h2>Dating : Blog Day 29 of 30: Love in the Time of COVID
Penultimate day of blogs! I am now 96.7% of the way through these 1000-word blatherings, so it’s probably time to finally dig into the literal one thing I’ve been holding back amidst the plethora of personal topics I’ve gotten into this month. Let’s get straight to it.
I’m prone to overthinking when it comes to courtship. (Is courtship an outdated word now? Not sure. Anyway.) If I accidentally use a turn of phrase which seems too couple-y too soon, or if I feel like I’ve been monologuing about myself instead of asking questions, or if I smile at someone for even a microsecond too long, I’ll find myself unable to stop thinking about my perceived fuck-up for far too long. I think I can usually manage to cover up the fact that I’ve been agonising over the weird voice crack I did That One Time or the occasion when my brain malfunctioned and I couldn’t remember the name of the movie that I’d just spent a good five minutes gushing about, but perhaps the girls I’ve been In The Talking Stage with can in fact tell that there’s often a lot of internal screaming going on behind the eyes. All of this stuff obviously goes away if the person I’m with and I end up actually dating, and despite my best attempts at self-sabotage I’m still reasonably good at holding an interesting and funny conversation, but it doesn’t distract from the fact that I get in my own head far too often when in that weird in-between stage beforehand. It’s why I’m absolutely awful at using dating apps. Another reason for that is that dating apps seem to actively dislike me.
Never re-downloading that shite again.
I’m in one of these fun in-between stages at the moment, thanks to an algorithm-based matchmaking website put together by some computer scientist at uni. Romantic, I know. It’s been around 4 weeks of messaging and sending voice notes back and forth, with one 3-and-a-half-hour video call crammed in around her hectic schedule around two weeks ago. She’s in England, and I’m here in France. With the obvious external circumstances taken into consideration, I think things have been going along pretty much without a hitch so far. I like coming home from work in the evening to see 20 different minute-long voice notes on about 7 different ongoing topics of conversation sitting in my inbox, and I like sitting down and sending back some more of my own reactions and anecdotes and questions. It’s a pretty weird means of communication from an external perspective, I’m sure, but I think it works. The fact that you need to sit and dedicate 45 minutes to your response, as if you’re writing a letter, removes any of the awkwardness of the person you’re talking to not replying instantly, for example, or them texting in a way which you find irrationally annoying. It’s about as intimate and personal a way of getting to know someone as is currently possible.
Anyone who’s been in a relationship will have experienced this phase. You may not know the person well (or at all) beforehand, there’s a clear (and usually unspoken) subtext that you’re both attracted to each other, and you’re both cautiously and gradually putting yourselves out there while also silently putting your feelers out too, just to make sure that there’s nothing absolutely horrible and irreconcilably off-putting about the other person. Sometimes it can last weeks. Usually, it lasts months. In normal circumstances, if your romantic sparring partner happens to be someone from work or school or uni, you’ll be bound to see them in person. And, in the realm of Actual Real Life, there’s always a spark. They might brush your shoulder or cast a lingering look right at you. When you have those moments, it’s a lot easier to feel vulnerable and emotionally intimate with them
Without those moments, however, it’s very easy to feel like you’re oversharing or overburdening when you let your guard down. Obviously all romantic pursuits require a leap of faith to be made by someone at some point, but when you’re unable to read someone’s body language that leap suddenly becomes quite a lot more perilous. I’m not saying that a big romantic leap of faith like that would necessarily be on the cards for me for a while yet, but that’s obviously not a problem when things still feel like they’re bubbling along really well. What does make things more difficult, though, is that we’re in the middle of a deadly pandemic. Coronavirus has made a lot of people pretty nihilistic in their attitudes towards prospective relationships, including a couple of my friends. If I might not be able to properly see someone with whom romance might be on the cards for another half a year or so, then what’s the point of it all? The same goes for people currently in relationships. Being faced with either not seeing one another for weeks on end or alternatively being within a few metres of each other 24/7 was a fairly difficult dichotomy to face for a young person in a relationship, especially a new one. Matt Hancock, the world-renowned couple’s counsellor who moonlights as Health Secretary, gave the following incredibly sage and empathetic advice: “Make your choice and stick with it”. Oh Matt, you always know what to say. In many cases, people have unsurprisingly opted to break that dichotomy and simply separate.
One thing I’ve neglected to mention is that, more than ever, lonely people are seeking company. I wish I could say I was exempt from that, but of course I’m not. I’d really love to be able to skip past the whole crucial getting-to-know-you part and fast forward to the inside jokes and the cosiness and the wonderful wordless familiarity. But that, alas, isn’t how it works. I described the early stages of budding relationships as an elaborate dance around two weeks ago. The circumstances we’re all in aren’t going away immediately. The U.S. have come out and said they expect the first vaccines to be administered next May, which isn’t to mention firstly that this is optimistic and secondly that it’ll take many additional months to actually get around to everyone. Maybe, with that in mind, we might need to just enjoy the dance for a while longer and keep the faith that with time there’s a chance something good could come from it.
