Last week, I was at the grocery store trying to just get my produce and go when I accidentally made eye contact with someone I knew. We were both wearing our masks that covered 3/4 of our faces and in spite of that, we knew exactly who the other person was. I didn’t stay because they were there with their partner. I didn’t want to try and have a haphazard conversation between our face masks, so I just went on my way.
The last time I had seen this person was in high school and it made me think about how differently my life could have been if I had just stayed in my small town. I could have gotten an apartment and ended up dating a friend of a friend and lived down the road from my old school. I knew a lot of people who were happy to do that, and yet I don’t know if I would ever be fully content with that.
These times of coronavirus and quarantine have impacted our perspective on the world, as well as our dating life, more than we may care to realize. We have the ability to connect with people geographically far away from us, but this pandemic makes us starkly aware of how we experience this pandemic differently.
The dating app Tinder has recently made their Passport feature free to all their users. It allows you to set your location to anywhere in the world so that you can talk to people halfway around the world. This is a wonderful move on their part. But, how likely are we going to keep these conversations going after this quarantine is over? Most likely we’re going to go back to our old ways of just talking to people who live near us.
But for argument’s sake, let’s say you do end up having a good chat with someone. Maybe they also speak English, so there’s not so much of a language barrier there. There’s still going to be a cultural barrier there. Even if you both speak English, there are going to be idioms, different ideologies and perhaps worst of all, jokes that they won’t get.
I think it’s nice if you can accept that you both come from different worlds and are open to that. I think that’s the best way to meet new people — to be open to new things. But I think for a lot of people, they’re going to come away from the interaction feeling confused and reinvigorated to talk to people near them, that actually understand them.
We are much more aware of our class and others based on how we are experiencing this pandemic. We saw this on a big scale with the social backlash when all the celebrities posted their sympathy on social media and videos of themselves singing “Imagine” by John Lennon. We are seeing just how out-of-touch with reality a lot of the one percent is. This occurs on a smaller scale as well, as we see some of our friends and family working from home, working extra hours in essential jobs, still going to empty offices, or who are now unemployed.
This time of stress for many people can be grating on inter-class relationships with a pervasive sense of guilt in the air. I don’t think our society is as picky about classes within the middle-class, as opposed to other cultures, but the underlying conversation is still there.
I know that I personally have been neglecting that this is a serious time when many people are trying to figure out how they’re going to financially last through the end of it.
As one Charlotte York once said in an episode of “Sex and the City,” “You’re trying to pretend we live in a classless society, and we don’t.”
this was beautiful to read, and hit the nail right on the head!