you tell your best stories. The writing skills you hone when you write an admissions essay are useful far beyond the admissions process and go way beyond one essay. We’ve had students tell us that their grades improved in AP Literature or they had an easier time writing essays for classes. We’ve had students improve their grammar, structure, and syntax so that there are no distractions from telling their greatest stories. Also, these winning essays are a reminder that there are opportunities to submit and share your stories. Who knows, maybe you’ll be submitting to The New York Times in a few years as well.

In the meantime, take a deep breath, grab your favorite tea, and enjoy the essays written by current college students.

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Written by CEA HQ

Category: College Admissions , Essay Writing , New York Times , Standout Students

Tags: Essays , inspiration , New York Times , winning essays , writing

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Deadline Approaches for Modern Love College Essay Contest

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Submissions are currently open for the New York Times Modern Love College Essay Contest . The prize is awarded to a current U.S. college student for an essay that “illustrates the current state of love and relationships.” The winner will receive $1,000 and publication in the New York Times Sunday Styles section and on nytimes.com . Four runners-up will also receive publication in the Times Sunday Styles section and on nytimes.com.

The New York Times Modern Love column has sponsored its college essay contest two previous times—in 2008 and 2011—and received thousands of submissions each year from students representing hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the country. Caitlin Dewey won the 2011 prize for her essay “Even in Real Life, There Were Screens Between us,” and Marguerite Fields won the inaugural prize in 2008 for her essay “Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define.” The essays of previous finalists can also be read on the New York Times website.

For more information about the Modern Love column, read Jones’s article “How We Write About Love.”

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Peoplehop: modern love college essay contest winner layla faraj.

By Elizabeth Walker on May 15, 2022 2 Comments

Daily Editor Elizabeth Walker interviews Layla Faraj about her experience writing and publishing her winning essay, “My Plea for a Second Love Language.”

When Layla Faraj (BC ‘25) wrote her essay on the intimate dynamics of her family’s WhatsApp group chat, submitting it to the New York Times 2022 Modern Love College Essay Contest was an act of courage for her. After exploring the idea during an assignment in her creative writing class, she expanded the paragraph into the essay that became “ My Plea for a Second Love Language ”—a piece that explores how her extended family turned to a WhatsApp group chat to share their lives with one another after being split apart by the Syrian war.

On Friday, May 6, the New York Times announced that Layla won the Modern Love College Essay Contest, and her work was published both on the newspaper’s website and in their Sunday, May 8 print issue. As someone who has never submitted her work before, it’s been a shock for Layla—but in the best way possible. 

When I spoke to Layla last Monday, it was such a genuine pleasure to get a window into how she sees the world. I came away from our interview with new insights about her writing process, her experience publishing her Modern Love essay, how she’s been documenting her first year at Barnard, and her writing influences.

Note: This conversation has been edited for clarity.

How did you learn about the Modern Love essay writing contest for college students, and what made you decide to submit a piece?

I had never read Modern Love before I got to college. My best friend, Kayla, is the one who sent me this one podcast episode they had, which was about a Syrian doctor and this really fun love story. I was like, oh my god, this is so specific, and yet so wonderful to listen to. I really wanted to get to know the column more, so I started reading it. And then my friend was the one who sent me the essay and was like, “they’re having a contest, you should totally submit something.” 

I’ve actually never submitted anything before to any kind of outlet. I don’t share my writing very often, so this has been super weird knowing that a bunch of people have read my piece. But yeah, I guess my main thought process was that I had something that I knew I wanted to write about anyway, which was WhatsApp, and I was like, this can encourage me to actually get that piece going, and then I’ll just submit it and whatever happens happens. I remember sitting and editing it with one of my friends, and I was like, I don’t really expect anything to happen out of this, but I just want to know that I had the courage to submit. That’s kind of how that happened.

That’s really cool. You said that this is your first time really submitting a piece anywhere. What has your experience been writing growing up, in high school, and in college? 

I never started to think about writing until I was in the sixth grade, or so I had this one teacher who was like, “Hey, you’re not so bad at this writing thing. Try writing.” I was like, okay, so I would do a lot of journaling. I never would follow a prompt and write—it was always like, I just thought of something, and then I would write. 

