Smell is often dismissed as the least important sense. But it’s the funk that draws us together.

Two Southern neighbors form a layered bond.

A first date; a viewing of a classic musical.

Match Group, which owns most major online dating services, screens for sexual predators on Match—but not on Tinder, OkCupid or Plenty of Fish. A spokesperson said, “There are definitely registered sex offenders on our free products.”

Paul Gonzales scammed his online dates into buying him expensive dinners. Then they made him pay.

For years he used fake identities to charm women out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then his victims banded together to take him down.

New love, lost love, and origins.

Odessa High School students know her as “Betty,” a ghost that haunts the auditorium at night.  But few know much about the real Betty, whose 1961 murder was “the most sensational crime in West Texas in its day.”

A whale permeates a series of culture clashes.

Lessons for dating and dying.

“I never got the ‘I’ve never seen a black woman, let me touch your hair’ vibe, it was more just like, ‘Hi, attractive person, let’s do this.’”

Lily gets ready for her first date.

A young woman's fears and observations, both past and present.

A story of high school, sexuality, and tagging; from Puerto del Sol's first online issue.

On the front lines of a dating culture dominated by right and left swipes.

Interactions and complications ensue at a Seattle wedding.

An oral history of the Tinderverse.

On fictional versions of a certain kind of man.

"I’ve known a few of these guys in my lifetime, all variations on the cad theme. There was Clifford, a tennis-playing Long Island boy who also sailed and all that junk. There was Daniel, straight from L.A., who had rigid opinions about how a woman should look, as did Ian, a barrel-chested charmer who strippers genuinely liked."

A new boyfriend complicates the creative and personal relationship of two teenage musicians.

"I was asking if she had figured out the fifth part because we had worked on three or four different versions, and John said all our music talk was boring. Kenna looked at him for a second, and I could tell she was annoyed, but she wasn’t going to do anything about it. He was limiting her. The old Kenna might have dumped his Denver Scramble on his head. She just made a face."

Sex and communication in experimental fragments.

"We are in your white bed full of light drinking white wine and it is dark. I balance the base of the glass on the side of my naked hip and look at the marble spa tub in the bathroom. There is a flushed gleam bouncing off the mirror, fainting exhaling ebbing back into the room and I ghost the smoke a reprise a remorse of sighing and feeling nothing but beam."

Two friends commiserate and reflect on their single lives.

"This was the first time she’d ever asked a man out on a date. She was from a small Midwestern town and had been brought up very old-school, very he holds the door open, he comes in to meet the parents, he makes the requisite phone call. But five years of liberal education—essays by Adrienne Rich, press conferences about Anita Hill, dormitories full of post–Gloria Steinem girls who spoke out loud about equality and in secret waited by their telephones—well, it had all confused the issue, for better or worse, and she crossed her fingers in her mittens. What would he say, what would he say?"

A set of instructions about how to handle culture clashes in modern dating.

"You’ll exchange names. His will be something like John or Jack or Jim — something with a J, something typical and boring. If he’s smart, he’ll make a joke about this. Not like your name. So beautiful. He’ll ask for its meaning. Give it to him. Land of the Canyons. Bringer of Hope. Gazelle Returning From Water. Your people have such a way with words. It’ll excite him. He’ll tell you (you were right!) he’s a writer. You’ll be impressed. He’ll say you’re prettier than anything he’d write. When he goes outside for a smoke, go with him."

On the internet dating pool.

What one woman spends in a year.