“Whoever Has Both Doses Is a Match”

Despite the difficulty of maintaining face-to-face meetings due to the coronavirus, the app had its most active year in 2020 and registered a 42% increase in the activity of its users.

Luna, a 28-year-old psychologist who lives in Madrid, had one of the worst romantic encounters of her life during the pandemic. Upon meeting a guy she had seen on Tinder, she noticed his mask was grimy. "You're going on a date. How's it going with the dirty mask! His was terrible, torn, half on the side. It started badly", says Luna, who prefers not to reveal her surname. "He spent the whole time talking about himself, on top of very boring things. There was nowhere to get him. When I said I was leaving, he told me that he had found me very special on the app but that he personally realized that I was commonplace and didn't speak. In the end, we both won an argument with a stranger," she recalls. "And I told you your mask was dirty ."

The Spanish Raquel, 27 years old, faced an even more rocambolesque problem with the mask. She had her eye on a fellow gym but didn't have the heart to approach him. Until she saw him on Tinder. Or not. "Since she always saw him in a mask, she wasn't sure if it was him. I tried to probe him with messages like 'You looked great in the green shirt today, and he just replied, 'hahaha.' She didn't know if he thought it was a joke or if he was himself because he didn't say anything. We scored in a period when you could go without a mask outdoors, but when I got closer, I said: 'Gee, it's not him. I abort the mission, walk away, and then the image comes back to me, and I realize that it was actually him. Without the gym clothes, of course, so my head didn't click. I didn't turn around because I thought it would be awkward to explain this to him. And he never went back to the gym.

Luna and Raquel are just two of the many people worldwide who made 2020 the most active year in Tinder's history. A growth maintained in 2021: in February of this year, there were 19% more messages per day than in the same month of 2020, shortly before the imposition of home confinement in Spain because of the expansion of the coronavirus. A company source says that, during the pandemic, each user made an average of 11% more screen swipes to see other profiles (which in application jargon is called swipe ) and got 42% more matches. In the language of Tinder, the expression denotes that two people have shown a mutual interest). On March 29, almost at the beginning of the Spanish quarantine, Tinder surpassed for the first time the three billion swipes in a single day worldwide, a record that, throughout the year, beat another 130 times.

Despite these numbers, the virus and restrictions made it difficult for meetings to take place at this time. "Previously, it was much easier to book with someone, but I noticed that the previous chat conversation is no longer," acknowledges Luna, adding that her 2020 (post-lockdown) and 2021 dates were always scheduled outdoors, just in case. . Tinder noted this in its figures: while it is customary for people throughout the relationship to switch to the phone or Instagram, chats on the platform are now 32% longer. An alternative explanation could be hidden in other data. According to Tinder, 60% of those who opened a profile last year did not intend to find a partner. The primary motivation was the desire to fight loneliness and relate to others. Other people.

After the vaccine, we mark

Journalist Lucía Ramos, who spent 2020 in Madrid and works in Paris, does not feel that the coronavirus complicated the meetings so much: "Covid changed the world, but things continue as before, you have sex the same," she tells. The mechanics of encounters were also inevitably affected by circumstances. For Lucía, the mask was "the initial obstacle." "When I had my first date, I wondered how to see the face without the mask. Normally, it's bad enough that you don't know if you'll like someone in person, but the mask complicates it even more. What do you say? 'Put it down so I can see if I like your face?". Luna agrees: "The greetings were weird. You're in limbo because, on a Tinder date, obviously everyone knows the intention. And before the pandemic, kissing could arise naturally. Still, as you put on the mask when leaving the bar, there is a barrier. It is an uncomfortable and challenging time to overcome,

This abruptly canceled out possible love stories, as appears to be with 24-year-old writer Jessica Martínez (not her real name). "The boy took me to salsa dance, so I put on the mask when I got up from the table. I know it was normal for there to have been a kiss there. I guess I was a bit of a killjoy, but I put her out of responsibility. He would move to Barcelona the next day, and I also don't like to invite anyone to my house on the first date," she narrates.

