Nothing Personal

At forty-nine, Nancy Jo Sales was a celebrated Vanity Fair writer with a broken heart and a nagging question: how had she ended up alone? A younger friend suggested Tinder, which was brand new at the time, and she signed up. That began a chaotic stretch of online dating that she recounts here with frankness and a lot of humor. Along the way she dated a string of younger men and eventually fell for one who was less than half her age.

The experience also changed her work. Sales, an award-winning journalist and a single mother, became a prominent critic of the dating-app industry. She wrote articles on it and made her directorial debut with the HBO documentary Hooking Up in the Digital Age. Nothing Personal combines that reporting with her own story of dating in middle age. She admits how hooked she became on the apps and jokes about dick pics, sexting, and the fear of missing out that comes with endless options.

The book is also a feminist investigation of what she calls Big Dating. Sales asks whether the companies behind the apps want users to find love or simply to keep swiping, and she argues that they profit from people's deepest needs and desires. She looks back at the history of modern courtship and at her own relationships to show how sexism has long shaped dating for women.

She closes by asking what courtship will become if Silicon Valley's tech giants design its future. The question carries extra weight during social distancing and a global pandemic, when the rules of romance are shifting again. Sales is also the author of American Girls, a book about teenage girls and social media.