If you can pronounce all five of these words, chances are you’d hope your partner can too. Women on the internet are gleefully documenting their boyfriends trying (and failing) to pronounce words, and the comments are concerned... 

“He’d be so upset if he could read these comments.” 

“I’m bored, let’s read 8th grade textbooks.”

“And you’re dating him :/ ”

Enter ReadMe, the dating app for people whose love language IS language. ReadMe was developed by the astrology app Co-Star and Emily Segal. Segal is the founder of strategic consultancy NEMESIS, Deluge Books, and the term NormCore. The app connects people on shared interests in literature and Lacanian psycholinguistics. They use your language preferences to understand your desires. 

To start, users take a 25-question quiz where they essentially play “This or That” with book passages, and answer personal and literature-related questions. At the end, users are given a report detailing what their language preferences reveal, a few book recommendations, what they need out of a relationship, a challenge, and some questions to ask on a first date.

The app comes at an interesting time. Not only can men not read, they’re also reading performatively—carrying, reading, and displaying certain books to project themselves as smart and culturally fluent (this is a fine and totally normal thing to do, seriously, at least they’re reading). At the same time, your favorite celebrities have book clubs and newsletters, and bookstores have become cultural hubs for the influential. Ultimately, literacy is trending.

Do I think this will last? Maybe. Right now, their user base and social following are small, so matches are limited, but I think the idea has real value. People have long begged Co-Star for a dating app, but they reframed it as a chance to create something far more interesting. Dating apps are hellish while reading is en vogue, so this tackles two cultural moments at once. If nothing else, it’s nice to see someone breathe new life into a space associated with never-ending suffering.