‘People treat each other like trash’: Dating writer-turned-author Annie Lord on love and sex in the software age | Fiction

There is a scene in Annie Lord’s book that will be familiar to any young person who has been in a pub or nightclub recently. Daisy and Maya, two best friends in their mid-20s, are complaining about the difficult state of the dating market.

Daisy said: “It’s just awful. “Every time we go there’s, like, a nice single man and then about 40 good-looking women with masters degrees in hairdressing and what’s the point in trying.”

“That’s in line with my experience… dating is not going well at the moment,” laughs Lord, as we sit down in an east London cafe. Something has to give! The 30-year-old author has made a career out of looking at the complexities and connections of modern dating.

In his mid-twenties, upset over a separation, the Lord wrote to the Viceroy about his story. The piece went viral, a book sponsor got in touch and the resulting work, Notes on Heartbreak, published in 2023, became a cult classic. Written with brutal honesty and diary-like detail, she turned her freelance journalist into one of the most famous millennial and gen Z bloggers. Then came her dating section for British Vogue, in which she chronicled the adventures, romances and adventures 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,” he says. “That’s why a lot of things just snowballed.”

Now he has turned to fiction. Her first novel, The Project, follows Daisy and Maya, two single women living in south-east London who, after years of sailing rough seas with bad men, come to a funny conclusion: if there aren’t any good men out there, they might just make one.

Daisy decides to take her boring but savable male friend, James, and treat him physically and emotionally: buying him better clothes, encouraging him to express his feelings, taking him to women’s classes. “Maybe he wouldn’t be so bad if he just found some girl friends, went to the hospital, got a nice white t-shirt and read some books,” Daisy thinks seriously.

The first flash of the novel came after Lord had a brief affair with a friend of a friend who was “a nice lady and a bit of a dreamer”, but underneath she was a sweetheart. He was writing another book at the time, but the friend joked that his next book should be about his rehabilitation. James, he insists, doesn’t take his friend for granted. “He’s the worst of most men I’ve dated or known,” says Lord. “This book is a kind of collage of my life.”

As he writes fiction, in The Project Lord he has an uncanny ability to turn the group’s secret observations into compelling stories. This book shows how today’s relationships are in detail, just like Dolly Alderton, Helen Fielding or Nora Ephron did for previous generations of women.

Under the premise of the comic, Lord asks the question: why do so many smart, beautiful women feel like the dating market is broken?

Growing up on romcoms, Lord says he adopted a homophobic vision where men compete against women, but the reality is very different. People always like you, people tell you that you are beautiful. he continues. “I hope that many single women will read this book and feel that they are not alone.”

Lord grew up outside Leeds, and has always had an interest in prose writing. At university, she had a section on sex and relationships in the student paper. “I’m not a secret person,” he says cheerfully. “I’m a big sharer. I don’t get humiliated easily – I put my pain on display.”

That lack of shame has been unexpectedly helpful. Over the years, Lord has turned her love life into her Vogue cover, with articles such as Why Do I Get Ick When Men Turn On Me?, Are You Too Much To Stay Together? It was in keeping with his instinct to be blunt, but it came with complications.

He said: “There were people I thought were amazing. People learned how I see something by reading on the Internet.” After that, he realized that he wanted to retire from being the protagonist of his work, and he stopped writing this column in 2024. “I decided that I wanted to prioritize my love life a little bit,” he says. “It was really revealing.”

Being exposed, however, was already dangerous at work. When writing Notes on Heartbreak, which he says began life as a “crazy, long, rambling letter to my ex”, he had to know that the book’s central character was not fictional.

“There were a few things (my ex-wife) wanted to get rid of,” he says. “I already knew what he wouldn’t like… He’s more of a private person than I am. But it wasn’t a book I was talking about in disgust with my ex.”

Although the Project is far from a Notes on Heartbreak episode, there are some moments of detail – Daisy found a small toilet between her cheeks in bed with James, for example. “I think writing fiction is more honest for me, because there are things that even I would be too embarrassed to say to myself,” Lord says. “I can write about sex and go into detail because I don’t have to worry about embarrassing someone or disturbing their privacy.”

The project comes at a time when homosexuality appears to be facing a PR crisis. Words like heteropessimism have entered popular discourse. Being in a relationship program fatigue is widespread, and girls, including celebrities such as Rosalía and Julia Fox, are showing themselves as single. Last year, a Vogue article titled Is Dating Embarrassing Now? it caused an internet storm, giving voice to the growing sentiment among young women that relationships are no longer the greatest sign of success or fulfillment they once were.

“I don’t know if it’s because parents make women work more,” says Lord. “Or because we were raised to be very intelligent.

Do they think dating is a modern problem? He said: “Dating apps have entered our brains. “Even if you don’t meet someone through an app, many times people treat each other like trash because they have the mindset of an app.” He has stopped using them himself. “People just shake during the day,” he shuddered.

And yet, even after years of writing heartbreaks, heartbreaks and heartbreaks about modern dating, Lord remains optimistic about his love life. “I think one day I will meet the person I love the most and run off into the sunset,” he said.