“A connection is a connection, and as stay at home orders remain steady, a future of global dating can be expected.”

To be a young adult in the pandemic is defined in making vacant plans with partial strangers, as much as baked goods and major hair decisions. Although notification bells have superseded personal connections in making our hearts skip beats, the idea that there is someone waiting for you behind the screen, and for the invisible door that is isolation to open, has somewhat humanized the idea of online dating. We’re all in the same boat. In my experience, where conversation would typically fall to reviewing daily activities and weekend plans, we’re almost forced to get to know each other on a deeper level, otherwise, there would quite literally be nothing to talk about. Still, such is often the case. The culture of ‘ghosting’ has fallen to the fact that small talk has been severely limited; wherein pre-quarantine the action of sharply dropping someone from your radar is taboo, in our current stage it’s relatable to the point of dilution. Weak connections in all regard have been severed, masked in getting to know randoms as they come through your feed. Boredom has named itself queen, and like many of my friends, talking to somewhat interesting strangers about what you do in your free time is much more fun than asking your crush from 9th grade (who’s never been particularly interested in you), what he ate for lunch. The point is, quarantine has been a true reality check in terms of connections. Along with public transit and cleanliness standards, a new dawn has risen on the idea of online dating. 

To quote Lil Dicky, “love is a fickle thing”. In our fast food, fast connection world, being able to swipe through suitors with ease might beat ASMR videos in terms of satisfaction. Although dating services are readily active, “Tinder saw an all-time high in usage on March 29, with more than three billion “swipes,” and the number of messages exchanged on rival app Bumble increased 26 percent over a two-week period in March in the US”, users have been forced to slow down. Conversations are no longer based on the hope for in-person contact but primarily for appeasing boredom. In the meantime between now and said in-person moments, the space for getting to know someone is incredibly large. Video chats and social distancing dates have become a new normal, and if I had to make any sort of prediction, such will remain so as we dive further into the future.

On top of increases in ‘swipes’ and whatnot, singles have turned to international locations to find companionship. Conversations with those abroad are commonplace within apps like tinder, where self-selecting location means a new pool of people, and has opened the door for long-distance dating to become equally habitual. Even those in existing relationships have become long distance in a sense, and I’d expect dual stay at home-dinner dates and such to remain an ordinary aspect of forming connections. The pandemic has globalized love. Accepting you can’t see a stranger a few miles away for months means that talking to a stranger thousands of miles away is nothing radical. A connection is a connection, and as stay at home orders remain steady, a future of global dating can be expected. 

Whether or not the habits we’ve created will be remotely relevant post-quarantine, our current stage has created a new normal. The lesson though, if anything, is that isolation has nothing against our inevitably social nature. As technology progresses, only time will tell what the future of dating will amount to. 

Works Cited

The Jakarta Post. “Love during Lockdown: Singles in US Reinvent Dating.” The

Jakarta Post, www.thejakartapost.com/life/2020/05/05/love-during-lockdown-singles-in-us-reinvent-dating.html.

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