COLUMNIST — MAX WALLIS
Virtual satisfaction in queerantine
It’s one o’clock on a Saturday night and an Italian man called Marco has just arrived in my Instagram DMs.
“Hey, how is the quarantine treating you?” he asks, all innocently. I know exactly where this is going. Up until now, he had not been concerned for my health and wellbeing – why would he be, after all?
We met briefl y at a house party in Florence; he had his life, I had mine. But now we no longer have those lives: distinct, distant, full. We are living the same lives, dictated by a pathogen. And as our existences have got smaller, with fewer distractions, old memories arrive like meteors: I wonder who he’s quarantined with? … Oh, I forgot about him!
And so those leading, hintheavy questions soon become super fl irty. For that is our romantic reality – we are now living in the age of the chaste, digital tease.
Instagram DMs, Grindr chats, WhatsApp messages: these are the entire extent of our amorous stage. And the actors on it are ex- lovers, passing acquaintances, or just that hot guy off Insta. No matter who it is, it all follows the same fl ow – horny, thirsty pics, sexts, all of them ending with the same functional sign- off : “When this has all blown over, let’s def meet.”
It makes one suddenly see how immediate, how instant our gratifi cation was before all this. In a way, this new normal is a reset. We appreciate sex more now we have to wait for it. Maybe our mums were right all along.
In a way, it is like being young again. Except where youth was about nervous chastity, or fumbling experimentation, love in the time of COVID- 19 is a blue- balls ache to get something you knew you could have got within minutes in the days before a global pandemic. Physical intimacy is crushed. Closeness is forbidden. The government – or governments, rather – have clamped down on touch.
But at least I have my DMs. “Ping!” goes my phone. It’s Marco again. The dance continues. I’ve got a bottle of wine open at my side, the TV on, and a fairly certain expectation of at least one nude. It could be worse, frankly.
It might be a trial to stay indoors most of the time, but it’s something we all need to do. At the end of it all, when we can roam free once more, neon lasers will spin around sweaty rooms which are sticky with spilled drinks and lined with heaving bodies pressing against each other. Human to human, mouth to mouth, a societal resurrection.
Humans need each other. Our time will come. And we’ll be dancing again, possibly in Florence…
“Love in the time of COVID- 19 is a blueballs ache”