Seeking a Quaran#ting
as seen in “sorry i’m late (glxtch issue #5)” july 2020
When the world went on lockdown in March 2020, it did not radically disrupt my day to day routine. A month and a half prior, two weeks into January, I had just returned to America after a month-long stay in the Caribbean. I had been visiting St. Vincent & The Grenadines, where my family is from, and it was my first trip that was not prompted by a funeral and my third visit there in my adult life. The trip had changed me fundamentally, spiritually. I felt different. When I finally returned to America, I was: unemployed, with depleted funds, and grappling with depression onset by my return to New York City in the heart of winter. As the pandemic was finally beginning to stir some panic, I was undisturbed: I had already been self-isolating, laying in bed, applying to jobs, filing for unemployment, turning down friends’ invitations to “hang out.” I didn’t have much of a livelihood to lose.
But slowly, boredom began to creep in. The imposition of social distancing put a halt to my infrequent rendezvous with the person I was seeing at the time, only for a few weeks at that point: we were drifting out of touch, out of infatuation with one another--a change I was unsurprised by and gently embraced...I didn’t want to force us to ‘work’ if it wasn’t meant to be. The dissolution of that pairing left in its place a void: what was I to do now with the emotional neediness that felt inappropriate to ask friends to assuage? I settled on logging back into The Apps: the dating app trifecta of Tinder/Bumble/Hinge, to all of which I am subscribed. I log on to these when I’m feeling bored, or unloveable, or lusty. It’s a lot of mindless swiping, a lot of small talk, a very low conversion rate of matches to first dates, and a lot of ghosting. In the days of working full-time, squeezing in irregular yoga sessions, and weekend fetes, I floated in and out of interest in the apps and subsequently, the people on them.
But more than ever, now, I thought: surely everyone else is bored too, right? So what the hell?
The irony of it was not lost on me. Matching with someone now presented a dead-end. We couldn’t agree to go on a date as a way of assessing chemistry anymore: there were no public spaces to meet up and going to a stranger’s house for a first date was out of the question. It became even more absurd as men started to edit their bios: “Not looking for a pen pal.” Pre-covid, this was kind of a valid sentiment, but now it just seemed tone-deaf. But the desire for human connection with some kind of romantic undertone persisted, so I just tried to work around it. But it quickly turned out that my starting logic was flawed: everyone was bored at home but people lacked the attention spans to pretend to care about matches or entertain conversations with them at all. None of us were taking this seriously--in fact, the small talk was worse. “How are you handling quarantine?” became a cringey default opener.
Online dating for me has always had that unfortunate side effect of me accidentally de-humanizing prospective matches.
I become more superficial. My biases are front and center. I’m confused by the fact that I swipe left on people I would probably date if I met them in person. I mean, if you described my partners on paper and presented them to me on the apps, I am certain I would pass on all of them. And yet, I feel entitled to be picky online. I’m not even all that embarrassed to admit that I paid extra for the subscription privileges: getting to filter matches by height, or whether they had dogs (a dealbreaker! I don’t like them!) or were seeking a relationship versus something casual. The subscriptions also let you see who had already liked you, and you could swipe through this more specific pool of prospects rather than the general one--but this perk always depressed me: the guys who liked me, it turned out, were majorly unattractive. Rows and rows of men I just thought were vapid or ugly made me feel both shallow and doomed.
Hinge will let you filter by ethnicity, and Bumble actually lets you filter matches by zodiac sign! For these reasons, I use Bumble and Hinge to seek men--because those sort of things do actually matter to me. On Tinder, my preferences are set to women because I’m a little more lax and there’s a wider pool of queer women to choose there from compared to other platforms. And in theory, this filtration should boost my chances of matching with someone promising but...that just never proved true.
It surprised me how dry these chats could be, and it surprised me the way it stung to be left on read or unmatched with arbitrarily in those first few weeks. I was taken aback by how rejection felt somehow more personal in this context. I’m used to it now, in June, as I continue to swipe wistfully, but at first it made me reevaluate my desirability often.
Eventually, apps like Bumble and Hinge decided to start catering to this new era, implementing video and audio calls right within their chats. I had the outlier match that was pissed about me not wanting to meet up (why had I matched with him at all, he demanded to know, accusing me of ‘wasting his time’) but overall most folks were reasonable, so eventually I did agree to the video dates. They weren’t romantic or anything, in fact really they were like screeners: we’d FaceTime or talk on the phone and try to get to know each other. In one case, I realized immediately that the guy looked nothing like his photos: not a catfish, he was just a lot older looking than his pics suggested. Plus, he was boring. A different match revealed himself to be super insecure, and I found myself giving him life advice and assuring him every five minutes that I didn’t think he was ‘weird’ but after my third or fourth insistence, I was pretty over it. In another instance, I matched with a girl and we would have scheduled Facetime chats and text throughout the week, but that eventually fizzled out, too.
Establishing a brand new friendship or relationship in this time just wasn’t ideal. Wasn’t realistic!
In some cases, I tried to revive the drooping leaves on the olive branches of relationships previously left to wilt. I texted exes. I messaged crushes and forgave them for being flaky. I developed crushes on guy friends who proved willing to spare me attention now and again, because I was so starved for it elsewhere. I entertained the men in my DM’s on Twitter and Instagram, not that it ever went anywhere. Eventually, I moved on to phone calls and FaceTime socials with friends. Anything to counter the deep loneliness I was feeling. To break up the monotony of home. I desired attention, and I felt helpless in my pursuit of it yet determined nonetheless.
Quarantine isn’t over, but businesses are slowly opening up. It’s warmer out, and people are feeling okay to hang out in parks or have ‘socially distant’ meetups with friends. Bumble even added a new preference setting where you can label your dating comfort level on a scale of ‘virtual only’ to ‘socially distanced’ (with or without mask). The landscape is changing: you can be hyper-specific about the kind of connection you’re seeking, and from whom, and I imagine that in the coming weeks dating might begin to again look familiar. I don’t have a Quarantine Love Success Story, and I’m not sure why I ever imagined I would. But I’m still swiping, just in case.