When I became a freshman in high school, my high school didn’t have a writing club, and so I was like, I kind of want to start a writing club, so I did. I would host open mic/assemblies for Black History Month, and Women’s History Month where people could read their pieces. For the first few years, even though I was head of the Writing Club, I didn’t perform anything. I would just MC, introduce people, and help other people with their pieces, but I’ve never actually performed anything myself. By then, COVID happened, and I never really did get to perform anything, which was crazy. 

I guess the biggest, most formative moment for me in terms of writing more seriously was this semester when I took a creative writing class. I was forced to write things outside of journaling, or like little poems or short stories that I thought to write but never considered editing or fully forming because they were not going anywhere, and I was like, “oh, it’s fine, this is for me.” But being forced to write, like 15-page pieces this semester, illustrated to me the stories that I have hidden in my brain… I think I’ve stumbled upon a lot of ideas that I really want to develop further after this class. The WhatsApp one was one of the things that came out of a prompt that we did for my creative writing class.

Do you remember what the prompt was?

My professor was telling us about the three ways in which to develop a plot for your piece, and it was 1) Things get better, 2) Things get worse, and 3) Things get weird, and I was like, “oh, things get weird.” I had the idea again that WhatsApp is an interesting thing that I would like to talk about, and I was really interested in the “things get weird” aspect. I wrote the paragraph about my family sending me pictures of their bloody noses and bruises in class, and then I was like, “oh, I actually kind of really like this. Let me take this time to use this paragraph in a bigger piece.”

What is your writing process like in general, and then what was it like for this piece?

I think a lot of the fully formed pieces that I’ve written start with me thinking about a moment in my life that I felt was particularly poignant or could be used to illustrate a broader message. For instance, the first piece that I wrote for my [creative writing] class this semester was about my process of learning Turkish. I have a lot of family that lives in Turkey, and I wanted to explore language learning as a means of shedding light on my American privilege. There’s a lot of different elements that went into the piece, but that was more broadly my experience of learning Turkish as opposed to my cousin’s or family’s experience learning Turkish, considering they live in Turkey. 

I had this one specific moment that I’ll never forget in Turkey, where I was in a cafe, and I ordered decaf tea, and they looked at me all funky, and they were like, we don’t have decaf tea. That’s not a thing here. Actually what they did is they were like, huh, we’ll ask, and then I heard him walk back, and he starts laughing in the back. Then he comes back and he’s like, yeah, no decaf tea, sorry. I was like, oh, okay, and that was just a moment [where] I felt super outed. 

I guess when I write, I like to think of moments that I feel like could convey a deeper message. Like in that instance, that outed feeling that I felt I was like, “oh my god, my family that lives in Turkey must have felt this like a million times when they came and they were refugees here.” I wanted to use that personal detail to write an essay about the refugee experience and language learning as a refugee. 

That’s what I’ll do even for the WhatsApp piece that I wrote. I think the first inciting moment was thinking about all the weird things that my family group chat sends, and then thinking “okay, why the heck are they even sending me pictures of their bloody nose? Like what’s the message to that?”, and then forming a piece around that one moment and then maybe even thinking about other moments in my life that when I put them side by side with this, it could get my message across. For Whatsapp Love, it was thinking about the Skype moment, for instance, where I was playing a board game with my cousin [over a Skype call].  

I like to do vignettes and think of moments that when strung together can create a fully formed necklace that looks really pretty and conveys a message.

I honestly really loved that about your piece. I’m personally a fan of the vignette form of writing—I kind of love the way that your piece strung those together. As I was reading it, I was like, “oh, how are all these connected?”, but by the end, it felt like all the strands just wove together, and that was really cool to see.

Thank you—that’s the goal. There’s so many separate moments that happen in that piece, like my mom and I looking through the photo albums, me and my mom in the grocery store getting salsa. There’s so many moments where it’s not necessarily fully fledged like, “this is a story, and this is the beginning and the middle and the end of the story.” But there are very, very tiny scenes to a story that you kind of have to piece together as a reader. I think that’s what I like to get done when I write.

This one line in the piece kind of stood out to me. If I can, I’ll just read it now: 

“I have fulfilled others’ needs, far distant, by thinking of them as I go about my days — in what I experience and feel and create. In documenting my life for them.” 

What has documenting your life looked like during your first year of college?

Oh, that’s a fun question. I’m a big fan of taking little videos of things, even if it’s something that could totally just be a picture, like my coffee cup for instance. I really like to take videos because looking back at them, I get the sense of, “what did it sound like when I took that specific video?” You get more of an atmosphere with videos, so I really like to do that—take videos and put them all together into a little collage. That’s a big thing that I’ve done. 

