‘We mapped out our dream dating app. One where you couldn’t access someone’s profile photos until you’d reached a certain level of conversation. Then you could figure out if you were attracted to them on more than just that surface level.’
We sat back in our seats, grinning at each other. Level was the product of the angst of our early twenties, but we also thought it was a genuinely good idea. And we weren’t alone, judging by the array of people in front of us who’d been working tirelessly on the app to reach this launch date.
Maeve had been recording our speech, and she brought her phone down now, beaming with pride. ‘We’re going to watch this back when you’re both famous.’
‘You know,’ Ella said, tilting her head, ‘you might have saved a lot of time and energy if you’d just dated each other.’
Rory rolled his eyes, and I wasn’t far behind. As if we hadn’t heard this suggestion a hundred times before. Maeve, Rory, and I had been a set of three since our third night in first year university halls. We’d bonded over our mutual disgust for a fellow flatmate, who’d reheated his rice three nights in a row. Mum had drilled food hygiene into me before she sent me off to live alone, so I’d been horrified. As an experimental amateur chef with boundaries, Maeve had also been aghast. Rory, I’d since learnt, would have done the exact same thing and reheated his rice for a fourth night. He’d just been craving friendship. It only took one night of free-flowing conversation, a bottle of rosé and little to no self-consciousness for the bonds to form. We’d all been stuck with each other ever since.
‘And then all of you would be out of a job.’ I cradled my glass.
Ella nodded and raised her glass. ‘Fair point. Here’s to our brilliant CEOs. Let the single people of London start walking in twos like they’re boarding Noah’s Ark.’
Everyone followed suit, laughing around the table. It was the kind of thing that Isla, my brother’s girlfriend, would have called kismet. Or for regular people, destiny. We were crammed outside a busy pub near our office in the middle of Shoreditch, only a five-minute walk from the hub that Rory and I had started renting two years ago.
‘Just a thought’ – Maeve had leaned in conspiratorially – ‘now that you’ve created a dating app, you might want to actually consider dating.’
I didn’t bite. It was a weekly thing, this lecture from my best friend. Sure, I’d dated. My dating escapades were the whole reason that this venture had begun. But somehow, I’d never actually had a boyfriend. Not even one of those sixth-form relationships where you held hands on the bus. There was always an excuse – I was too busy, they’d been leaving Edinburgh whilst I’d been staying on, there wasn’t a ‘spark’ – why my situationships had fizzled out. I knew how to debrief a bad date like the back of my hand, but I’d never returned with rosy cheeks and a gushing story about how he’d held the door open and everything changed. Maeve had met Adrian whilst doing her doctorate in Leeds, after a string of very questionable exes that I’d been very vocal about. Rory had also had a couple of girlfriends, including Lottie, the girl he’d met two weeks after we’d moved to East London post-graduation. They’d bumped into each other at a bar when we’d been out for Maeve’s birthday, and for a while it seemed like he’d cracked the romance thing. She was the one, until she wasn’t. So for both of my best friends, I’d watched the cycle from hopeful beginnings to the bitter end. It didn’t exactly appeal. I’d grown up with two households for Christmas, and two birthday dinners, since my parents had split when I was 11 years old. I’d seen first-hand the fallout of two people completely wrong for each other, so whilst it wasn’t that I wanted to be alone forever, I would just rather be alone than with the wrong person. Joe brought enough romance to the family for both of us. He and Isla had been together since they were 15, walking home from school with their hands entwined and playing footsie under the dinner table when they thought Mum and I couldn’t see. They were the reason that the pressure was off for me.
I said as much to Maeve, who smirked. ‘You’re so predictable, Pen.’
Rory heard us, chiming in. ‘I have a secret conspiracy that she uses AI to talk to us.’
I shook my head, smiling down at my drink. These were my people. If anything, this – celebrating the launch of Level with both of them beside me – was kismet.
2
After the first initial flurry of excitement, it really was a waiting game. No one was meeting the love of their life overnight. We turned up to work each morning, checking the app for bugs and glitches, pouncing on Harriet as soon as she arrived to see if there was any media noise. Of good dates, bad dates, any dates. And then, two weeks later, it started to happen.
The concept of Level was this: you answered short, introductory questions about yourself first. Some of the questions were light-hearted – What is your idea of a dream first date? How would you spend an ideal weekend? – and some were heavier and asked about your political inclinations and whether you planned on trying for children. The app then paired you with six potential matches based on their answers, your answers, and proximity. You could start chatting to all of them (or just one of them), using prompts if needed to move the conversation along. Once you’d reached a level of chatting that hit our programmed target, you unlocked their photos. At that point, you could take it off the app and start dating – technically, you could start dating whenever you wanted, but research showed that people were 80 per cent less likely to go on a true blind date. If you kept chatting on the app after the photos were unlocked, the final level was an added extra. Your meet-cute. Despite it being part of daily life, people still got embarrassed about meeting their significant other on a dating app, preferring to make up their own story about how they met. So, at the final level, the app would spit out a meet-cute. An idea, based on prompts and conversation, for how you might have met in real life. You could use it as a cover story, or as your actual first date idea. Programming this last level had been a logistical nightmare, but it was worth it. Nothing was more stressful than planning a first date. Getting it delivered on a silver platter to you? Incredibly helpful. Or so we hoped.
***
I shoved the phone in Joe’s face whilst he fought back tears, his knife deep into a red onion. ‘Look.’
Credit to my big brother, he didn’t snap, instead taking in the tweet.
‘Tapas at St Katharine Docks, huh? Level isn’t sending people to KFC, then.’
