Valentine’s Day | Two initiatives reimagining love for the disabled and for senior citizens

When Mumbai-based Khushi Ganatra, 35, turned to dating apps to look for a life partner, or even a companion, she had no luck. “No one wants to talk to me once I state that I am a wheelchair user,” she says. Born with spina bifida, Ganatra’s experience reflects the quiet exclusion faced by many persons with disabilities (PWDs) seeking intimacy and belonging.

On Valentine’s Day, when the idea of companionship is widely feted, for PWDs, forming romantic and social connections often remains far more complex. “It doesn’t even strike my own family that I have desires and dream of marriage,” says Ganatra.

Many PWDs face insurmountable barriers when navigating mainstream dating and social networking platforms. The challenges range from poor accessibility and lack of inclusive design to social stigma and rejection based solely on disability.

According to WHO/UN estimates, globally more than 16% of the population lives with a significant disability, indicating the number of Indians with disabilities could be over 200 million (more than 10 crore). And Cupid can be cruel.

Finding connections

(L to R) Gopika Kapoor and her son Vir, with Mihan and his mother Moneisha Gandhi. Kapoor and Gandhi are the founders of the Buddy Up Network (BUN) app.

It took two Mumbai-based women, mothers of neurodivergent boys, to plug this gap and offer a ray of hope for this section of society.

“My 21-year-old son Mihaan has Down Syndrome and though he studied in a mainstream school, as he approached his teens, I realised that all his friends were going to move on to college and their paths would cease to cross. He needed a new companion and I hunted for a platform where he could meet other young people like himself, but did not find any,” says Moneisha Gandhi, 54.

A chance introduction to another 21-year-old, Vir, who has autism, proved to be life-changing for Mihaan. Both boys hit it off instantly.

And that inspired Gandhi and Vir’s mother, Gopika Kapoor, to launch Buddy Up Network (BUN), an inclusive social networking app, in 2024. It allows users to search for friends based on their location, interests, age, gender and disability.

“While there are several good services for PWDs, a platform for making social connections was missing,” says Kapoor, 51. “Many PWDs feel isolated and lonely as they don’t have the same kind of social opportunities as non-disabled people. Mihaan and Vir were lucky to find each other and their friendship made us realise how powerful such a connection can be for one’s sense of wellbeing.”

Khushi Ganatra, BUN user and disability activist

Once the app was launched, the founders realised that people were not just looking for friendship, but also for love, companionship and life partners. Now, users can indicate on their profile the kind of relationship they are seeking. With an average of 150 daily active users, most in the 20-30 age bracket, BUN is slowly gaining traction, say the founders.

Take, for instance, 23-year-old Bhruguraj Rathod from Gandhinagar in Gujarat. After discovering the app through a friend, he is hoping to find a life partner. But in the meantime, he has forged many friendships online with other visually impaired users like him.

“Women on regular dating apps just block me, but here I have found a family,” Rathod says cheerfully. He often chats about movies and music with his new pals, and adds that the app is safe and easy to use with a screen reader.

“We are not your typical dating app,” says Gandhi. “No swiping, etc. We are just a community space for people with disabilities to gather and make connections, both platonic and romantic as per their needs.” A total of 5,547 connections have been made on the app so far.

Pioneering efforts

Inclove, among the first inclusive matchmaking apps, founded in 2014 by Kalyani Khona and Shankar Srinivasan, was also launched with a similar ethos like BUN. To eliminate social barriers and provide a forum for differently able people to find partners. However, the app shut down in 2019 as the team faced “challenges in scaling and monetisation, plus it was hard to reach out to this audience”, says Khona. Despite these limitations, it wasn’t an exercise in futility, as out of 10,000 matches made on Inclove, almost 8% converted into marriage, and many of them have children too, adds Khona.

Judgment-free spaces

For India’s rapidly growing senior population, love increasingly takes gentler, broader forms — companionship, emotional safety, shared purpose, and being truly seen.

Loneliness among older people is frequently misunderstood. It isn’t always about living alone. Many senior citizens experience loneliness even within families or marriages, when they feel unheard or invisible. According to the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India, 13%-14% of seniors report frequent loneliness, while other studies show that emotional isolation can affect mental health, especially among women and those with limited social networks.

A meet-up by Marzi in Bengaluru.

This is the space that Marzi, a Bengaluru-based community platform for 55+ users, is addressing — not by matching people romantically, but by helping them build meaningful connections through shared interests, life stages, and experiences.

“After moving to Bengaluru, I found it difficult to find like-minded people. I had a thriving social circle in Mumbai. It was my children who came across Marzi and encouraged me to check it out. Since then, I have attended multiple events and have found my own little circle. People who are just like me, and people who like the same stuff as I do,” says 60-something Anjali Kochar.

With over 30,000 members across 40 cities, Marzi facilitates interest-based meetups, curated travel, social clubs, preventive health programmes, and concierge-style services for active seniors.

In Bengaluru alone, more than 15 meetups take place each month — ranging from hobby groups and wellness circles to life-stage conversations — creating safe, judgment-free spaces for older adults to express themselves and form bonds. These initiatives help these seniors move from passive participation to active contribution.

“The antidote to loneliness isn’t numbers — it’s depth,” says Vibha Singal, co-founder of Marzi. “People don’t need dozens of connections, they need a few relationships where they feel emotionally safe, valued, and heard. Marzi exists to enable exactly that.”

Some Marzi users have formed stronger bonds that have blossomed beyond being solely platonic, proving that shared interests and commonalities can be a great way to find a companion.

As India’s senior numbers are projected to reach nearly one-fifth of the total population by 2050, initiatives that nurture emotional inclusion are becoming essential. And platforms like Marzi and BUN remind us that love doesn’t fade with age or disability — it simply evolves. Sometimes, love looks like a shared laugh on a morning walk, a circle that listens, or a community that finally feels like home.

The writer is based in Mumbai.