Another thing that I really like to do is, I’m a big fan of voice memos. I’ll be walking on College Walk, and if I have an idea, I’ll voice memo it. Even if I see something, and it makes me think of someone, I’ll immediately whip out my phone and send them a voice message and be like, “I’m walking right now, but I saw this tree in full bloom, and it just made me think of you. I think you’d really like it.” 

Now that I’m piecing them together, I really like auditory experiences, considering the videos, and also the voice memos. I just think that it’s really personal to hear someone’s voice and hear what’s going on around you. I think it offers a really personal connection. 

Is there like, like one video or one image that you think of when you think of your freshman year?

It’s hard because I feel like I’ve lived so many lives in my freshman year. I look back at the year and I’m like, “oh, my god, like, so many things have happened. It feels like three years in one.” For that reason, it feels a little like, hard to pinpoint, like a specific picture. 

Oh, my gosh, of course. I was thinking of [the question], and I was coming to the same conclusion. I feel like I’ve been so many different people throughout the year. Do you feel the same?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, obviously, “high school me” is going to be completely different from “college me,” but I think that “college me” semester to semester, even month to month is super different too. I don’t know if that’s like a specifically freshman experience because it’s my first time living away from home, and I’m meeting so many people and you’re settling into so many different aspects of your life. 

I definitely feel like if “me now” met “me three months ago”, we’d be using different slang and talking differently and having different views about things, which is, I guess what college is all about.

So true. This is my last “longer” question, but what emotions did writing this piece bring up for you?

I think it was a lot of like, if I’m gonna be honest, jealousy. As I was writing it, and comparing it to the pandemic, I think I just felt super jealous because I was like, “this is a reality that I’ve lived for, like 11 years, and will continue to live for I don’t know how many [years] ”. There’s like, just this open-endedness to it of like, “when will this end?”, and there’s no real answer. When I compared it to the pandemic—obviously, the pandemic was super hard for everyone and not to invalidate that experience, because it’s incredibly difficult to be away from people you love—but I think I was a little jealous. I was talking about quarantine and quarantine has kind of ended, as opposed to this situation of diaspora and it’s been so long and it hasn’t ended. I think that was a big emotion for me. 

Another thing that I felt was definitely thinking about all the moments that have happened in my group chat, and thinking about the people who are no longer in the group chat because they passed away or for whatever other circumstances. I guess I was thinking back on the things that they used to send or say. That was obviously super emotional and made me just kind of miss—in the same way that we’re talking about how you become a different person, month to month—the group chat, in and of itself, becomes different month to month. I guess thinking back to all of its iterations, I missed certain phases of the group chat as opposed to what it is now—not to say that it doesn’t have amazing things to it now, but it’s just different.

I think that makes sense—like any web of social connections, it’s just natural that it’s going to change. Sometimes you like the way it changes, sometimes you miss past iterations like you were saying, but I think that totally makes sense. 

I have a couple of quick questions that I’m wondering. So first, what was your reaction when you found out that you won the essay contest?

I was actually having a really bad day that day, and I was on the way to the Brooks 3 bathrooms to have a silly little cry, and I’m holding my phone and I get an email. I’m like, heck, let me open this, it’s from the New York Times. Then I open it and immediately just like, fall to the floor and I’m just shocked. I was completely, completely shocked. 

So the way that it kind of worked—and I don’t know if this was just my experience, or if it’s everyone who gets published via Modern Love—but they emailed me two weeks before I actually knew that I won, and they were like, “Hi, we’re interested in publishing your piece, but we’re not 100% sure yet. Can you call me?” I was at an open mic at the time, and I remember being like “they’re interested, oh, my god.” I didn’t think anything was gonna come of this. Like, I was just like, super, super in shock. Then I talked to them, and they talked me through a lot of [stuff] like, “if we want to publish it, would you consider editing this part?”, or like, “Could you maybe see, like, adding a paragraph about this in here?”, which was super interesting. The editing process was not what I expected it to be, but in the best way possible. 

