There are a zillion think pieces and clickbait listy things, churned out by a thousand i486s chained together in an old Soviet submarine pen, I could eye-scan in the mime action most of us do in lieu of actual reading anymore if I wanted to learn something about the experience or the expectation of dating for people who have been locked down during lockdown.
The predictions for the effect of pandemics on existing relationships was something akin to how people try to predict how severe SoCal wildfire season will be: either it will be terrible because we got so much rain during The Wet, it will spur an overgrowth of underbrush, providing extra fuel for fires OR it will be terrible because the paucity of precipitation during a noticeably absent rainy season means what vegetation we do have will be so extra desiccated, it will be primed to provide an ideal fuel for fires.
The forced extreme cohabitation of lockdown living was going to either be terrible for existing relationships when couples drive each other insane with the terrifying persistence of unbearable intimacy OR it was going to be great for existing relationships as it finally strips away the distractions of the outside and foments closeness and unbearablY GREAT new, unprecedented levels of intimacy.
In a piece like this, this is where the Knowing (and Known) Author would tie the two examples together as metaphors for one another and skewer the irrationality of both positions in some comparative way that gives both rhetorical weight to build momentum for the coup de grace as the Grand Unifying Point lands in the next paragraph...
But instead of that, I'm going to make the bolder choice of driving myself directly into a cul-de-sac by pointing out that all the above positions are essentially correct and consistent despite the superficial contradictions. I mean, we do have a fire season out here in SoCal whether it rained in January or not. The analysis isn't wrong, it's just that it doesn't matter in any kind of a material way, so engaging with it is simply a compounding waste of everyone's time.
And the relationship thing, some will thrive and some will fail, some for reasons related to lockdown closeness and others simply playing out a narrative string set in motion well before anyone got COVID 1 through 18, let alone our own beloved COVID-19. They were either structurally sound or they weren't. Ascribing too much determinative agency to the circumstance is just high-drama, catastrophic, ahistorical thinking. It's never as simple as it seems.
Although I will definitely allow that sometimes it takes exactly the right circumstances to fully appreciate how annoying another human is. Or for you to finally hatch out of the bullshit politeness chrysalis and achieve your final form of hey-I'm-just-being-honest brand of asshole unworthy of human love.
For those of us who went into the social distance void pre-distanced by dint of being uncoupled, now is a weird time. I haven't explored a dating app for 8 or 9 months until just the other day. As far as how to negotiate the isolation and loneliness, I would suggest meeting someone with early access to vaccination and who is mostly just interested in passing time not-alone a few times a month with an explicit discounting of anything like sustained commitment. So I'm not sure all the online writing about it applies to me as I seem to have gotten relatively lucky. Like I said, a few times a month.
I'm back out there now, trying to remember how it works. The easy joke now is that we're all about to devour each other in a smorgasbord* of mutual, explosive satiation. It's only been a day, but I'll be honest, so far it looks pretty much the same. Same profiles with some of literal same people available, with the same weird fixations on hiking and yoga and being "down to earth." I can't really tell you if anyone's more down to anything else at the moment, but like I said, it's only been a day. I definitely will not be reporting back in any detail to this space.
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*I swear I first misspelled that "smorgasmbord"
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