By Victoria DiMartino, Staff Writer
Did you start dating right before the pandemic hit? I bet much like everyone else you know, 2020 was the year that seemed to finally be going your way. You were probably loving your classes, Bot’s was popping, you were excited for the spring concert in a few weeks, you may have snagged a job at Breakthrough and to top it all off you finally had someone to date.
And then WHAM—COVID-19!
So how’s that relationship now? Did you guys say “I’ll see you after spring break” or “we can talk once we’re back on campus”…and then you were never back from spring break, let alone back on campus? If that’s the case, you’ve probably had a lot of thoughts and discussions over the past few months with that person on what exactly you’re doing. Or maybe it’s been total radio silence. That person not only went into physical quarantine, they went into relationship quarantine too.
How do you come back from that? Even if you were able to see each other over the quarantine your relationship was not normal. Sorry if that’s the first time you’re hearing that, but it’s true. You have lived through a global standstill, life literally stopped happening (even if only for a few weeks), and you did it while trying to date someone.
Maybe over the quarantine you made it work. Long distance became your friend, a trusty companion that created Facetime dates and had you ordering takeout for the other person as you both pretended that you were just staring across the table at BJs and not a screen. So how do you come back together now? Whether your relationship was stagnant over quarantine or full of passion, it is jarring to go months without being able to hold someone’s hand, rest your head on their shoulder or even have your first kiss. For so long you have been functioning as individuals. Unless you started dating months before the pandemic, you’ve never been a real couple. There is already an awkwardness of learning how to be around each other for the first time and now you have to do that during a pandemic with an extra set of complications.
Communication is about to be your best friend.
Maybe you haven’t been a talker before, maybe confrontation makes you uncomfortable, maybe you just don’t know how to talk about your feelings, but now you have to. Too much has happened in the past few months for you to be able to function “business as usual.” Whether this person is the Mr. Big to your Carrie Bradshaw or they are just a random leaf floating in the wind, you need to talk. Because if you don’t, you’re not going to be able to go anywhere from here in your relationship.
When you started dating life was normal. You may have wanted one thing because it was feasible, but is it feasible now?
I can’t help but wonder, as creatures of habit how do we escape this unpredictability of COVID-19? How do we live our lives as normal, but still know about the transformations that have occurred in our world over these past few months? Did we need a “restart”?
In addition to talking about our problems and troubles, do we need to hit refresh on this relationship page and just pretend that we haven’t been in a weird dating limbo with this person for months and instead just start as if we met only yesterday? Maybe “trying again” is the saving grace for you both.
Only time will be able to tell, but if I know one thing for sure, we don’t have any more answers than we did a few months ago. Neither myself nor you can really rearrange the puzzle of quarantine into a picture that makes sense. Especially when the pieces are scattered across two people trying to figure out how they fit together. Looks like this week, we just don’t have a clear diagnosis for dating.