I don’t know, it was just a lot of shock because when I submitted it, I didn’t really think anything was going to come of it at all, I was submitting to submit. So yeah, just like shock and disbelief. I think even now when people message me, and they’re like, “oh, my god, like, I read your piece, and it’s so cool”. I’m like, wow, and I feel like there’s some weird disconnect. It’s like, “the me that’s published is not like me,” and it’s like, this imposter syndrome kind of going crazy…

It’s my first time having something published, so like connecting the dots that the thing that I’ve been writing for like a month—it was like a document in Google Docs—is now in print. It’s kind of hard to grasp. Like hearing people say that they’ve read it is also an out-of-body experience because no one’s really read my stuff before.

I don’t know if you told your family, like the WhatsApp group chat, but if so, what were their reactions?

I was so excited about this because I didn’t tell any of my extended family members until the day that it was published online. I wanted to do this very meta thing where I would send the link about the WhatsApp family group chat article to the group chat and have it be this very full-circle moment, which is what I did. I think if I were to take the average of all the reactions, it would be like, “you made us laugh, but you also made us cry, and you kind of brought us back to a lot of different phases of our lives.” 

Even at the beginning, I mentioned it briefly, but a lot of my family members haven’t been back to Syria for like 11 years or so. So they were like, “I was reading this, and emotions of, I used to live there like I used to go there very often came up for me,” and I think there was a lot of like, “Is this really how you see us? Like you really think we’re this funny, like, like we do such stupid things. Do we really do this?”

I think it was a lot of making fun of themselves like, “No way, one of us actually sent a picture of our spilled juice. Did that really happen?” like disbelief almost at seeing themselves in print. They were just in shock, because it’s almost like you’re writing people into characters, and they’re seeing themselves as a character in a story. You know, we do a lot of things that we don’t realize that we do or say a lot of things that we don’t realize that we say. I think having that for them was very funny, but also surprising. Yeah, like a nice reception. They were very, like, “so proud of you.”

Yeah. That’s really cool . I mean, sending the link in the WhatsApp group chat. That’s like perfect…

Do you have a favorite line in this essay or a favorite part?

I think my favorite part is, the two paragraphs that talk about once more of my family members started moving abroad and the way I talk about how the group chat was transformed into a venue of sorts. I really liked that part, because I think up until then, it was kind of light-hearted. Like I was talking about, like, “they’re sending pictures of a brown circle of dirt on my brother’s foot or like, a perfectly mashed up avocado or spilled juice.” But then this [section] is, I think when it kind of gets to be a little more real. 

I like these two paragraphs a lot because I think they illustrate the bulk of what I want to say—even though there’s so many difficult times, the majority of what we talk about [in the group chat] is silly and goofy. I think that’s also kind of made clear by the fact that there’s only two paragraphs that are really focusing on the sad parts. The rest of them are kind of focusing on the silly or like the more hopeful parts. But yeah, I don’t know. I guess I like these two paragraphs because I think they—and I don’t want to sound like I’m tooting my own horn or anything—but I think they’re poignant, and I don’t [even] really like that word, but I think that’s the only way that I could think of describing.

No, I think that’s completely fair. I think they definitely do stand apart in a good way.

In terms of a line that I really like, it’s what I would consider my thesis of the piece:

“We knew that staying connected was less about itching to find something to say to others than it was about carrying them with you as you lived your life, searching for them in your spilled juice and spider veins.”

I think that’s my favorite line because if I had to summarize my piece to anyone, that’s the line that I would choose to summarize it with.

Yeah, I definitely felt like that line was like my takeaway that gave me something really new to think about and that I know I’ll carry with me. 

Who are your writing influences if you have any?

For a really long time, it was Elif Batuman, who wrote The Idiot . I really, really enjoyed [that book], and I think it was really formative in my experience as someone who likes to write because it’s so boring, but in the best way possible. You’re reading this coming-of-age story, and it kind of is almost like nothing is happening. I really like stories where nothing is happening because I think when nothing’s happening, there’s so much room to talk about the little things that everyone does every day. Boring stories just really interest me, because I think they kind of show the most. They’re not trying to be anything—they’re just talking about someone’s day or they’re like character studies in a way, and I just like to really get into someone’s mind and see the way that they’re thinking about things. That’s what I loved most about The Idiot was that the main character is very introspective, and so you’re going throughout her first year in college, and you’re just like, getting to see what she thinks. 

I remember this one line, which I think about all the time, in which the main character asked, “What are people supposed to be thinking about? I have no idea what people are supposed to be thinking about.” That line to me is what I find most interesting when I’m reading or when I’m writing—what are people thinking about? I think the less intense the story is, the more room you have to just hear a person’s thoughts about the silliest things, or the most mundane things, which is what I enjoy. So, I really like Elif Batuman. 

