The Dating Dilemma Of A Pandemic

A good part of 2020 has officially been spent at home. Dating wasn’t necessarily a priority in the beginning, but as time passes, people reveal how they’ve navigated the dating arena, and health professionals explain what is a safe-during (we’re far away from post)-pandemic-dating protocol to to follow

- Samreen Tungekar

20 days into the lockdown, I attended a virtual speed dating event in April, and wrote about it here. It was all new, the virtuality of everything, and I was one of the less-well-reads who didn’t think that the pandemic was set to take over all of the year. I got back on to dating apps out of sheer curiosity to see what’s the crowd like, now that the immediate gratification of hooking up was out of the question. Other than a few Covidiots, there were some new “here only because of the lockdown” bios, and another few that said, “Can I take you out before corona does?” None have taken me out (yet).

The dating space is in a time when the casual aspect of it is one that needs to be thought through. You have to be able to trust someone to even be within 10 feet distance. As things open up, we are trying to get that cup of coffee with a friend or by ourselves, keeping precautions in mind. But what happens to casual dating, and to hooking up?

Anantika from Mumbai was initially on Bumble just out of boredom. A guy did initially ask her out for a drive (like I said, covidiots), but she refused. “A lot of people wanted to video call on the app, and I wasn’t up for it, it’s weird to video call someone you don’t know at all. Eventually I did unmatch a few, and some conversations just fizzled out on their own,” she says.

Atmadip Mukherjee is a final year engineering student from Hyderabad, and he is at home, with his parents. He’s generally more social, but during the lockdown, he has restricted his usage of apps. “I met this one person through a dating app, but I knew of him through mutual friends. So there was an element of trust, and we were very careful, and socially distancing. Also, I feel being on dating apps right now creates an anticipation that I don’t like,” he says.