Beyond the Swipe: Can a New Dating App Make Literature the Ultimate Love Language?

Imagine this: you are standing in a quiet, independent bookstore while Norah Jones or perhaps The Cranberries plays softly in the background. You stand on your tippy-toes, stretching your arm to reach for a heavy volume on the top shelf, only for your hand to brush against that of a beautiful stranger who happens to be reaching for the exact same niche paperback. You lock eyes, feel a sudden and familiar excitement flutter in your belly, and, well, the rest is history, isn’t it?

Except, of course, it isn’t. Because sadly, this is real life, rather than a romantic comedy from the turn of the millennium. From Notting Hill to You’ve Got Mail, the fantasy of meeting a soulmate in a bookstore is one of the most enduring and familiar romantic tropes in popular culture, even if it is not particularly realistic. Books have long felt naturally ripe for romance, intellectual discourse, and deep emotional projection. It is one of the primary reasons why celebrity pairings like Dua Lipa and Callum Turner have become so intensely idolized after the couple reportedly discovered they were reading the same novel when they reconnected, and why “performative men” toting around copies of bell hooks’ All About Love have prompted so much online dissection and cultural commentary in recent years. The idea of deeply connecting with someone over literature remains a dream scenario, and it is a concept that brand strategist Emily Segal knows exceptionally well. In fact, it served as the core inspiration for Readme, a new dating app designed explicitly for people whose primary love language is language itself.

Launched this past September, Readme arrives as the latest entry in a growing sea of niche dating applications, emerging amid a broader cultural wellness wave. Intriguingly, the platform comes from the exact same team behind the enormously popular astrology app Co-Star. Segal, who serves as Co-Star’s Head of Brand, founded Readme alongside Banu Guler, the CEO of Co-Star. For bookish types, romantics, and literature enthusiasts, Readme’s core premise—using literature as a pathway to love—is undeniably intriguing. But in an era characterized by extreme dating app fatigue, where millions of users report feeling utterly exhausted by endless swiping, is matching over books really enough to make people want to engage with a dating platform once again?

According to Segal, the answer is a resounding yes. To the co-founder, books represent the pinnacle of romance. Alongside her extensive work as a cultural trend forecaster, Segal is also the author of the 2020 novel Mercury Retrograde, a book that examined contemporary culture and technology through the lens of astrology. That very book was partly how she first crossed paths with Guler, who is now her business partner. Although users had been persistently asking for a Co-Star dating app from the very beginning, Segal notes that Guler was initially hesitant, feeling strongly that astrology was only one narrow way of examining true compatibility between individuals. As the pair began discussing what an alternative, more thoughtful dating app could look like, they realized that the books you hand-pick to give a partner, the poems someone casually sends you in the middle of a workday, or even the intimate experience of scanning a new lover’s bookshelf the morning after staying over felt far more emblematic of a genuine, lasting connection.

These organic, literary moments represented the polar opposite of the super-transactional, disposable dating app culture that so many modern singles have come to deeply hate, according to Segal. It is, in her view, diametrically opposed to the mechanics of conventional dating apps. Despite what one might naturally assume, Readme does not simply match you with people who share identical reading tastes or favorite authors. Instead, as many users quickly discover upon downloading the platform, the app collects information about how you personally relate to language, and then uses those insights to try and understand how you might actually show up in an intimate relationship.

The platform achieves this through a comprehensive, 25-part quiz that asks a deliberate mix of literature-related questions, such as "How do you feel about your own writing?", alongside more personal, introspective questions like "Which of these things are you surprisingly bad at?" However, the vast majority of the quiz consists of carefully curated pairs of literary quotes, asking users to choose which one they instinctively prefer over the other. Think of classic, emotionally resonant lines like Margaret Atwood’s "Can a heart leap? Can a person be dizzy with relief?" juxtaposed against Peter Schjeldahl’s observations, such as "The tone of his through-line may be treble-register, slight, and reedy, but if you stood in its way it would flatten you."

Reflecting on the experience, many users note that they feel uniquely positioned—or perhaps entirely unsuited—for a platform like Readme. Those with a background in creative writing, former book bloggers, and professionals who write for a living often find themselves drawn to the premise while remaining deeply skeptical of modern romance apps as a whole. Yet, creating a profile and completing the multi-part quiz can deliver an experience largely absent from mainstream dating apps: actual fun, intellectual stimulation, and genuine emotion. After all, it is difficult to read evocative lines such as "the way the wet skin of her shoulder felt private against mine, damp from the earlier rain" and not feel at least a little stirred or intellectually engaged.

Once a user finishes the introductory quiz, their specific responses to literature are analyzed and used to map them across three distinct axes: how they relate to desire, how they communicate it, and how they make sense of it. This psychological and literary mapping helps the app sort individuals into one of twelve distinct archetypes. For instance, an archetype like "Utopia in our Lifetime" signifies that a user feels somewhat outside of the traditional social pact, that their communication is motivated by the impossible hope of one day making perfect sense to others, and that they heavily rely on structured systems to make sense of a chaotic world.

Although the app does not actively filter your potential matches based solely on your shared archetype, once you successfully match with another user, you are shown a brief description of their archetype, a few bullet points explaining what it supposedly reveals about their personality, and an estimated percentage of your overall similarity.

Segal emphasizes that these archetypes are designed to tell users something genuinely interesting and important about the way they relate to other people, how they fall in love, and how they might behave inside a committed relationship. While there is no astrology integrated into Readme, Segal describes the archetypes as the intellectual equivalent of a horoscope. And though the app does offer tailored book recommendations to its users, it is not trying to function as a literary database or a Letterboxd for lovers. The creators deliberately avoided the performative trap of letting users list their top ten favorite books. Instead, the focus remains firmly on what people can learn about themselves through their personal relationship with writing, bypassing the performative signaling of taste that dominates so much of the broader internet.

Like other niche dating apps currently operating in the digital space, Readme certainly has its work cut out for it. Aside from the massive, entrenched market dominance of industry giants like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble, it is an open secret that young people today are experiencing profound fatigue regarding dating apps altogether. According to a 2024 survey conducted by Forbes Health and OnePoll, an overwhelming 79 per cent of Gen Z dating-app users reported feeling mentally and emotionally exhausted by the entire ecosystem.

According to Segal, what is glaringly missing from the current market is a platform that provides a deeper, more substantive picture of who an individual truly is—a gap that Readme is actively hoping to fill. The co-founder also notes that there is historical precedent for this type of literary matchmaking, pointing to earlier digital experiments like Nerve.com’s dating service in the early 2000s, which matched users through detailed profiles and deep questions about their cultural tastes, as well as the legendary classified dating ads published in The New York Review of Books since 1968.

While there are countless other human interests one could theoretically bond over—such as music, cinema, visual art, or shared hobbies—Readme’s fundamental bet is that there is something uniquely powerful and enduring about the written word. It is a thesis that even hardened dating cynics can ultimately get behind. In any case, even for those who fail to find their romantic soulmate on the platform, users are almost guaranteed to walk away with a handful of new books, poets, and writers newly added to their radar, which is arguably more than most modern technology platforms can promise. As Segal notes, books, poetry, writing, and language are simply an intrinsic part of the human spirit and remain inherently romantic, serving not as the only thing people connect on, but simply as a meaningful place to start.