Even before coronavirus was the only thing we had to talk about, everyone’s dating app profiles were already pretty much the exact same. On any given profile, you’d be guaranteed to see a line about The Office, loving margaritas, or asking your opinion about pineapple on pizza. But the lack of originality is even worse than usual. We may all be living the exact same lives right now, but that doesn’t mean we need to be making the same jokes about toilet paper, how we don’t know what day it is, or if we’ll ever leave our homes again. We all get enough of that coronavirus small talk on our Zoom meetings with our bosses. Here are all the quarantine dating app opening lines, bios, and prompt answers that no one ever wants to hear again.
“This year, I really want to…leave my apartment”
All this does is remind me that I had to cancel all of my summer trips and will instead be getting drunk on White Claws all by myself and inflating a mini pool in my living room just to feel something.
“Need some toilet paper?”
Not sure about everyone else, but I don’t know a single person who has had trouble finding toilet paper in the last two months. The toilet paper jokes should have ended in March, just like any hope we had of having a real summer.
“Can’t wait to hang out after quarantine”
The optimism here is nice, but given all the people playing the game of “how many drunk people can we cram into this public pool” in states outside of New York and California, it’s looking like quarantine is literally never going to end. You’re better off acknowledging that we’re all probably going to be FaceTime dating until it’s time for our Zoom weddings in 2023.
“On day __ of quarantine…”
Just like every major event planned for 2020, jokes about wearing sweatpants every day, having conversations with your cat, and not remembering what day it is have been canceled. Once my Boomer parents start making jokes about it, that means it’s officially time for the joke to retire (to Facebook, where your relatives share memes from six months ago).
“Ideal night out…going outside”
“F*ck, am I ever going to go to a crowded bar and pay for overpriced drinks and forget my purse in the bathroom because ‘Mr. Brightside’ came on and I needed to go scream-sing it with my friends ever again?” That’s what this response makes me think of. Not exactly “swipe right” material.
“First round is on me if…Rona ever ends”
Then odds are, there won’t ever be a “first round.” Maybe you wrote this back in March when you thought the world would go into lockdown for a few weeks and then everything would go back to normal. In that case, maybe it’s time for an update.
“I’d break quarantine for you.”
Hmmm…. Pretty sure if you’re breaking quarantine for me, you’re also probably breaking it for every other girl you talk to. It may feel like it’s been 84 years since I’ve felt a human’s touch, but I’d still rather ride out the rest of the hellscape that is 2020 alone than get coronavirus from a guy whose entire profile consists of mirror selfies.
Corona/Quarantine puns
Puns are never effective even when the world isn’t living out an episode of Black Mirror. And maybe we’re lowering our standards a little bit right now (I’d swipe right on a Goldfish cracker if it meant I could talk to it), but not enough for me to change my mind about immediately unmatching with anyone who uses puns.
“If coronavirus doesn’t take you out, can I?”
IDK if you’ve read the news lately, but 100,000 people have died. And if that isn’t enough to convince you that this is a super f*cking insensitive thing to say, consider that eventually you will probably end up sending it to someone who has lost someone to Covid.
“I love The Office!”
Because apparently, even in a global pandemic where we’ve all got nothing but time to stream new content, people still think being obsessed with a seven-year-old TV show is a personality trait.
Not only are none of these even that funny, they’re also just a really f*cking boring way to start a conversation. Like, do you really want to talk about your quarantine routine with every person you match with? It seems like maybe we should all make a resolution to fix our dating app game before this is all over.
Images: Samantha Gades / Unsplash; Maddie Dean (9)
I don’t know about you all, but the only thing keeping me in relatively good spirits these past few days has been the high quality of memes being churned out on the internet. It might have something to do with the fact that this is one of those rare times when the entire word is experiencing the same thing at the same time, and there is a tremendous amount of solidarity online. But apart from providing a much-needed distraction from the news, these memes serve a more crucial role in maintaining our sanity than we might realize. (Take that, every parent who’s ever said creating memes is not a real job.)
Is a symptom of corona virus having thick luscious juicy ass cheeks cos I’m scared guys
— chris (@Chrissyinglis) March 16, 2020
Laughter has been considered an effective form of therapy for years, and we’ve all heard sayings like “laughter is the best medicine.” But how does this work exactly? I spoke with Ugur Üngör, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and someone who has studied the functions of humor during and after genocide, to get to the bottom of why humor really can help people cope with dark times.
“The key objectives of humor in a crisis involving death(s) are criticism, community, and coping. The latter is very important for people to get through a crisis. Ask anyone who’s been through a war or genocide and they’ll confirm that a certain friend with a good sense of humor is what kept them alive at times,” said Professor Üngör. Now, the coronavirus is no World War, technically speaking, but the lasting socioeconomic damage this pandemic has caused on a global scale is already being compared to the recession of World War II.
1920: Alcohol is prohibited
2020: Liquor stores are an essential business during a national health crisis
— RubMor (@QBruby) March 28, 2020
Also similar to a war is the grim fact that thousands of people across the globe are dying. So is it really okay to make jokes about the virus that is killing so many people? I spoke with Dr. Thomas Ford, Editor In Chief of the International Journal of Humor Research about the benefits of using humor in stressful situations. He conducted an experiment in which participants completed a role-play exercise in which they imagined they were about to take a stressful, difficult SAT-like math test. Participants in the first condition read four cartoons and four jokes that poked fun at math tests and math in general. Participants in the second situation saw cartoons that poked fun at their own math ability. And finally, participants in the last group did not read any jokes or cartoons while anticipating taking the math test. They found that participants whose cartoons poked fun at the math test reported lower feelings of anxiety compared to participants in the other two conditions.
These findings suggest that engaging in not just any humor, but humor that trivializes the immediate stressor, is particularly effective at mitigating the negative effects of that stressor on anxiety. This is perhaps the reason why social media is flooded with memes that explicitly talk about coronavirus, as opposed to shying away from joking about the virus directly.
“I think it’s very healthy to joke about the coronavirus,” said Dr. Ford. “Stressful events such as the coronavirus can adversely affect our mental health, producing anxiety and depression. Humor invites us to reframe those stressors playfully and non-seriously, providing a way for us to see them as less threatening and scary, which consequently mitigates, at least momentarily, the experience of emotional distress.”
HOW TO AVOID CORONAVIRUS‼️
– Don’t let them in
– Don’t let them see
– Be the good girl you always have to be
– Conceal
– Don’t feel
– Put on a show
– Make one wrong move and everyone will know— eca (@WlDOWBYTE) March 16, 2020
At first, I was surprised, even annoyed to see the amount of Coronavirus content that was there online. But eventually, I started feeling solace knowing that other people were also feeling the same way. And with no end in sight, the uncertainty of the situation adds to our anxieties, leading to the creation of some truly entertaining content that is bound to stay for a long time. So don’t delete that COVID-19 meme folder on your phone—it’s called documenting history for future generations, look it up.
Images: Charles Deluvio / Unsplash; @WlDOWBYTE, @QBruby, @Chrissyinglis / Twitter