There’s this [other] book called The Magical Language of Others [by E.J. Koh] that I really enjoyed too. It’s a memoir, but it’s structured through these letters that her mom has written to her, and then she translates the letters, and the memoir is like a story of her growing up. I really like that as well, because I think it talks about mother-daughter relationships in a way that I really, really enjoy. That’s something that I like to talk about a lot in my writing. It’s actually really funny— for this WhatsApp Love, I had all of them be references to like my aunt and like my cousin and my cousin’s daughter’s and this and that. Then the editor was like, “can we throw in like an uncle in there?” Ok, ok, I’ll change one of them to an uncle for you. 

I really like to talk about female relationships, and I think that that book does it really well. The mom is not a good mom in the story, and yet, there’s so much love, and so much care and tenderness that I think reading it made me really emotional. I’m also super interested in translation and the process of like, how you can convey the same meaning in different languages, and if that’s even possible? I like the translation element that was added into the book, that was really interesting. 

Do you have a book that you think should be required reading?

What a fun question. There’s an essay that I think would just make so much sense for the fact that we’re at Columbia, which is, Here is New York by E.B. White. I think that I get really shocked when I meet people, and they’re like, I haven’t read that essay, because I think it was so amazing. It also really made me excited about living in New York and just made me think of New York differently. So that would be like—it’s not a book—but I would recommend that it be something that every Columbia student reads or anyone who lives in / studies in the city reads.

Are you working on anything right now?

Because of my class, I think I’ve developed a lot of different ideas for essays that I want to write over the summer. The thing that I’ve officially started writing is an essay that talks about using humor as a way to illustrate belonging. And I want to title it “Inside Jokes”. 

For me growing up—obviously, Arabic is my second language—as a kid, my dad would always tell me, “Oh, I’ll know that you’ve really mastered Arabic when you’re able to tell me jokes in Arabic.” So I want to write an essay exploring humor and language learning. I’m a big fan of language learning/language as a means of communication and language as a means of illustrating something broader, but yeah, humor as a way to feel like you belong is like, what I want to talk about.

My last question is, what are you looking forward to doing when school is over?

This sounds so lame, but I’m actually really excited to just get to read and write personal things—that’s my biggest thing. I think over the course of the year, I’ve been recommended so many good books, and I’ve had so many ideas that I would quickly jot down, but have had no time or space to think about. I guess I’m just ready to have time to read the things I want to read and write the things I want to write. 

I guess a more funny, silly, goofy response is I’m really excited to enjoy the good weather and just be out with people that I like. I’m not a summer baby, but I’m a big summer person and I feel like I should have been a summer baby. [Editor’s Note: Layla is an Aries.] And so yeah, I’m just excited to be out and get to, like watch people. 

I’m a big people watcher, and I don’t do a lot of it, surprisingly, in the city, because I get sucked into the [Columbia] bubble quite often. So I’m excited to have free time where I can devote it to just observing and watching people. It’s like that quote that goes “you can’t sit down to write until you’ve stood up to live.” I want to go out and see people, and I like to turn strangers into characters and write about them. So I’m excited for that too.

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Malcolm Conner of Trinity University Wins Modern Love College Essay Contest

Malcolm Conner’s essay “ The Physics of Forbidden Love ” won the 2017 Modern Love College Essay Contest .

The winning essay was chosen from nearly 2,000 entries from about 500 colleges and universities nationwide. Mr. Conner, a student at Trinity University, will receive $1000.

In addition to publishing the winning essay ( online now and in print on April 30), The Times will publish the essays of the four finalists each week in May.

On the contest and winning essay, Daniel Jones , editor of Modern Love , says:

“Every time we hold this contest I’m impressed by the depth of understanding students have about the complexities of their relationships, and also by the depth of problems some are dealing with. This year our current political climate showed up in many of these stories. Fittingly, that was an element of our winning essay too, the story of a relationship between a transgender man and an immigrant Indian woman in San Antonio, Texas.”

