ARTICLE IN THE WASHINGTON POST ON DECEMBER 8, 2029
This is one of our “Woman Least Likely” series of pieces about the women in the United States who have taken on leadership roles in politics, business and industry, despite being “unlikely candidates.” This week’s piece, by Maria Ferreira, is about Bryony Kinsella, 31, the founder and CEO of Adapt, a new dating app for women that is now the world’s largest by user numbers.
Bryony Kinsella can’t tell me the dating app she used to work for as head of strategic partnerships, although she assures me that it was the world’s biggest. I’m not sure how this admission will skirt around the boundaries of the NDA she signed when she left, but Bryony seems confident she’s in the clear.
We meet in her huge corner office at her company’s midtown headquarters, a space befitting the boss of a multibillion-dollar company. Adapt is the first unicorn of the post-Plague world and is now, by user count, the world’s biggest dating app.
“Oh my God, it feels so good to have the numbers we do. When I first started my company, I got so much abuse. Internet access is now back to pre-Plague levels in most developed countries but three years ago we were all still scrabbling around for allotted hours of bandwidth and cell reception was questionable at best, remember? But I knew really early on that I was going to start this. Those infrastructure problems were always going to be solved, it was just a matter of time. The biggest problem of mankind, of all time, was going to need a solution and fast.”
My head spins a little at the reference to the biggest problem of man- or womankind. Does she mean finding a vaccine?
“The great question of our time: How to find love when there are literally no men left? The phrases single women always used to hear like ‘there’s plenty of fish in the sea’ and ‘as soon as you stop looking for love, it’ll find you’ do not apply anymore. The sea is empty. It became the thing to talk about, when you weren’t talking about who else had died: How am I going to meet someone? Even in the apocalypse, human beings have the same needs. We all want to feel loved, to be desired, to feel like we’re not alone in this insane, terrifying world.”
I have to ask what Bryony’s job at the unnamed world’s-former-biggest-dating-app involved. Head of strategic partnerships sounds like a phrase from a TV show about Silicon Valley. Bryony laughs in good humor at my ignorance. “Basically, I made us money and raised our profile by pairing our app with other brands—so I was obsessed with numbers. Data was my life. When did men and women use the app most? When were they most likely to say yes or no to a potential match? For the record, in summer people get choosy and December is easy pickings. What percentage of matches became conversations and what percentage of those conversations resulted in an exchange of phone numbers?”
The thing I really want to know is how that data-driven role led to the big “aha!” moment of knowing she needed to set up a female-only dating site with different settings depending on how much romantic experience a woman has had with other women.
“When the Plague started, the weirdest thing happened. You’d assume that when loads of men are starting to die, men would become a valuable commodity, right? The basic rules of economics would suggest that as the supply of men decreased, the demand for them would increase. From the sharp rise in reports of abusive messages we received—messages with unrequested dick pics, insulting demands for sex, etc.—a lot of our male users thought the tide would turn that way. But it was the opposite. Even at the beginning stages of the Plague when maybe 5 to 10 percent of the male population was sick, women did two things. They started dating less, and if they were dating, they dated women.” She pauses, and waves her hands in annoyance. Clearly, she has been misquoted before. “Obviously not all women. But a significant number. Between March and June 2026, 40 percent of regular female users stopped using the app. In that same time frame, of the women who stayed on the app, 25 percent changed their preferences from ‘Woman only seeking men’ to ‘Woman seeking men and women’ or ‘Woman only seeking women.’ I think it made complete sense—why would you open yourself up to grief and sadness? What’s the point in dating someone who will almost definitely be dead by the following Sunday? For the first time, women could genuinely say ‘Maybe he died?’ about a date that stood them up.”
She sits back, with a triumphant expression to which she is entitled. Bryony Kinsella is the woman who has single-handedly understood and then monetized women’s emotions about romance and dating throughout the years of the Plague. So, after that realization, she knew there had to be a new app?
