Love in the time of COVID-19

Pandemic has changed the way we date

In Sex and the Single Girl, former Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 manual for a new breed of man-hungry, urban working girl, a section was devoted to how to meet men.

You had to go to places where men go and start conversations. Construction or engineering conferences, for instance. Or airplanes. “There’s something sexy ... about being sequestered 20,000 feet above the Earth,” Gurley Brown wrote, “almost as close to a strange man as a banana to its skin.”

Six months ago, the idea of getting as close to a strange man as a banana to its skin was both possible and even exciting (providing that man was attractive, of course).

Now, even if the idea no longer fills one with COVID19- tinged terror, it’s hardly the sort of thing one can do. Physical proximity has become taboo, socially unacceptable and complex with all but your nearests and dearests.

The effect of this on all our lives has been profound, but for those who might have been looking for romance when the pandemic struck, or are looking now, the end of close-up, spontaneous, in-person meetings has been deadening.

Online dating, and apps in particular, have for the past few years been corroding the potential for spontaneous meetings.

This is the year that pretty well all of Gurley Brown’s tips for meeting people became truly impossible.

It is the year that all the old ways of meeting people became obsolete.

As one of many avenues to intimacy, apps and sites are handy.

The quest for intimacy marches on, as it always will. But after a year in which the idea of easy physical intimacy and spontaneous close contact has been poisoned, we quest online because we have no choice.

Dating sites have reported a boom year. They are adapting to the demands of the COVID-19 world, with new video-calling platforms and, in Tinder’s case, temporarily making its “passport” feature free, allowing singles to chat to anyone in the world.

But that’s where the passion ends. Even now, six months in, sex in our current time remains laced with fear. Canada’s chief public health officer has warned against sex with people you don’t know well, and masks even with those you do.

“The lowest risk sexual activity during COVID- 19 involves yourself alone,” she intoned gloomily.

At the peak of the pandemic in April, being able to chat with someone online if you were single and alone was indeed a lifeline. But that temporary lifeline has become the whole scene, and spells the end of a long era of romantic adventure and exploration.