The New York Times 2017 Modern Love College Essay Contest Results

Malcolm Conner, Trinity University

Emily DeMaioNewton, Elon University

Clara Dollar, New York University

Ellis Jeter, Columbia University

Lauren Petersen, University of Chicago

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Nick Rowan Bassman, Oberlin College

Sadie McEniry, Johnson County Community College

Caroline Tan, Penn State University

Kai Williams, Wesleyan University

Audrey Zheng, Dartmouth College

OTHER NOTABLE ESSAYS

Rebecca Asoulin, Dartmouth College

Zoe Butler, Brown University

Michael Fischer, Northeastern Illinois University

Caroline Grand, Trinity University

Danya Issawi, University of Kansas

Srishti Kapur, University of Chicago

Minahil Khan, Harvard University

Danny Kelleher, Northwestern University

Amelia Nierenberg, Yale University

Elizabeth Shackney, Wesleyan University

Joy Shen, Dartmouth College

Natalie Tsay, Cornell University

Sophia Tulp, Ithaca College

Alina Utrata, Stanford University

Haley Wade, Barnard College

Learn more about this year’s Modern Love College Essay Contest here .

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2020 pulitzer prize remarks from malachy browne.

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• Why people have fallen out of love with dating apps

Tinder and Bumble are struggling as singles refuse to pay up

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W hen Tinder , a mobile dating app, launched on college campuses in America in 2012, it quickly became a hit. Although online dating had been around since Match.com, a website for lonely hearts, launched in 1995, it had long struggled to shed an image of desperation. But Tinder, by letting users sift through photos of countless potential dates with a simple swipe, made it easy and fun.

Soon Tinder and its rivals had transformed courtship. A report published last year by the Pew Research Centre found that 30% of American adults had used an online dating service, including more than half of those aged between 18 and 29. One in five couples of that age had met through such a service. Usage surged during the pandemic, as lonely locked-down singles sought out partners. The market capitalisation of Bumble, a rival to Tinder, surged to $13bn on its first day of trading in February 2021. Later that year the value of Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge and scores of other dating services, reached nearly $50bn. Today roughly 350m people around the world have a dating app on their phone, up from 250m in 2018, according to Business of Apps, a research firm. In June Tokyo’s government even said it would launch a matchmaking app of its own to pair up singles in the city.

Yet lately online dating has lost its spark. The apps were downloaded 237m times globally last year, down from 287m in 2020. According to Sensor Tower, another research firm, the number of people who use them at least once a month has dwindled from 154m in 2021 to 137m in the second quarter of this year (see chart 1). On August 7th Bumble reported revenue growth of just 3%, year on year, in the quarter from April to June, and lowered its forecast for the full year to 1-2%. Its shares plunged by a third in after-hours trading. On July 30th Match Group reported that its revenue for the same quarter grew by only 4%. Both companies’ market values have cratered since Bumble’s listing (see chart 2). That reflects users’ increasing disillusionment with dating apps, decreasing willingness to pay for them—and growing interest in offline alternatives.

Start with the disillusionment. Apps that once felt fun have, for many, become wellsprings of frustration. The network effects that initially propelled services such as Tinder, in which a widening choice of partners lured in ever more users, have now made them exasperating. Users grumble about spending hours sorting through tens of thousands of profiles. Half of women surveyed by Pew said they felt overwhelmed by the number of messages they received. It doesn’t help that 84% of Tinder users are men. So are 61% of those on Bumble, which is targeted at women. Many users also fret about scams.

Younger adults are growing especially weary of the apps. One survey commissioned last year by Axios, a news site, found that only a fifth of American college students were using them at least once a month. “It’s not fun, it’s so superficial and it’s also just like really exhausting,” laments one youthful influencer on TikTok, a short-video app. “I’m kind of over it,” sums up Wunmi Williams, a 27-year-old who, after years of swiping and matching, has been unable to find a partner through a dating app. In a sign of growing despair, the Marriage Pact, an annual event in which participants are matched with a “backup” spouse should their future romantic endeavours fail, has spread to 88 college campuses across America.

All this helps explain why dating-app developers are struggling to convince users to part with cash—the second reason for their lacklustre performance. In an effort to boost margins, dating apps have been peddling paid upgrades to supplement their lowly ad revenues. Hinge has a separate feed with popular profiles it thinks you might like, but demands that you hand over $3.99 for a “rose” before you can chat with them. Tinder’s paid plans range from $17.99 a month (which gives you unlimited swipes and lets you change your location) to a hefty $499 a month (which lets you see the most popular profiles on the app and message users you haven’t matched with).

