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

You voted. You have sent a message. They even have video chats.

Congratulations. In the midst of a global pandemic, you have found another person you want to get to know better. The only problem: you can not or shouldn’t actually hit them for a personal appointment.

Online data are just a group of many whose normal habits are through the Corona virusCrisis. As the world learns to work from home, school from home, and … stop … damn … touching his face, data struggles not only about how to look for love, but also builds a relationship.

According to OkCupid data, daters sent more than 35 million intro messages in March, around 4 million more than in the same period last year. There was also a 5% increase in people looking for long-term relationships and a 20% decrease in those looking for contacts.

But what’s next when you’ve covered the basics of an initial video chat appointment? Here are some ideas of when this first date progresses to a second, third, and fourth.

Visit a museum

Museum dates are a classic. Instead of going to one in real life, you can find various tours of museums around the world on YouTube. For example, there is a series that is essentially a slideshow of famous works from the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. Elsewhere on YouTube you will find a tour of the Louvre in Paris, France. Google art and culture also offers virtual tours that come from famous museums. Depending on what each museum offers, you can scroll through the collections like your own Google photos or view the online exhibits, which tend to provide more background information. For your date, you can try synchronizing or sharing the screen so that you are viewing the same graphic at the same time.

Watch a concert

If you go back to YouTube (or any other platform that may offer music), you’ll find full-length concerts by bands and artists. Whether it Queen at Wembley Stadium in 1986, Radiohead at Lollapalooza in 2016 or Billie Eilish at Music Midtown there’s a lot out there last year. And if you don’t want to commit to an hour-long concert, you can go to a place like this NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert serieswhere acts play shorter sets at NPR Music headquarters in Washington. Watch together and chat via phone or video chat.

Do some art

For the more creative out there, you can plan an art project that you can do together via video chat. Choose something you want to draw or paint with something you have on hand. This can be a milestone that you both know, an image that you found on Google, or you can even print out a coloring page – Crayola offers, for example Free printable pages for adults. Spend the next hour or so long chatting. In the end, you can show each other the results of your crafting time.

Virtual escape room

Would you like to see how well you solve problems together? Try a virtual escape room. An escape room, if you haven’t tried one yet, is a comprehensive problem-solving scenario – you are literally in a room where you try to solve clues that are normally 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 has one Harry Potter themed room with Google Docs.

Watch a movie together

Services like Netflix Party – a Chrome extension that lets you sync your Netflix ad and chat along the way – have received a lot of attention since the days of social distancing. Could make a date out of it too. While Netflix Party only supports text chat, you can also speak on the phone or on a platform like Discord, while looking for a more immediate experience.

Share dinner or drinks

If you don’t mind someone watching you video call while you eat, you can arrange a dinner or a drink. Put on decent clothes, order food, or eat whatever you’ve cooked, and continue with the usual dinner banter that you might have in a restaurant or bar.

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Go to the old school with games

The players among you probably have a feel for the types of video games that you can play with friends (or dates). But if you’re not one of the legions of people visiting friends’ islands in Animal Crossing, you can resort to simple games and puzzles. Do you remember playing battleship as a kid? All you need is a pen and paper (graph paper if you have it). There is also a fairly simple online version You can try. Or you can work together on a crossword puzzle. The Washington Post, for example, lets you Send a link to a crossword puzzle to a friend so that you can work on them for free at the same time.