An Open Letter on Surviving Online Dating in Toronto During the Pandemic
So as I sit here to write the first blog of 2022, I thought to myself, how can we help the Toronto dating community while we sit in a lockdown (thanks Omicron!). Should I write 5 tips to date during the pandemic? What would those tips be? Go for a bike ride in -17 degrees and lock eyes with someone at the crosswalk?
All I kept coming back to was the thought that dating during the pandemic in the GTA has been ridiculous. I couldn’t write a post in good faith trying to pretend that it hasn’t been ridiculous. So today, I present to you no tips, no tricks, no hacks. Just a blog post talking about how ridiculous dating in Toronto has been over the last two years. Hopefully, I’ll help you relate a little, laugh a little and give you some optimism for the future.
Want to walk in the park?
Oh the restrictions, they come in all different shapes and sizes. There were: circuit breakers, stay-at-home orders, various stages, then modified various stages, then colours (grey was the worst) then modified colours. Right now we’re probably in the light blueish grey shade of the 50 shades of restriction greys since hair salons are open but everything else is closed. We should have written a blog post convincing you that you could do a date at a salon, with you and your date getting haircuts.
Kudos to all of you who went out and did walking dates in Trinity Bellwoods Park in -4 degree weather; wearing your best mask for a shot at love, no doubt.
Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, oh my!
Remember the good ole days, when your biggest worry about a first date was whether or not the person who showed up looked like their profile. Wouldn’t you love for that to be the biggest concern again?
Now you get to be concerned about which vaccine team they are on, if they have the same number of shots as you and what was their relative urgency to get vaccinated. On the flip side you get to bond over being on the same vaccine team or perhaps over the fact that you got your shots at the same vaccine clinic. You might be even so lucky as to go on a date with someone who won vaccine bingo and has PfiDernaZenca in their body.
Hopefully, you find that special someone who shares similar views to you on vaccination, because if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s difficult to get along with someone who you disagree with on that front.
Where do you want to meet for our date?
You’ve spent the entire day working in your favourite sweats, navigating multiple zoom calls, attending a virtual happy hour and after that is all done, you have an exciting date to look forward to with this really great person you met on Hinge!
So you amp yourself up, you head to the washroom to start getting ready, you are all ready for your date… and you pick up your phone to FaceTime. You navigate the awkwardness of doing a FaceTime date, you justify why your hair is at a crazy length (salons are closed you say), your date says something but the app freezes. You then talk over each other because the video call lags, only to hang up and ask yourself, “did I actually just go on a date?”.
So weird. I wonder how many couples will be telling their future children that their first date was on FaceTime.
The opinion balancing act
Do you know what Covid has blessed us with? Opinions, lots of them. Opinions on vaccines, restrictions, and science don’t stop on dates. We’ve all become overnight epidemiologists. We cite efficacy numbers for vaccines but don’t actually know how those numbers are calculated. We have opinions on public health restrictions, but don’t actually know how much it’ll help. We do all this on dates trying our best to figure out if our values align with the person we are dating.
But the real balancing act is trying to do all this while not coming off as too opinionated, even though, secretly, we are.
And the truth is how could we not be opinionated? It’s impacted every single part of our lives for almost two years!
Dating fatigue
I’ve tried to make light of a very frustrating situation but the reality is that with all that is going on with Covid and the nature of Tinder, Bumble and Hinge, the level of dating fatigue that exists right now is probably at an all time high. Endless swiping, ghosting, catfishing as well as having draining dates, are all part of the culture of online dating that existed prior to Covid. When you throw Covid on top of all that, dating fatigue is inevitable.
If you are feeling dating fatigue right now, just know that you aren’t alone. If there is any way we can help you get past it, then please reach out to us. If not, then I will leave you with some parting words which hopefully will give you some encouragement to keep going.
Some encouragement
If dating in Toronto was a video game it would be a video game that was permanently set on ‘difficult’. To all of you who are trying to find love during a pandemic, trying to balance restrictions and not feeling like the best version of yourself, I salute you. You’re playing the Toronto dating game on extra difficult mode. It’s not easy and if you are reading this blog and you got this far, you are probably still playing this game.
My encouragement to you is that it can’t be harder than what you went through the last two years and you’ve come out of it on the other side. Pandemics do end. You are stronger for going through this experience and finding a great person to spend your life with is an absolutely amazing, fulfilling experience. Take breaks when you need them, use your support system when you need it, but just keep on going. Eventually, you’ll find your person.