Got the ick

Online dating may no longer look desperate, but users seem to worry that paying for it might. The share of people who are willing to spend money on dating apps has been falling. Tinder’s paid users have declined for seven consecutive quarters. Men are more likely to cough up, which may be worsening the feeling common among women of being bombarded by messages on the apps.

Perhaps the biggest threat to the future of dating apps, though, is the growing share of singles looking offline for love. Last year some began wearing an aqua-coloured ring, made by a startup called Pear, to show their openness to being wooed. Thursday, a company that organises in-person events for singles, has expanded its service to roughly 30 cities, from Stockholm to Sydney. Its app works only on Thursday, when the events are held.

The romance is not confined to bars. Running clubs have become a place for athletic types to meet. Cooking classes, too, have become a place to look for partners, says Julia Hartz, the boss of Eventbrite, a ticketing platform. Attendance at its singles events rose 42% between 2022 and 2023. “You are bonding with someone, you’re having an experience, even if they’re not the love of your life,” says Casey Lewis, a blogger on youth culture, of such events.

Dating apps are looking for ways to lure users back. Some are hoping to spice things up with artificial intelligence ( AI ). Whitney Wolfe Herd, Bumble’s founder, recently mused that the future of courtship could involve one person’s AI bot going on “dates” with another’s. One new app, Volar, has begun offering just that.

In time, society might be willing to leave matchmaking to machines—but it is hard to imagine the strategy paying off just yet. A more fruitful approach for dating apps may instead be to focus on narrower markets. Grindr, an app for gay men, continues to grow quickly. So does Feeld, which targets the polyamorous. In the past few years Match Group has launched apps targeted at gay men (Archer), single parents (Stir), ethnic minorities ( BLK , Chispa) and snobs (The League). Revenue from this portfolio of brands grew by 17%, year on year, in the second quarter of 2024.

In addition to offering a smaller pool of partners, such apps also serve as a community for like-minded people. Grindr, for example, acts as a travel guide for tourists looking for gay bars and a hub for information on HIV . The company says its average user sends 50 messages a day, about the same as for WhatsApp, a messaging service. Its success in that regard might explain why Lidiane Jones, the chief executive of Bumble, has said she wants her firm to be known as a “connections company, rather than a dating company”. Pulling off such a rebrand may prove tricky. But love has never been an easy business. ■

To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line , our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Swiped out”

Business August 10th 2024

China’s manufacturers are going broke, china is overhauling its company law, what can olympians teach executives, a court says google is a monopolist. now what, a history-lover’s guide to the market panic over ai.

From the August 10th 2024 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

More from Business

Overcapacity is leading to soaring bankruptcies

Its leaders want to make business less volatile—and easier to control

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The ruling could lead to a big-tech showdown

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The giant chipmaker has shed $40bn in market value in a day

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Tiny Memoir Contest for Students: Write a 100-Word Personal Narrative

We invite teenagers to tell a true story about a meaningful life experience in just 100 words. Contest dates: Nov. 6 to Dec. 4, 2024.

By The Learning Network

Illustrations from Modern Love’s Tiny Love Stories , the inspiration for this contest.

Can you tell a meaningful and interesting true story from your life in just 100 words? That’s the challenge we pose to teenagers with our 100-Word Personal Narrative Contest, a storytelling form popularized by Modern Love’s Tiny Love Stories series .

After running this contest for two years, receiving a total of more than 25,000 entries, and honoring dozens of excellent miniature teen-written memoirs, we have discovered the answer is a resounding yes .

So, we challenge you to try it yourself.

We’re not asking you to write to a particular theme or to use a specific structure or style, but we are looking for short, powerful stories about a particular moment or event in your life. We want to hear your story, told in your unique voice, and we hope you’ll experiment with style and form to tell a tale that matters to you, in a way you enjoy telling it.

And, yes, it’s possible to do all that in only 100 words. For proof, just look at last year’s 15 winning entries . We also have a step-by-step guide full of advice that is grounded in 25 excellent 100-word mentor texts, as well as a rehearsal space , published for our first year’s contest, that has over 1,000 student-written mini memoirs. Because that space was so successful, we’re keeping it open for this year’s contest. We hope students will use it to get inspiration, experiment and encourage each other.

Take a look at the full guidelines and related resources below. Please post any questions you have in the comments and we’ll answer you there, or write to us at [email protected]. And, consider hanging this PDF one-page announcement on your class bulletin board.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Resources for Teachers and Students
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Submission Form

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