TeaHere’s a scene from Annie Lord’s novel that will be instantly familiar to any young person who has spent time in a pub or nightclub recently. Daisy and Maya, two best friends in their mid-20s, lament the poor state of the dating market.
“It’s just shit out there,” says Daisy. “Every time we go out, there’s a decent single guy and then there’s about 40 beautiful women with master’s degrees and shag haircuts and what’s the point of trying.”
“It fits perfectly with my experience… dating is very depressing at the moment,” Lord laughs as we sit in an east London café. “something’s got to give!” The 30-year-old author has made a career out of exploring the complexities and intimacies of modern dating.
In her mid-20s, dealing with a breakup, Lorde wrote an essay about it for Vice. The piece went viral, a book agent contacted her, and the resulting memoir, Notes on Heartbreak, published in 2023, became a cult hit. Written with brutal honesty and detail like a diary, it transformed him from a freelance journalist into one of the most recognizable historians dating back to Millennials and Generation Z. Then came her fortnightly British Vogue dating column, in which she documented the situations, romantic confusion and the increasingly surreal experience 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,” she says. “It was from that that a lot of things just snowballed.”
Now she has turned to fiction. Her debut novel, The Project, centers on Daisy and Maya, two single women living in south-east London who, after years of navigating a sea of terrible dates with terrible men, come to a ridiculous conclusion: if there are no decent men available, maybe they should just make one.
Daisy decides to take in a vulnerable but potentially salvageable male friend named James and try to better him physically and emotionally: buy him better clothes, encourage him to talk about his feelings, take him to feminist lectures. Daisy thinks, “Maybe he wouldn’t be so bad if he got some girlfriends, went to therapy, got a well-fitting white T-shirt, and read some books.”
The original spark for the novel came when Lord became briefly involved with a friend of a friend who was “quite a woman and a bit of a nightmare”, but was also a sweetheart inside. She was writing another book at the time, but her friend joked that her next book should be about a reinvention of her style. However, she insists that James is not based entirely on her friend. “She’s a mix of a lot of people I’ve dated or known,” says Lord. “The book is a collage of my life.”
Like his non-fiction writing, Lord at The Project has an uncanny ability to turn private observations of a group chat into compelling content. The novel depicts the textures of contemporary dating with anthropological precision, the way Dolly Alderton, Helen Fielding or Nora Ephron did for previous generations of women.
Within the comic makeover setup, Lord poses the question: Why do so many intelligent, attractive women feel as if the dating market is fundamentally broken?
Growing up in romcoms, Lord says she internalized a view of heterosexuality in which men competed for women, but the reality is very different. “You may feel desired all the time. Men stalk you, people call you attractive. But then you say, if I’m so desirable, why is it so hard to actually meet someone?” She continues. “I really hope a lot of single women will read the book and feel less lonely.”
Lord grew up on the outskirts of Leeds and has always had a passion for writing confessionals. At university, her student paper had a column on sex and relationships. “I’m not a very private person,” she says happily. “I’m a very sharing person. I’m not easily insulted – I share my pain with everyone.”
That lack of embarrassment has turned out to be unexpectedly useful. For several years, Lorde turned her romantic life into copy for her Vogue column, with articles like Why Do I Get Angry When Men Open Up to Me?, How Much of You Is Too Much to Put in a Casual Hookup?, and Why Do I Suddenly Become Insecure in Bed?. This suited his natural tendency towards candor, but it came with complications.
“There were definitely people I was seeing where it made things awkward,” she says. “People were reading online to find out how I felt about something.” Eventually, she realized she wanted a break from being the heroine of her own work, and stopped writing the column in 2024. “I decided I wanted to prioritize my romantic life a little more,” she says. “It was really revealing.”
However, the exposure had already become an occupational hazard. While writing Notes on Heartbreak, which she says began life as “a crazy, long, neurotic letter to my ex”, she had to take into account the fact that the book’s central character was not fictional.
“There were some things (my ex-wife) wanted to get out,” she says. “I already knew what he would feel uncomfortable about… He’s a much more private person than I am. But it was never a book where I was talking trash about my ex-boyfriend.”
Even though the project is a step away from the raw autobiographical territory of Notes on Heartbreak, it has moments of hilarious personal detail – for example, when Daisy was in bed with James, she found a bit of toilet roll between the cheeks of her buttocks. Lord says, “I actually think writing novels is almost more honest to me, because there are things that even I would be embarrassed to take credit for that I can just say.” “I can write a sex scene and put in a lot of detail because I don’t have to worry about embarrassing someone or invading their privacy.”
The project comes at a moment when heterosexuality itself is going through a PR crisis. Terms such as heteropessimism have entered mainstream discourse. Dating app fatigue is widespread, and young women, including celebrities like Rosalía and Julia Fox, are identifying as celibate. Last year, Vogue published an article titled Is it shameful to have a boyfriend now? It took the Internet by storm, giving voice to a growing sentiment among young women that a relationship is no longer the ultimate indicator of success or fulfillment as it once was.
“I don’t know if it’s because patriarchy has forced women to do so much work on themselves,” Lord says. “Or because we’ve grown up to be more emotionally intelligent. But it feels like women have done all this work and then it’s hard to find someone who matches them.”
Does she think this dating malaise is an exclusively modern phenomenon? “Dating apps have infiltrated our brains,” she says. “Even if you don’t meet someone through an app, people often view each other as disposable because they’ve got the mentality of an app.” He himself has stopped using them to a great extent. “People just get mad every day,” she says with a shrug.
And yet, despite spending years documenting the heartbreak, disappointment, and absurdities of modern dating, Lorde remains optimistic about her love life. “I think one day I’ll meet someone I really like and run off into the sunset,” she says. “I actually feel definitely more awkward about it than ever before.”
