In the late summer of 2020, when much of normal social life was suspended, a relationship that I had been in for several years abruptly collapsed. I was thirty-nine and scared by the idea that I would not be reproducing the kind of heteronormative nuclear family I had grown up in. I wandered the sidewalks of my Brooklyn neighborhood, where discarded masks littered the gutters, with a sense of having been exiled from my own life. My apartment, with its cat and its plants, still existed but was no longer my home; I could get a glass of cold prosecco at my favorite bar, but the people I used to see there seemed to have vanished. In Haruki Murakami's novel "1Q84," a character climbs down a ladder into a parallel existence in which things appear to be the same but nothing really is.

The online dating app has announced that its latest update allows users to type a word that describes their gender identity. The West Hollywood, California-based company says in a blog post Tuesday that users also can choose to be shown in searches that best reflect that identity.

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