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This Is Us
The Risks of Taking My Quarantine Romance from DM to IRL
He was more than just a fun distraction, but was it worth the leap?
A thing they don’t tell you about starting a relationship — of any caliber — in quarantine is that there is absolutely nowhere to put your feelings. They stay contained, like yourself, in a 500-square-foot studio apartment, until you reach a breaking point and decide it’s worth the risk to set them free. And putting your heart on the line during a pandemic? Well, that’s like taking a thousand risks at once. You ought to be prepared to protect all the vulnerable parts.
I met J in the most iconic of destinations: my Instagram DMs. I knew he existed long before he took the leap, however, because he’d been following me for years on Twitter, after reading a few of my McSweeney’s pieces. He was the best kind of follower — a “fan” who didn’t push boundaries, one who just quietly liked the wild, witty, weird words I posted on the internet, and nothing more.
Until, of course, he finally decided to say hello.
For most of my online life, I have openly shared anecdotes from my dating experiences — particularly on platforms with limited character counts (and in longer form, when merited). But being single during quarantine was an interesting new dynamic. No longer able to do whatever with whomever, whenever, gave creativity to the moment — ripe with fresh, fascinating content.
Some of my tweets through this lens were making their way around the internet in rapid-fire bouts that skyrocketed my Instagram account (dedicated solely to screenshots of my tweets) to over 15,000 followers in less than a few months. My Insta DMs were comically overcrowded with interested men, most of whom, per usual, couldn’t leave a lasting impression. But I was thankful to give Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge a tiny break and instead sift through the prospects who were shooting their shot on my new favorite dating app.
As I was busy running my own personal dating reality show in confinement, J and I began a playful dialogue, filled mostly with punny banter and heart-eyed Instagram Story reactions. I wouldn’t have engaged initially without doing my detective due diligence, of course, and…
