A former lawyer, comedian, and wellness events host, Lux tried “all the apps.” She lasted only three months. “The swipe fatigue and the confrontational nature of those systems poisoned my heart,” she tells me via Zoom.

Lux was struck by the limited information-a picture and some words, as she put it-through which people were supposed to connect. “Everyone gets reduced to making a decision about love based on symmetry,” she says of the sea of profile pics. “Every time you match with somebody, there’s a combination of excitement but also fear, because you’re in these weirdly anonymous, antisocial contexts.”

With $2 million in seed funding from investors including Questlove and Hugh Jackman, La Vette is attempting to create a more careful, self-aware space for dating and socializing-the kind Lux wishes she had when she first started dating post-divorce

One of the most pressing and painful problems, as Lux saw it, was ghosting.