I beamed down at my phone, and the girl who’d posted about her experience with Level. She seemed to be in her mid to late twenties, and she had a sausage dog in her profile photo. From the looks of things, she was a dating blogger. And she’d been for a very successful first date last night.
‘Our first success story.’ I leaned back on the bar stool with a happy sigh. ‘Or at least, our first hope of a success story. There is always time for it to go tits up.’
‘My sister, ever the optimist.’ Joe blinked back a fresh wave of tears. ‘Good God, are these onions radioactive? I’m surprised that people are even tweeting about their dating life – I would rather die.’
He did have a point. The issue with needing public noise for success was that people were kind of hesitant about sharing their dating app experiences online. @dateaholic97 was a rare gem.
‘I bet Rory is bouncing off the walls.’ He went back to his chopping, finishing it up before crouching to root around in his and Isla’s kitchen cupboards. I was bracing myself for crisis; the recipe that Isla had left him unattended with – an Ottolenghi recipe for sweet and smoky chicken – was beyond both of our repertoires. We’d been left in charge of dinner once when I was 15, and Mum had never quite managed to get the scorch marks out of her worktop.
‘He was quite excited, to say the least.’ In reality, he’d stood in the middle of our shared office and done an improv dance to ‘Love is in the Air’, pulling me in until I had no choice but to dance along with him. Never a dull day. I described this to Joe, who snorted.
‘Sounds like Ror.’
I could hear him banging around below. ‘What are you actually doing down there?’ I pinched a salted cashew from the tiny dishes that Isla had placed on their dining table. It was either that or a pumpkin seed – something that I maintained only belonged in a bird feeder.
‘You’d think turmeric would be easy to spot, wouldn’t you?’ My brother’s head finally appeared again, his hairline damp with the stress of being left alone whilst Isla had dashed out for emergency couscous. He wasn’t coping well with the responsibility. Having people’s lives in his hands, he could handle. Being responsible for roasting a chicken had tipped him over the edge.
‘I would ask you to help, but I think that might actually make the whole thing worse.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘And technically, that would be cheating.’ I raised my can of Diet Coke. ‘And I am many things, but I am not a cheater.’
Joe, who had disappeared again for another attempt, appeared from below deck, clutching a jar of bright yellow spice. ‘Aha! Victory is mine. So, what else are people saying online?’
Social media made launching a new product simultaneously way more difficult and a lot easier. Easier, because you could instantly reach thousands of users at once. Harder, because you were trying to break through the traffic of hundreds of brands doing the exact same thing. I scrolled through Harriet’s work online, wincing as I passed a promotional video Rory and I had done to introduce our app. In general, I preferred to leave most of the activity that required charisma and confidence to Rory, since he had both in abundance. In this rare video that they’d managed to squeeze out of me, we were sitting in the library in Edinburgh – Harriet had maintained that one of our strongest USPs was that we’d started Level as students, and I cringed at my accent. Did I really sound like that? It was a culmination of growing up a Londoner and then spending five years in Scotland before returning home. Sometimes, when I was distracted, I accidentally let out an ‘aye’, much to my family’s amusement.
‘Humiliating publicity aside,’ I said, scrolling past the video, ‘people seem to be enjoying the experience. A few men complaining about the blind-date element. Imagine my surprise.’
My brother scoffed. ‘If I’d been able to hook Isla in with my charm alone, and not the teenage overbite and the acne, things would have been a lot less stressful.’
I shoved another handful of cashews into my mouth. ‘Oh, look, here are some comments telling us that the female CEO has a weird nose.’
Joe paused to take a proper look at me before returning all attention to his chicken, poking it with a fork. ‘It’s not weird. Slightly crooked, maybe, but I’ve seen a lot of messed up noses. Yours isn’t weird.’
Given that Joe was training to specialise in Accident and Emergency, most of the people he saw on a daily basis probably weren’t feeling their best. It wasn’t much of a compliment. I brought up my phone camera, staring at the alignment of my nose. Was it weird?
He worked in silence for a few minutes peeling potatoes into neat wedges with expert precision whilst I responded to some of the comments from our Level profile. Joe had been the toddler who immediately stacked up building blocks in a perfectly aligned tower on his first try whilst the other children threw them on the floor and wailed. He’d taken some of his GCSEs early and had been reading brick-sized books whilst I’d still been getting my head around Biff, Chip, and Kipper. I hadn’t always been this close to my brother. With only two years between us, we’d been arch-nemeses during childhood. But in the wake of an emotional divorce, siblinghood had become a tag-team effort. When Joe had gone off to university in Bristol, I’d had to do the dashing between Mum and Dad’s houses alone. Things had become a whole lot more complicated when I’d fled to Edinburgh. Teaching them how to FaceTime had been a bloody nightmare.
Although our parents’s divorce had been a blessing – there were only so many arguments two children could listen to from the top of the stairs – they’d both reacted to it in entirely different ways. Dad, realising his part in the breakdown of their marriage, had never quite recovered. Mum had blossomed, finally getting the time for herself that she’d craved. It made for awkward conversations (‘no, Dad, I promise Mum is finding it hard too’) but at least it had meant we only needed to worry about one of them. It had strained my relationship with Joe for a little while, but we’d survived the ordeal, and now as adults we were closer than ever, and our parents had found their way to civility too. My big brother had always been older than his years, obsessed with his routine of drinking a black coffee and reading the newspaper on Sunday. Every week he sent me a photo of the crossword, and we’d race to finish it first. The current tally was 11–17 to me, and I planned to never let him forget it.
