Emily Audsley wonders how different things would’ve been, if that first Covid lockdown had never forced everyone onto dating apps and glued them to their screens. Would single people be braver at approaching each other in real-life? Would she still meet men on trains and in bars like she used to, pre-pandemic? "Everyone's got so lazy since the pandemic... it's like they've forgotten how to meet people in-person now," says Audsley, 30, a recruiter from Balham who fears the pandemic took away prime years she'd have liked to have been going out and meeting a future partner.
Meehika Barua, 26, a writer from north-west London, feels lucky that she was a few years younger than Audsley when the pandemic hit — "I don't know any single friend who met someone on the dating apps during the pandemic and is with them now," she says. She's not worried about meeting potential partners in-person because everyone she knows has deleted their dating apps since the lockdowns. But Covid still lingers in her romantic life in other unexpected ways, like prolonging how long it took her to get over her lockdown breakup, and her inability to share a bed with potential partners after a full year sleeping on her own.
