Dating on lockdown: Socially long-distanced relationships

By Austyn Close, Senior Executive

There’s something to be said for a relationship that can survive a multitude of issues or plagues. Financial woes and family feuds to name just two. Every relationship is unique unto itself and trials its protagonists in its own special way.

Lockdown has brought an entirely new veneer to the idea of relationships. For those of us not yet married but not living a ‘teenage dream’, it’s a rather peculiar situation to navigate. Do we move in together even though we hadn’t anticipated it? Do we stay put and see each other in the later half of the year? Do we separate all together?

I’ve read many testaments to different couples’ situations since lockdown came into force. A friend of mine has vacated their university household to live with their boyfriend’s family until the virus has passed. Another has dumped the love interests they were fleetingly seeing and has boosted their activity on dating apps such as Hinge or Tinder. The perplexing life of dating and finding your ‘soul mate’ is somewhat dampened by this lack of face-to-face contact, isn’t it? For all that it’s worth, dating apps are ridiculed by sceptics who only believe the chemistry came alive when you were able to naturally stumble into your beau. Now, with a global pandemic raging on, it may be that those individuals have no other choice but to abandon that assessment and jump aboard the online dating scene.

Dating apps are having to readjust their strategies and techniques just like any other business. It’s a balancing act of not rolling back the progress such sites have made in combatting the stigma of online dating whilst not encouraging users to break lockdown protocol.

Whether you and your other half have been together eight weeks or five years, lockdown brings couple counselling to an entirely new level. Even the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England was providing advice on the tough decisions couples need to make during a government press conference a couple of weeks ago.

For me, lockdown is proving tough and somewhat harder than physically being further away from one another. At the end of 2019, I spent three months living and working in China while keeping a relationship of three years going. Despite the thousands of miles wedged between China and the UK, it seems almost harder now when the law and welfare of others dictates how couples sustain a life together while not physically living together. Perhaps this ‘new normal’ will see the resurgence of love letters and pigeon messengers?