Dating show goes on with social distance
‘Sheltered in Love’ on Instagram aims to promote romance in time of pandemic
Before the coronavirus hit, Jimmy Parenteau and Tyler Cohen were already on the way to creating a live dating show.
Cohen, 24, had been on one called “Updating in New York” before he moved to San Francisco in January to work at Yelp, where he met Parenteau, 25. Cohen had seen “Updating” three times before he appeared on the show.
“I was just taken with how interesting it is to watch a date unfold and put yourself in those situations and live vicariously through each person and judge and make fun of, laugh — with, at — the whole way someone else thinks,” he says. “It’s not something you get to see happen with normal people who aren’t you and the person you’re on a date with.”
So he wanted to start a dating show of his own in San Francisco. “I was talking about this idea with people on the team at work, and Jimmy heard some of that spiel, and we grabbed coffee a day or two after that.”
Parenteau was already a fan of dating shows, including “The Bachelor” and “90 Day Fiancé.” “I’m super into the drama,” he says. Watching other people fight over “nonsensical stuff ” makes his own life and work seem “not that bad.”
They had been looking at venues — Shelton Theater, PianoFight, 111 Minna Gallery — when San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced the city’s shelterinplace order. But true to their tech background, they pivoted.
“Jimmy had this brilliant idea to continue the dating show we were going to do, but do it on Instagram,” Cohen says.
The social media account launched March 19 with a show called “The Quarantined Bachelor,” which was later renamed “Sheltered in Love.” Now on its third season, the show has set up a straight man, a straight woman and a gay man on blind dates so far. Contestants begin with speed dates with each of five hopefuls on Zoom. Three make it to the next round of longer dates, their graduation marked not with the bestowal of a rose, as in “The Bachelor,” but with a roll of toilet paper, complete with ceremony. A lucky winner gets a “final roll.”
The idea is that the couple will maintain an “isolationship” while shelterinplace persists, and then go on an inperson date once the order lifts. (Contestants can hail from anywhere, though, meaning Zoom dates now might be good practice for a longdistance relationship in the future.)
The whole show is shot from participants’ computer cameras and edited mostly by Cohen and Parenteau. In just over a month, the show’s Instagram account @shelteredinlove, whose logo features a surgical mask with a heart over the mouth, has gained more than 5,000 followers, some of whom are very vocal about whom they think contestants should pick.
Richard Shall, 30, was named the first bachelor when the show was still called “The Quarantined Bachelor” (a name Parenteau and Cohen later changed in part to remove gendering) on March 21. Parenteau had worked for Shall at Odoo, a software company, before Parenteau went to Yelp.
“I was on Instagram, flipping through,” Shall remembers, when he saw Parenteau’s post about the dating show. Parenteau asked him if he’d help promote it. When Shall agreed, Parenteau replied, “Do you want to be our first bachelor?”
Shall figured he had nothing to lose — and nothing better to do while sheltering in place.
He turned out to be a natural for the show. He wore a suit (on top, at least; some midthigh peeked out on the bottom corner of the screen) to the first toilet paper ceremony. “I thought you guys deserved the best,” he said to the five women.
The dates on “Sheltered in Love” lack the inflated drama of those on TV dating shows. Banter has a pleasant, everyday feel: Contestants talk about jobs and pets or why, on the second season, a hopeful showed up late to a Zoom date with bachelorette Kaylee Reynolds. You could imagine meeting these people in real life or overhearing them at a bar. And when we’re sheltering in place, an everyday feel is necessarily a nostalgic, precious one. Right now, it’s manna to see strangers try to attract one another instead of maintain a 6foot berth.
Shall admits that although he knew others would watch his date, he forgot about it in the moment. “There was a girl on the other side of the screen that I could devote my full attention to and have a conversation with, who was in the same boat as I am,” he says.
Weeks after he chose a winner, Kenzie Caufield, he’s still going on Zoom dates with her. A recent date lasted 2½ hours.
Reynolds, 22, acknowledges the drawbacks of Zoom as a dating medium but focuses on its advantages. While speed dates can feel “interviewy,” removing the physical aspect “makes you have to appreciate the person’s personality and beliefs more.”
She has also taken advantage of Zoom’s ability to record sessions by rewatching her dates.
“I’m a very personable person,” Reynolds says, “so sometimes, I can confuse my own bubbliness as a connection with somebody.” Rewatching, she could see the part of the date she wasn’t looking at when it happened — maybe her reaction, or an interesting point her date made that she missed. “I was like, ‘Wow, I was not into this conversation as much as I thought I was.’”
In recent posts, “Sheltered in Love” has added new segments, including followups with previous season’s
couples to see how “isolationships” go, as well as “Quaranteas,” or contestant confessionals.
As seasons progress, the idea is to maintain diversity of gender and sexual orientation, but Parenteau and Cohen estimate that 80% of applicants are women.
Parenteau believes heterosexual men think they have a better chance on apps, where “they can meet someone quickly and talk to them. The show’s more about putting yourself out there and having a fun go of it. I think men are less likely to put themselves out there in that manner.”
With women, “Their friends are tagging them like, ‘Oh my God, you need to do this, girl. You need to do this.’ ” Parenteau suspects that if a man were to post about being on the show, “your friends would be like, ‘Is this you? Is this you doing this?’ You wouldn’t be telling people you’re doing this.”