None of the users interviewed say they have found a crush on Tinder or other apps .who made demands related to the pandemic, such as a recent PCR test or having been vaccinated. However, they know of people with whom this happened. "A friend was very stressed because the person she wanted to make an appointment with preferred that they do not see each other until the two were vaccinated because his parents were a high-risk population. In the end, they scored but kept a distance of one and a half meters. And now both are immunized and stayed together", says one of the interviewees. "Whoever has both doses is a match. So it's worth playing the net", laughs Raquel, admitting that, although she is interested in the vaccine, she does not consider it a mandatory condition for a date. What she seeks, like most, is to arrange outdoor dates.

Polyamory in the times of covid

The more contacts that occur, the greater the possibility of contagion. This was the experience lived up close by Samuel Paredes, a 32-year-old Spanish researcher. He lives in Budapest and also identifies with a fictitious name for professional reasons. "I follow a regime of polyamory and relational anarchy. I'm not looking for a monogamous affair, so I use these apps very often," he told. Samuel doesn't know if he's ever had coronavirus – at least not with symptoms – but a girl he's been seeing has fallen ill. "In polyamory, it's easy to have intimate contact with more people. So you need to let everyone know. Then, of course, the person is in trouble because he has to contact a lot, not only family and friends but also his relationships. So suddenly, you have to inform God and the world."

The presence of the virus has also become part of everyday life in the applications themselves. For example, Javier Narváez, a 24-year-old graphic designer from Madrid, tells that jokes like "one PCR and we stay together" have been relatively standard lately in profile descriptions, in addition to photos with a mask. Raquel, in turn, because she has restrictions on using personal images in her profile, published a series of pictures with the cover placed on different parts of her face: "It was a joke, like a jigsaw puzzle, something like 'reconstruct the face from the unmasked parts.'"

Tinder sources also say that themes such as "shortage of toilet paper" began to appear in the profiles during the confinement, which, in the case of the so-called Generation Z (born between the late 1990s and early 2000s), reached to be updated three times as often as before the pandemic, often with current affairs. The company also reveals that in this age group in Spain, mentions of "skating" tripled in February and March 2021. In addition, the phrase "walk through [park] Retiro" was written 50% more times, which suggests a reduction of other options that were previously more common to arrange meetings, such as bars.

The restaurant and expectations

Bumble, the dating app created by a former vice president of marketing at Tinder and launched on the stock exchange this year, opened its own restaurant on July 24, New York, conceived as the ideal place to book your dates. Jessica Martínez, a user of this application, thinks that she would never go to a restaurant of this type: "You can't arrange a dinner or dead. You need to tag somewhere you can get away if things go wrong. I have no desire to see a person for the first time with food gushing out of their mouth." "Making dates in restaurants is something for those who think they live on Friends," says, in turn, Lucía Ramos. Jessica, on the other hand, thinks that, whether in a bar or restaurant, seeing how the other person treats the waiters serves as an indicator of how she really is: "If you don't look in the face when ordering or are not at all kind, I'm sure you won't like me."

Javier Narváez, 24, a resident of Madrid, admits he hasn't had success on the dating app since the start of the pandemic. However, he doesn't link this directly to the virus. "Let's assume that I don't know how to flirt. And half of the people say they don't know either," he argues. Narváez notes that "95% or 98% of the time," he was the one who initiated the conversation with the matches. In the data provided by Tinder, the company highlights the behavior of Generation Z users, who, according to their own reports, 40% enter to "meet new and different people." It also states that this generation is more given to the meetings being limited to the digital sphere, which is why the platform launched the video chat modality. In the absence of a full-fledged vaccine, a convenient restaurant, or simply the will, many would-be Gen Z couples continue to see each other, as we all learned to do a year and a half ago, with the mediation of a screen. With immunity, maybe love will come too.

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