Masks, hikes and snakes — love in the time of COVID
DATING DIARIES
Dating life has been transformed by the pandemic and the Toronto Star’s popular relationship column Dating Diaries has chronicled the many challenges of COVID-19 that are specific to single people: planning outdoor and physically distanced dates (and deciding if, and when, to take things inside); communicating explicitly and in advance about safety and comfort with strangers, which many daters find awkward at the best of times; even navigating proximity and touch based on personal chemistry and amateur virology.
“Bill” and “Cecily” made the most out of a masked date. Our dater Bill wrote, “I made a bad joke about both of us only being able to see each other’s eyes. At that point, she suggested that we pull our masks down briefly to compare our faces to our profile photos. It was a spontaneous moment. Cecily told me that I looked like my photos. She looked different, but good.”
Another kind of “reveal” didn’t go as well for “Jacinta,” who planned a long walk by the lake with “Nathaniel,” only to find that “his hair and beard looked particularly scruffy, which is understandable since barbershops have been closed due to the pandemic, and he was dressed a little too casually and ‘young’ for my taste.”
There were, though, some silver linings to be found, like a more casual atmosphere than usual on first dates.
Early in the pandemic, when she realized that COVID was “much bigger than I expected” and subsequently “just kind of lost it,” our dater “Ashlee” turned to swiping left and right “to feel normal and to pass the time.”
There, she found smart and successful “Jeremiah.” Ashlee said, “He suggested a social-distance walk. I was hesitant about it. ‘Stay home!’ had been drilled into my head, and I hadn’t seen another person besides my roommate in ages, but I was feeling pretty lonely. And desperate.” Ashlee wore yoga pants and a T-shirt, but she did her hair “for the first time in weeks.”
She wrote, “I think the COVID issue actually put me more at ease before the date, knowing that nobody would be putting moves on me. Less pressure.” They walked and talked about “work, travel, food and everything in our lives that had changed,” and eventually sat six feet apart for backpack beers. Ashlee wrote that “being around him, even at a distance, was also surprisingly comfortable.”
For some daters, the pandemic created new possibilities, and new problems, on the same date. After meeting “Alexis” on an app, “Vince” wrote that their text conversation “moved faster and was more serious than it might have been before the pandemic.” He wrote, “I felt like we had an intimate connection.”
Vince forgot his mask, but Alexis wasn’t wearing one, either. They elbow-bumped and sat a few feet apart. Vince was nervous about transmission and “angled my face away from her as we talked.” He wrote, “I made eye contact with her out of the corner of my eye. It was challenging to carry on a first-date conversation without being able to see her body language.” After the date, Alexis asked Vince what had happened, interpreting his caution as shyness. Vince wrote, “I didn’t tell her that I was turned away because I had forgotten my mask. Alexis didn’t respond to my subsequent texts.”
Outdoor dates have their own complications, especially for daters more accustomed to urban adventures.
When “Jasmine” went out for the second time with “Andy,” who had told her he was playing the field, she wrote that she “felt compelled to ‘win the race’ to be the girl that he ended up dating.” Going into their hiking date, she “knew I didn’t want to mess things up with him somehow!” Jasmine, however, is “absolutely terrified” of snakes and when a few showed up on their hike she “started shaking, laughing and crying uncontrollably” and ended up running straight back to the parking lot. However, instead of being scared off by her, Andy suggested they go to a park instead and asked to join Jasmine at her outdoor yoga class.
Some pandemic dates would have been just as absurd in the Before times, like when “Jackie” thought she was meeting “Evan” at a café, but found that the address he gave her was actually for a cannabis shop in the same plaza.
She thought he was joking, but no: he texted Jackie that he was “picking up some things” for their date (she wasn’t into it) and then made her wait for 30 minutes while he was in line for the goods, and then sat in his car smoking while she sat in hers. “He was acting like what he was doing was totally normal date behaviour.”
At this point, what’s normal?