I Started Dating Someone Right Before the Pandemic, and He Met My Parents Via FaceTime
I never had a good track record of introducing partners to friends. I had dated guys prone to using those initial meetings to brag about their prior arrest warrants or rib on a friend’s unfortunate haircut (“very Oregon Trail”). But when Jason met my friends for the first time at my birthday dinner, he didn’t embarrass me or make anyone cry. He was kind, mild-mannered and blended easily into our friend group. I could sense the good energy of the evening spreading into other evenings.
But there wouldn’t be other evenings, at least not for awhile. Two weeks after that dinner —just two months after we began dating — the COVID-19 pandemic traveled across the country. It would now just be the two of us in Jason’s apartment, one measly line from him to me. I worried about this one line, flatlining. Can you build a relationship on a two-dimensional plane? Didn’t a relationship need to bend outward, onto another surface, towards other sources of feedback and noise?
Although I was often too susceptible to other people’s opinions, I worried a relationship couldn’t exist in a vacuum. It needed to be sustained and nourished from the outside. I believed in the process of integration. When I envision a future with someone, I imagine him lodged between two cousins at Thanksgiving, getting in on all the family in-jokes. I picture him joining one of my WhatsApp group chats, deploying a steady stream of jokey texts. The night Jason met my friends, one of them texted me that we were such a “lovely match.” I could sense the text affirmation push us somewhere deeper in the relationship. Though embarrassing to admit, most of us (on some level) want to be judged or assessed. We want to see our relationship refracted back to us from a third party.
As the quarantine dragged on, Jason and I began slowly hanging out with other people, albeit from a distance. We engaged in wisps of interactions, face-masked, across the patio, across a field and even on Zoom. Every few weeks, Jason’s parents would drop off groceries that were a part of their Costco delivery order. The first time they stopped by, panic rippled steadily through me. I preferred meeting others in quiet, properly seated scenarios, where I could slowly assess the room, survey the mood, shyly slip in and out of conversation. But with an invisible, viral killer in our midst, such leisurely gatherings were no longer a thing. When I first met Jason’s parents, we stood six feet apart on a sidewalk, exchanged exaggerated air hugs, shared rushed updates on various relatives, contemplated when — if ever — we would be able to meet in an indoor setting.
But the brief meeting possessed a surprising warmth. We still found new ways to connect, standing, in passing. Social distancing requires us to navigate new barriers, improvise new entries into intimacy. We have to invent new gestures of warmth, sign-language our affection, push to the deeper parts of conversation within a limited time frame, before the quick convening ends. It’s intimacy on speed from a distance.
When Jason met my parents, they were 570 miles away in Kentucky. FaceTime was all we had. I felt bad for him that he had to meet my parents via a 4.7 x 4.7 screen, and that he would have to watch his own face on an even smaller screen within that screen. Desperate to fill in the impending silence, I launched into yet another dumb, obvious story about How Our Lives Have Changed. "I just cut my own bangs using children’s scissors in the bathroom!" I said. "Such crazy times we're living in!" My parents lapsed into a sea of hearty guffaws. Bless them. Their noisy cackling over nothing loosened the seams of the call. Laughter, certainly the most primal, instinctual mode of connecting, helps us remember how to act normal with each other, even over video chat on shaky WiFi connections. As we are now forced to meet in snippets, through static, on screens, laughing reminds us of good ol’ IRL times, telling bad stories in shoddy bars and restaurants.
On the phone the next morning, my mom told me she liked Jason, “What’s not to like??” she asked. My iPhone still linking me umbilically to my family, it was comforting to know my family and friends could still offer their ceaseless, unsought opinions, three states over. My relationship would never have to exist in a vacuum. None of my life would. Amid the remoteness of our new lives, the formlessness and strangeness of our new existence, we could still find new, untried ways of letting people in.
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