SINGLETONS TEST OUT ANTIBODY FLAUNTING

Some are adding COVID results to dating profiles

Lockdown began just like the moment in musical chairs when the music stops. For singles, it quickly became clear that the road back to the old ways — intimacy on tap, a quest for love determined by our own rhythms and needs, not those of a global pandemic — would be littered with blockades. Those of us who thought nothing of physical contact with strangers before have, of course, been terrified into rethinking a handshake.

In the past week or so, singles’ patience has begun to fray and a new, riskier leaf is being slowly turned over. It began with Prof. Neil Ferguson earlier this month: If the U.K.’s top (and now former) epidemiological modeller could see his married lover at the pandemic’s peak, surely we could start seeing ours?

Most of us weren’t gutsy — or foolish — enough to do so. But many singletons can wait no longer.

The sun is out, the birds (and bees) are singing, and every park has filled with people on only very slightly socially distanced dates.

The more cautious are waiting in hope of testing advances.

While those much-vaunted fingerprick tests still seem a way off, the romantic Earth shook last week with news of new antibody tests going on sale in some countries. The possibility of demonstrating immunity, at least for a time, means these kits have been leapt on by the touch-starved — despite uncertainty about whether the virus offers immunity to all who recover.

In New York’s aggressive dating scene, the antibody test has entered with particular panache. As the New York Post put it, “They’re single and have the paperwork to mingle.”

Some people have added the results to their dating profiles. Others demand to know a potential partner’s “corona status” before entertaining them as a prospect.

THE NEW LIE MEN ARE TELLING.

Maureen Nelson, a Long Island matchmaker, said: “About a week-and-a-half ago, my clients started asking questions like: ‘Maureen, this person that you matched me with, do you think they’ve had the coronavirus?’ We’re asking people if they’re comfortable sharing if they’ve had it, and if they’d like to know if the person they’re matching has had it.”

The rise of “antibody flaunting” has exposed some fairly predictable gender differences. Men are flaunting, women considering warily.

“One guy on dating app Hinge tried to convince me to come over by saying that he’d already had the virus and recovered, so I wouldn’t get it from him,” one woman said, adding on Twitter that bragging they’ve had COVID-19 is “the new lie men are telling to try to get laid.”