Dating During a Pandemic: A Collection of Sweet & Funny Stories.

The UK first went into lockdown on March 16th 2020 as a security measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19. As we know, this has lead to drastic changes in our everyday lives, with one of the affected areas being the dating scene. In order to ring in the new year and bring you some lightheartedness during our current re-entry into lockdown, we decided to compile some quarantine dating stories. Some funny, some sweet, and some reflective, we hope you enjoy these stories and if you have any stories of your own feel free to include them in the comments!

Firstly, this funny, slightly stressful moment on Hinge:

21, she/her

“Okay, so I was on Hinge and began chatting with this guy.

I forgot what we were talking about, but he said something about what he was cooking for the night, to which I responded: “oh sounds amazing”. To which he then responds, that he is amazing about a few other things…

I know where this is going so I am trying to keep it vague, but he keeps pressing me to ask what he is amazing at.

Finally, I give in and he responds in exactly the way I imagine “giving head”.

I am absolutely cracking up and truly do not know how to respond so I turn to my flatmate to give me some advice and we come up with a meme to send.

After taking a good 15 minutes to find one, we realise that you can’t send photos on Hinge. We are about to unlatch because, at this point, this guy is both our match, only for my flatmate to call him accidentally.

Thankfully, I don’t think he ever answered, but I unmatched instantly so I will never know if the man really was amazing at giving head. It did make me aware of just how shit I am at online dating!”

(The chat on the left and the researched meme on the right)

Next, these reflections on how the dating scene has changed:

22, She/Her

“dating in lockdown for me has been a mixed bag, but can be tracked by the use - and symbolic deletion - of tinder. the familiar atmosphere of quick hookups and even quicker ghosting on tinder pre-Rona rang true during the summer when the pandemic was still relatively new territory, and things were beginning to feel normal again. I tried going on a date with a boy from back home, which started off with a lovely walk through the park, but took a fateful turn for the worse when he suggested we grab a coffee from the local spar, wherein he proceeded to press his way to two lattes and a disapproving glance between me and the cashier. it's difficult to justify being too picky when your only company for the past few months has been your family and a few zoom calls, but suffice to say the 'spark' was not found down the back of the petrol station coffee machine, and I got rid of tinder for the foreseeable.

however, after moving to a new city for uni, and enduring a long stint of increasingly depressing government guidelines that made nightlife and seeing friends more difficult, I was spurred into getting tinder again by my flatmates 'for a laugh'. I noticed that the general feeling on the site had changed, from one-line bios: 'who's wanting pumped?' or '6'2'' because apparently that matters', to more friendly pleas of: 'just want a girl I can cuddle with' or 'will let you walk my dog and hold my hand in public'. it was clear that more than 6 months of lockdown had caused the men of Scotland to change their tune, now that there was less opportunity to shag and bag, and the long winter was approaching. after an unlikely and unsettling match with our plumber, I did find myself chatting with a boy who seemed nice and genuine - insofar as you can tell from a few pics and their favourite artists on Spotify.

we very quickly arranged a virtual date, where he deliveroo-ed a coffee to my flat and changed his zoom background to Edinburgh castle to really set the scene. despite it not being anything that I’d experienced before, the combination of the no distractions one-on-one nature of the call, and our combined extensive zoom practice, made for a fun and not awkward experience - far removed from the costa machines of the past. we kept up this kind of relationship until we could meet in person, watching films and having drinks via the power of the internet for over a month before we actually saw each other face-to-face. any apprehension that came with this first meeting soon dissipated, as I realised that the foundation that we had, despite being virtual, was strong, and led to us getting on like we'd known each other for months. I think it's interesting to reflect on this change in the dating scene over the past year or so, where sleeping around has become an issue of public health, and a generation of twenty-somethings have become far more likely to be in relationships than I’ve ever seen before.”

22, She/Her

“connecting the dots between three months spent in my family home writing a dissertation and finding previously black-listed boys the hottest shit is not difficult. the unfortunate combination of too much free time and too little human contact made me believe that restarting a particularly ill-fated relationship would be a good use of my time and energy and led to one of the most demoralising dates in my back catalogue. In essence, I used my first taste of freedom as the lockdown was lifted in the summer to go and visit a boy in a different city who (after months of talking and facetiming) thought that I’d driven an hour and a half to simply go for pints..... and left me with a formal hug and night spent sleeping in my car.

