Yahoo News Love at first Zoom as Covid changes the way singletons meet their perfect match
A first date is usually an occasion to dress to impress. However, it might soon be more normal to drop the high heels in favour of slippers, as singletons increasingly look to vet potential partners on Zoom before meeting.
Although this year’s Valentine’s Day is a far more restriction-free affair than it was last year, research has suggested that the pandemic has had a lasting impact on dating.
Preliminary video dates are an important “gut-check stage of the dating journey”, explained Logan Ury, the head of the relationship science department of Hinge, the dating app.
There can be multiple benefits to getting introduced over a video call, Ms Ury told Bloomberg News.
“Do you like the sound of their voice? Do you feel attracted to them? Can you banter? We’ve seen a huge rise in the popularity of video dating since the beginning of the pandemic.”
During the pandemic, seven in 10 Hinge users were interested in video dating and almost two-thirds wanted to continue using it after restrictions were lifted.
A good way to check if someone is normal
A third of Hinge users reported that they would consider starting a relationship with someone who they have had only video calls with and have never met in person.
Last year, Jungle, an app which allows people to meet for double dates, surveyed users and found that about a tenth of them prefer to video call or send voice messages to potential partners before meeting.
Christian Mitchell, the app’s co-founder, said that singles liked having a way to check that their potential date is “normal” before meeting in real life.
He told The Telegraph: “Video calling is a good way to make sure that that person is normal. [I might be] concerned that the person could come across well in their profile, but they might be odd in real life.”
Other apps reported similar findings from their users. Bumble, the app where women make the first move, reported last year that more than a third of users said that virtual dates are now a normal part of dating. A third also said that sending voice messages before meeting was now more common.
How Bobby Ewing found love on Zoom
Video dating is not only favoured by the younger generation. Patrick Duffy, famous for playing Bobby Ewing in Dallas, reported that he fell in love over Zoom with his partner Linda Purl, the star of Happy Days, over the pandemic.
After briefly meeting once at the end of 2019, they kept in contact and started to video call after the pandemic began in 2020.
“We Zoomed for a couple of months for two to three hours a night,” Purl told You magazine. “We found all of this common turf and then we would drop down to a different level… Patrick would read me a poem he’d written [over Zoom].”
They also used the video calls to give each other virtual tours of their homes.
After months of nightly Zoom calls, Duffy told Purl that he loved her and they decided to become a couple. They met in real life for the second time afterwards, in the summer of 2020, when he made a 23-hour drive to her home in Colorado, US, from his home in Oregon.
