Juniper was over Tinder. A recent college grad living in rural Connecticut, they’d been subject to the swipe-and-ghost thing a few too many times. Then, this spring, Juniper submitted an ad to @_personals_, an Instagram for lesbian, queer, transgender, and non-binary people looking for love (and other stuff). The post, titled "TenderQueer Butch4Butch," took Juniper two weeks to craft, but the care paid off: the ad ultimately garnered well over 1,000 likes—and more than 200 messages.

"I was so used to the Tinder culture of nobody wanting to text back," Juniper says. "All of the sudden I had hundreds of queers flooding my inbox trying to hang out." The response was invigorating, but ultimately Juniper found their match by responding to someone else: Arizona, another recent college grad who had written a Personals ad titled "Rush Limbaugh’s Worst Nightmare". "Be still my heart," Juniper messaged them; soon they had a FaceTime date, and spent the next three weeks writing each other letters and poems before Arizona drove seven hours from Pittsburgh to visit Juniper in Connecticut. Now they plan on moving to western Massachusetts together. (Both asked to use their first names only for this article.)

"I'm pretty sure we decided to move to the same place and live together within the first two weeks of talking. 'You're really cute, but we live in different places. Do you want to U-Haul with me up to Western Mass?'" Juniper says, giggling. "And they were like, 'Yeah, sure!' It was like no question."

Juniper (left) and Arizona met on Personals. Arizona

Kelly Rakowski, the creator of Personals, smiles when telling me about Juniper and Arizona's romance. Shortly after the pair connected via Rakowski's Instagram account, they sent her an email saying "we fell so hard and so fast (I think we still have bruises?)" and talking about the Rural Queer Butch art project they were doing. They attached several photos they made as part of the project—as well as a video. "They were like, 'It's PG.' It's totally not PG,'" Rakowski says now, sitting at a cafe in Brooklyn and laughing. "They're so in love, it's crazy."

This is, of course, exactly what Rakowski hoped would happen. A fan of old-school, back-of-the-alt-weekly personals ads, she wanted to create a way for people to find each other through their phones without the frustrations of dating apps. "You have to be present to write these ads," she says. "You're not just throwing up your selfie. It's a friendly environment; it feels healthier than Tinder." And now that the 35,000 people who follow Personals seem to agree with her, she wants to take on those apps—with an app of her own.

Kelly Rakowski created Personals after being inspired by the looking-for-love ads in the lesbian erotica magazine On Our Backs. Cait Oppermann

But unlike the services rooted in the selfie-and-swipe mentality, the Personals app will focus on the things people say and the ways others connect to them. Unsurprisingly, Arizona and Juniper are one of the poster couples in the video for the Kickstarter Rakowski launched to fund her project. If it reaches its $40,000 goal by July 13, Rakowski will be able to turn the ads into a fully-functioning platform where users can upload their own posts, "like" ads from others, and message each other in hopes of finding a match.