Dating : Why You Should Date During the Pandemic

Use this time to find your match — the love of your life is online right now, just like you

As a matchmaker, one of my biggest rules is that I never match friends. Too sticky icky for my liking. The quarantine has reconnected me with many of my single friends this past week. I’ve given all of them the same nugget of advice: “Find the love of your life amidst the COVID-19 pandemic”. Before you laugh — read on.

There are major benefits to dating during this “pre-apocalyptic” time. Such an unusual time may not take place again during your lifetime so take advantage. The advantages far outweigh any negatives.

Have you ever matched with someone on a dating app, only to find out that either their schedule or yours will prohibit establishing a relationship anytime in the near future?

They have a work deadline.

You’re traveling back home for a friend’s wedding.

You know, the small things that come up that mean, you put your love life on the back burner, yet again.

We live in a day and age where we are rewarded for being the best workhorse we can be. Being busy is a status symbol. Our worth inherently tied to what we can produce and the title of the job we hold. So often that hamster cycle of life means we miss out on great opportunities. More often than not we sacrifice love for the rat race.

Everyone is quarantined in some fashion or another. While I dislike the abusive use of the word, “literally”, literally, everyone is home, from the hot flight attendant, the badass traveling businessman, to the sculpted meathead that can’t get to the gym.

Guess what?!

They too have binge-watched all nine seasons of The Office, The Sopranos, Sex and The City, and are now working on rewatching Friends for the second time.

Many singles have begun resorting to signing up for dating apps at their newly discounted rates — as should you. Generally, dating apps are cyclical. The cream of the crop signs up at the beginning of the year per their new year’s resolutions. They die off shortly thereafter because dating becomes too time-consuming. The remainder of the year you have the “app leftovers” as we call them in the matchmaking world.

You are in luck! The next few weeks are the greatest time to date online because the odds of matching with someone of the caliber you have been waiting for have never been greater. The cream of the crop is back online. You can’t be too busy for love. They can’t be too busy for love. What else do you two have to do?

How many times have you sat down for at a date with someone you realized was not a match within the first five minutes?

Your whole evening ruined for nothing. You could have grabbed a drink with friends. You could have gone on a date with your next choice. The options were endless. However, your time was not. Its happened to all of us.

We generally use the first dates to weed out the “clear no’s” from the “contenders”. Such a method of dating generally leads to high burnout rates. This is the reason so many throw in the dating towel year after year.

Imagine if you had the time to talk and get to know potential matches before your first date.

You could weed out who would be worth the time to meet by first dating virtually. Virtually handling the task would make for more pleasurable first dates with a higher probability of your dates “going somewhere”. Imagine how much deeper your first dates can go if you get the preliminaries out of the way before the date. The odds suddenly begin working in your favor.

Matchmakers are in business for two primary reasons.

First, we generally have access to the “cream of the crop” that would rather not be online per their desire for discretion due to their high profiles.

Second, we put in an average of eight-plus hours a day to find the perfect match for our clients while our clients put in eight-plus hours a day at work. Not many successful people have the available time it requires to really weed through their potential matches.

Many of you are teleworking and others unable to do anything for work at all. Let’s turn dating into your full-time job. We can all agree that this will likely be the new normal for the next few weeks. Let’s do the math, a forty-hour workweek over the next two weeks could significantly move the ball in your dating life. Put in the time.

In a forty-hour dating workweek, you can craft a better profile, take your time finding the right profile picture, and stop desperately replying that you’re ready to meet when all you know about each other is that you both like tacos and you think they’re hot!

Everyone is so sure they want to find “the one”, but they treat their grocery eggs with more care than their dating life.

We have all been guilty of living our lives in fast forward mode instead of play at times. In dating, that undoubtedly leads to the ultimate undoings of may relationships that otherwise might be.

Over these next few weeks you can really get to know someone by asking all the preliminary questions, testing their ability to handle adversity (aka life with COVID-19), and court in an otherwise unheard of way for this generation of daters. For those of you that binge-watched Netflix’s “Love is Blind” host your own experiment. What do you have to lose? Another few hours watching reruns?

I can acknowledge that these are not the stone ages. Everyone wants and needs a physical connection with a partner. I don’t negate that. I do, however, negate, that such interactions need to happen as swiftly as they often do.

This is an unpopular opinion, but one night stands rarely if ever turn into something more. Relationships built on emotional intimacy and vulnerability can always turn into sexual chemistry.

Facetime and Skype dates can also be a great way to break up the monotony of the day and create physical chemistry before in-person meetings.

For those of you that have a harder time exercising self-control — not to worry the CDC and your local governments will exercise it for you (AKA quarantine).