Will Masks Affect Your Dating Life?

Damn you, Delta variant. We really thought everything was going to be OK there for a second. Does the weird deep-pandemic dating scene already feel like a collective fever dream? Well, I hope you didn’t burn all your masks, because the CDC is asking us to cover our face holes once again. I personally don’t mind, since mask-wearing mitigates public chit-chat, and I got really into sewing masks during last-year’s quarantine. But for those hoping for dates with new people that end in smooches, it’s fairly bad news, I’d say. Will you be masking as aggressively as you did last year? I feel like a lot of people are too tired or two confused to really commit to public safety in the way that they did in 2020. But it doesn’t hurt to try. At the very least to avoid looking like an asshole.

If you are trying to be a conscientious citizen, how will your dating life change? Are we going to see a resurgence of a more text/talk/video-heavy dating experience? Will you take more time getting to know someone remotely before meeting in real life? If you’re fully vaxxed, you might make being vaxxed a prereq for the people you date in person, or maybe you’ll date the same as you have been all summer, but wearing a mask into places that require it. Whether you’ll be taking extra precautions or just doing what you need to, having more intentional, engaging conversations is always the move. Use BANTER for all your back-and-forth, and be safe out there.