Help! I Think I'm Falling in Love Over Zoom

I vowed to spend the coronavirus quarantine focused on looking inward and improving myself. Then I went on one virtual date and everything changed.

Illustrations by Ellen Surrey | Edited by Brendan Spiegel

Lying comfortably on her back, Allie looks up into my eyes and graces me with another one of the big smiles that I’ve quickly grown to cherish since matching with her on the dating app Hinge last week. It’s our third date. The first two went exceedingly well, with seamless conversation uncovering like-minded worldviews, agreeable senses of humor, and even some respective vulnerabilities. By this point, as the third-date rule dictates, getting a little randy was natural.

“I was wondering how long it was going to take me to get you into bed,” I say, sparking a laugh, considering our current circumstances.

Indeed, this is the first time I’ve been welcomed into Allie’s bedroom, but this experience has only been made possible thanks to the magic of contemporary video-communication technology. Such is courtship in the coronavirus quarantine of 2020.

“You look so good,” I say into my phone, also in bed, at my apartment in Queens.

Allie…