Emma Perrier spent the summer of 2015 mending a broken heart, after a recent breakup. By September, the restaurant manager had grown tired of watching The Notebook alone in her apartment in Twickenham, a leafy suburb southwest of London, and decided it was time to get back out there. Despite the horror stories she’d heard about online dating, Emma, 33, downloaded a matchmaking app called Zoosk. The second “o” in the Zoosk logo looks like a diamond engagement ring, which suggested that its 38 million members were seeking more than the one-night stands offered by apps like Tinder.
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She snapped the three selfies the app required to “verify her identity.” Emma, who is from a volcanic city near the French Alps, not far from the source of Perrier mineral water, is petite, and brunette. She found it difficult to meet men, especially as she avoided pubs and nightclubs, and worked such long hours at a coffee shop in the city’s financial district that she met only stockbrokers, who were mostly looking for cappuccinos, not love.
It was a customer who had caused Emma’s heartache, two months earlier. Connor was one of London’s dashing “city boys,” and 11 years her junior. He had telephoned her at work to ask her on a date, which turned into an eight-month romance. They went night-fishing for carp near his parents’ home in Kent, where they sat holding hands in the darkness, their lines dangling in the water. One day at the train station, Connor told her it wasn’t working; he liked nightclubs more than he liked being in a relationship. When she protested, Connor said that he’d never loved her.