Dating during coronavirus: 7 ideas for virtual dates while social distancing

You’ve matched. You’ve messaged. You’ve even video chatted. 

Congratulations. In the midst of a global pandemic, you’ve found another human being you’d like to get to know better. The only problem: You can’t or shouldn’t actually meet them for an in-person date. 

Online daters are just one group of many whose normal habits have been upended by the coronaviruscrisis. As the world learns to work from home, school from home, and… stop… friggin’… touching… its face, daters are grappling with not only how to look for love but also forge a relationship. 

According to data from OkCupid, daters sent more than 35 million intro messages in March, which is about 4 million more than in the same time frame last year. There’s also been a 5% increase in folks looking for long-term relationships and a 20% decrease in those looking for hookups. 

But once you’ve covered the basics of a first date via video chat, what comes next? Here are some ideas for when that first date progresses to a second, third and fourth.  

Tour a museum

Museum dates are a classic. In lieu of going to one in real life, you can find various tours on YouTube of museums around the world. There’s one series, for example, that’s essentially a slideshow of famous works from the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. Elsewhere on YouTube, you can find a walking tour of the Louvre in Paris, France. Google Arts and Culture also offers virtual tours, of sorts from famous museums. Depending on what each museum offers, you can scroll through collections the way you would your own Google photos, or check out the online exhibits, which tend to offer some more background information. For your date you can try to synchronize or  screen-share so you’re looking at the same art at the same time. 

Watch a concert

Once again turning to YouTube (or any other platform that might offer music), you can find full-length concerts from bands and artists. Whether it’s Queen at Wembley Stadium in 1986, Radiohead at Lollapalooza in 2016 or Billie Eilish at Music Midtown last year, there’s quite a lot out there. And if you don’t want to commit to a whole hours-long concert, you could head to somewhere like NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series, where acts play shorter sets at NPR Music’s headquarters in Washington. Watch together and chat away via phone or video chat.

Make some art 

For the more creative-minded out there, you can plan an art project to do together over video chat. Using whatever art supplies you have on hand, decide on something to draw or paint. This could be a landmark you both know, an image you found on Google, or you could even just print off a coloring page — Crayola, for example, offers free printable pages for adults. Spend the next hour, or however long, working on it while you chat. At the end, you can show each other results of your craft time.

Virtual escape room

Want to see how well you solve problems together? Try a virtual escape room. An escape room, if you haven’t tried one, is an immersive problem-solving scenario — you’re literally in a room trying to solve clues, usually tied to a fictional situation, in a limited amount of time. You can find some virtual translations online. For example, the Peters Township Public Library in McMurray, Pennsylvania, created a Harry Potter-themed room using Google Docs. 

Watch a movie together

Services like Netflix Party — a Chrome extension that lets you sync up your Netflix viewing and chat on the side — have gotten a lot of attention since the days of social distancing began. Might as well make a date out of it. While Netflix Party only supports text chat, you can also talk on the phone or a platform like Discord while you watch for more immediate experience. 

Share dinner or drinks

If you don’t mind someone watching you eat via a video call, you can stage a dinner or drinks date. Put on some decent clothes, order food or eat whatever you’ve cooked, and carry on with the usual over-dinner banter  you might have at a restaurant or bar. 

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Go old school with games

The gamers among you likely have a sense of the types of video games you can play with friends (or dates). But if you aren’t one of the legions of folks visiting friends’ islands in Animal Crossing, you can resort to simple games and puzzles. Remember playing Battleship as a kid? All  you need is a pen and paper (graph paper, if you have it). There’s also a pretty simple online version you can try. Or you can work on a crossword puzzle together. The Washington Post, for example, lets you send a link to a crossword puzzle to a friend so you can work on the same one at the same time, for free.