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    The Sunday Read: ‘Online Dating After 50 Can Be Miserable. But It’s Also Liberating.’

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    Adrienne Hurst and Sophia Lanman and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeWhen Maggie Jones’s marriage collapsed after 23 years, she was devastated and overwhelmed. She was in her 50s, with two jobs, two teenage daughters and one dog. She didn’t consider dating. She had no time, no emotional energy. But then a year passed. One daughter was off at college, the other increasingly independent. After several more months went by, she started to feel a sliver of curiosity about what kind of men were out there and how it would feel to date again. The last time she dated was 25 years ago, and even then, she fell into relationships mostly with guys from high school, college, parties, work. Now every man she knew was either married, too young, too old or otherwise not a good fit.That meant online dating — the default mode not just for the young but also for people Ms. Jones’s age. Her only exposure had been watching her oldest daughter, home from college one summer, as she sat on her bed rapidly swiping through guy after guy — spending no more than a second or two on each.Ms. Jones tells her story of online dating in later adulthood, and what she learned.There are a lot of ways to listen to ‘The Daily.’ Here’s how.We want to hear from you. Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Follow Michael Barbaro on X: @mikiebarb. And if you’re interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.Additional production for The Sunday Read was contributed by Isabella Anderson, Anna Diamond, Sarah Diamond, Elena Hecht, Emma Kehlbeck, Tanya Pérez, Frannie Carr Toth and Krish Seenivasan. More

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      Tinder’s C.M.O. Moonlights as a Matchmaker

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      Melissa Hobley believes in the power of dating apps, but she’s been moonlighting as an old-fashioned matchmaker for over a decade.It might seem odd that Melissa Hobley is a real-life matchmaker who is working with 50 to 100 singles around the globe at any given time.She has, after all, spent much of the last decade working for dating apps whose goal, presumably, is for singles to connect through their phones. She is the chief marketing officer of Tinder, a position she’s held since August 2022. Before that she worked for OkCupid for over five years.It’s not that Ms. Hobley believes that dating apps are dead or even dying, though some statistics show troubles. Bumble and Match Group, which owns Tinder, OKCupid, Hinge and Match.com, among other brands, have lost more than $40 billion in market value since 2021 as they struggle to attract young people to pay for the more expensive features.Ms. Hobley pointed to Tinder’s great success: It has 50 million users in 190 countries, she said. “Every three seconds a relationship starts on Tinder, which is actually crazy.” (This credence is rooted in a study Match Group did in 2023 that defined “relationship” as anything lasting more than three months.) But Ms. Hobley, 44, who splits her time between New York City and the North Fork of Long Island with her husband and two daughters, believes there are many ways for people to mingle. She wants to be involved in all of them.For Ms. Hobley, in-person matchmaking is a “hobby or a passion,” she said, not something she has “ever been paid to do.” Sometimes singles will reach out to her via email or social media asking for help. Other times she strikes up conversations with strangers while out and about. “I will just meet someone at an event or in line for a coffee shop or that amazing doughnut place in Sag Harbor, and we will start talking,” she said. “I’ll say, ‘You’re great. Let’s help you find someone as perfect as you.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Book Review: ‘There Is No Ethan,’ by Anna Akbari

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      Reading Anna Akbari’s memoir of online manipulation, you think you’ve seen it all — then you keep reading.THERE IS NO ETHAN: How Three Women Caught America’s Biggest Catfish, by Anna AkbariI did not expect to be shocked by “There Is No Ethan.” Online deception has become so ubiquitous that it’s boring. By now, the term “catfish,” which was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary a decade ago, seems almost quaint. But the twists and turns in Anna Akbari’s book are outrageous. I read it in one sitting, then spent days recounting her story to anyone who would listen, unable to shake off my indignation on behalf of the author and her fellow victims.The book begins in late 2010, when someone presenting himself as Ethan first messages Akbari, a sociologist teaching at New York University, on the online dating site OKCupid. Ethan’s photos are “approachably attractive” and his credentials seem impeccable: a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from M.I.T., a three-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side, an exciting (albeit mysterious) job that involves working for both Morgan Stanley and the U.S. government that he describes as “stealing from the rich.” Akbari is most drawn to Ethan’s “eagerness to keep the conversation going.” A persistent and intuitive communicator, Ethan stands out among the city’s innumerable self-absorbed and flaky men. For weeks, they message each other nonstop.But Ethan’s excuses for why he can’t meet in person grow increasingly implausible: first work, then weather, then a horrifying cancer diagnosis. When Akbari starts fact-checking and finds holes everywhere, Ethan chastises her: “You obviously distrust me right now, and when I’m going through such an ordeal, that’s really the last thing I need on my plate.” She wants to extricate herself but finds it impossible to ignore him; Ethan even persuades her to have cybersex. He offers to pay her rent. He asks her to go away with him for the weekend. When Akbari finally stops responding, she feels awful for abandoning Ethan before he has started chemotherapy.Then Akbari connects with two other women whose (simultaneous) relationships with Ethan mirror her own. Soon she begins hearing from more of his victims, all professionals in their 30s. Ethan has strung some of them along for years.Language is his weapon of choice, Akbari writes, “persuading and emotionally manipulating women with attention, affection and the promise of love and companionship because the thing many women, especially high-achieving women, lack most in this digital age — far more than access to money or sex — is meaningful romantic companionship.” Ethan’s victims have convinced themselves that he is real — and really cares for them — because he doesn’t reap any financial or physical sexual gain. He demands nothing except for, in one woman’s paraphrased words, “her time, openness and emotional vulnerability.”Through some clever sleuthing (and an eerily portentous dream) the group discovers Ethan’s real identity. He isn’t a typical catfisher, a “wannabe influencer,” as Akbari puts it, but instead a “highly educated overachiever” with multiple Ivy League degrees.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More