Although impossible to recover fully from such a brutal patch, if the pandemic has taught me anything, it's that we're governed by a bunch of lizards and that resilience is key. So, after an enjoyable two weeks spent in isolation (classic!), I was divinely inspired to reach out to another blast from the past - this time with an artfully crafted dm littered with exclamation marks. maybe it's the extended periods of time spent reminiscing that the pandemic has afforded, or the absence of new experiences and busy days that tended to sweep us along pre-2020, but either way I found something very cool that I might not have, without the changes incited by an extremely deadly virus!

I’ve recently seen a lot of my eternally single friends getting into relationships, myself included, which may just be a very timely coincidence, but I think has a lot to do with the situations that people are finding themselves in right now. I don't like to generalise, but the lack of opportunity to have four pints, go home with someone and then rarely speak again is far less accessible and doesn't look like a play that's going to be feasible any time soon. additionally, the closure of many cafes, restaurants and literally everything else ever, has forced dates to become more outdoors-based, soberer, and are arguably overall a bit more wholesome. not to mention the government not really loving you having people over to your flat, and the sense of companionship that these lockdown relationships may bring people during a time of increasing isolation. all of this is to say that I don't think it's surprising that people are en mass finding comfort in having someone to rely on now more than ever, considering the entire world is burning and we'll be in recession for the rest of our lives - viva la lockdown relationship.”

A couple of short and sweet submissions:

“A friend of mine has been in a relationship for about two years now. She deleted the Tinder app from her phone when she got together with her boyfriend but forgot to delete her account. A couple of months ago one of her boyfriend’s friends found her on Tinder and decided to try and let him know. Through a roundabout series of calls and texts, the news finally got back to her boyfriend. My friend and her boyfriend laughed about it and even checked out her Tinder to see what was on it so thankfully everything was ok. Her boyfriend’s friends’ concern for him was really lovely and sweet though.”

“Me and my friend matched with the same guy on bumble and sent him exactly the same messages for like an hour and it took him so long to clock”

“Me and [a close mutual friend] found out the other day that we were both speaking to the same boy at the same time last year hahaha”

And finally, this slightly funny but overall super sweet story from early quarantine (they are still dating btw!):

She/Them

“Back in April, like all of us attempting to stay digitally connected, I would individually video call each of my friends for hours. There was this one specific guy, whom I have been friends for years, that I really fancied but never had the nerves to tell him. Not to mention, he lived in London and I in Edinburgh, so no chance this conversation would have happened in the near future. One day, after having chatted for over 3 hours (reminder it was not an online date), the internet connection begun to get in the way. As he attempted to change his settings from wifi to 3g, his finger would point and move in the direction of the camera and it really looked like he was trying to do a “personal attention ASMR” kind of thing, specially because the connection had gone so bad the screen would often freeze and I could only hear whispers. I don’t know what on earth liking someone does to you, to the point that I actually believed a friend would do that over FaceTime, like wtf was I thinking? Instead of just hanging up and attempting to call again, because I was so shocked to see him attempting to caress me over a screen and didn’t want to upset him in case he actually was, I got nervous and started playing along with it. I could not be anymore embarrassed of this, I was either out of mind at that point during lockdown or I was just extremely needy. As the connection returned, there was I ASMRing the screen and being a total weirdo and he, as well as I, could not believe what was going on. Just imagine what that’d look like!!! I had to admit to him I liked him there and then, though we were both loosing our breaths over laughter and so nervous that we just carried on with the conversation pretending nothing had happened. Once restrictions eased I returned to London and it turned out he liked me too. But damn, I wish my love story hadn’t begun with me tapping, scratching, being affectionate and whispering to my laptop screen.”

Hope you enjoyed these dating stories and refections if you have any of your own feel free to add them to the comments section.

And lastly, here’s a cute dating story from NYC we just had to include (it’s too sweet!), enjoy :) https://www.insider.com/guy-asked-out-girl-drone-facetime-rooftop-date-quarantine-2020-3