She nods vigorously. “The app I used to work for was falling apart as I was trying to figure out a plan for moving forward. It’s hard to describe how bizarre it was working in business back in 2026. Lots of men were still technically employed but not working, or not showing up to work because, hello, they were probably going to die. E-mails went unanswered, meetings didn’t happen, contracts lapsed. Almost everything ground to a halt. My main priority was using the data we had to ensure that we kept going so that I would still have a job in ‘the New World,’ whatever that would look like. My line manager at the time—one of the vice presidents of the company—was literally having a daily meltdown. She came into the office two days a week and spent most of that time crying. She was married and she had a son, so I guess she was panicked, but I liked my job. I wanted to have a way to pay my mortgage even after the apocalypse meant we’d be in a barter economy or something. We were all terrified but some of us wanted to get through it by keeping some stability and working through it. Old wounds. Anyway. I took records of as much data as I could and handed in my notice—to my line manager, who wasn’t in the office—on August 3, 2026. I took three of the female coders with me and had a prototype of Adapt up and running by October 2, 2026. We went live on November 1, 2026, and we were the biggest dating app in the world by February 15, 2029. I’m still mad that we missed Valentine’s Day by one day. One day!”
But why not just work within the old app? Why something new? “Look, if you had asked me what would need to happen for me to own the biggest dating app in the world, the last thing I would have said was ‘reduce the male population by 90 percent,’ but change allows for new entrants to the market. The other apps had issues. Most of them had primarily male executive leadership teams, coding teams and boards, so as the Plague ravaged the male population it affected their company structures. In that sense I had a head start as—newsflash—I’m a woman and, until two months ago, I employed only women. Secondly, women connected preexisting dating apps with their old lives and the way the world used to be. Swiping for half an hour on a Sunday evening looking for cute boys, having a quick conversation and maybe going for a drink the following Friday, after which you may or may not sleep with him, was no longer an option. That’s not how the world works anymore. Unless you own a company deemed to provide a ‘necessary economic service’ as I do or you’re in a category of ‘essential professions’ like medicine, law, policing or engineering, you get the job you’re assigned by the state and that’s that. We do jobs now because we have to, not because we want to. We eat the foods that are available, not the foods that we crave. We have children if that privilege is afforded to us by a lottery, not because we met a nice guy, fell in love and ‘it’s the right time.’
“Life now has a lot of requirements and not a lot of joy. So, a dating app that says ‘We get it: it sucks that your life has changed beyond recognition, but guess what? You can still have love and sex and something that makes you feel less alone’ is a welcome piece of normalcy.”
Does she want to ever introduce men to the platform?
“Ha, no! They don’t need any help finding women. No, in all seriousness, it’s partly that. If a man wants to be in a relationship with a woman, the statistics are in his favor, put it that way. But it’s more because of hope. Do you know what’s worse than your life’s plans falling apart in the space of a few weeks as the world collapses? Hoping that somehow, despite the odds, your plans of a husband and two kids and a white picket fence will still come true. Women go on Adapt to find love in a new way. I don’t want them to be faced with the question, when they first sign up, ‘Are you interested in men . . . still? Do you hold out hope . . . still?’ Because the numbers don’t add up. There are nine women for every man.”
Does Bryony hope to meet a man, fall in love? She sighs. I guess she must get this question a lot. In return for my commonly asked question, I receive a rehearsed response. “I’m single and I don’t anticipate that changing. Hopefully I’ll be able to have a child one day but I try not to build it up as an important goal because there’s absolutely nothing I can do to make it happen. Most things in the world don’t operate on a ‘return on investment’ basis anymore. Before the Plague, when I was interviewed about my job I always used to say that it was a numbers game; if you spend enough hours on the app, swipe a sufficient amount, message your matches and arrange dates, the chances are that you’ll meet someone and, perhaps if you’re lucky, fall in love.” She smiles ruefully. “It was a simpler time. I can’t put in the effort to meet a man or have a child. The odds are pretty stacked against me now. But I can put effort into building my company, employing more people in jobs that are interesting, and help women more flexible than me find love. That will do for now.”
As I’m being walked out, thanking Bryony for her time, I ask the big question everyone keeps asking. “Do you think lots of the women in relationships with other women have had a shift in sexuality, or was their sexuality always there, the way it is?”
“You know, we don’t pretend that women are suddenly all gay now. There’s no doubt that female sexuality is more fluid than male sexuality is, although that’s not saying much. But the fact is that humans don’t like to be alone and there aren’t a lot of men now, so we do what we can to still feel like the people we used to be.”
It’s a simple, straightforward answer from a complex, successful woman who knows exactly what she, and other women, want. But the question will inevitably be asked for many years to come.