Finding love during COVID — How to get back out there

Finding love is never easy. Especially if, like me, you’ve been out of practice for a while.

My boyfriend and I broke up right at the start of COVID, and with everything else going on, I gave myself permission not to deal with it.

Global pandemic or not, it always feels daunting to get back out there after a breakup. You need time to heal, so you put meeting new people off. And before you know it, months go by, and you’ve fallen into a rut.

You’re not meeting new people, and you have no idea how to meet them. You’re not talking or flirting with anyone. And you can’t remember the last time you felt attractive.

None of this is new, but what COVID has changed are the chances that you’ll meet someone else spontaneously.

Now that most people work from home and no one is going out to bars or live events, putting yourself out there feels impossible, unless you’re willing to online date.

So, what I wanted to figure out (after months of just accepting that my love life would have to wait until after COVID), is this:

How can you put yourself out there and meet new people in a way that feels natural and fulfilling during the pandemic?

This blog post is my attempt to find out. What I’m most interested in is building habits and rituals in my daily life that let me connect with other people and practice my social skills organically.

Here’s how I’m thinking about it: finding someone you like (as blunt as this sounds) is a numbers game. If you’re only meeting 5 new people in a given month, the chances that one of those 5 will be someone you really like is quite low. If you’re meeting 500 new people, the odds are a little better.

What’s interesting too is that a lot of people (myself included), think that being selective means limiting how many people you meet. But in reality, you can be much more selective when you have more options to choose from.

So with that in mind, here’s the challenge: Meet 50 new people in the next 3 months.

That’s 15 people a month or 1 new person every other day. A meeting counts when you get the person’s name and have a conversation with them that’s at least 5 minutes long. The person doesn’t have to be someone you’re romantically interested in or attracted to. What this is about is putting yourself in a position where you’re regularly meeting lots of people, so that spontaneous and natural interactions have the space to happen.

As crass as it sounds, what you’re creating is a kind of sales funnel. You need to have lots of leads at the top, and continually qualify them as you go down. Here’s what that funnel looks like:

To track your progress, put the names of every person you meet into this funnel and qualify them each week.

For example, if you find 5/15 people you met attractive, move them to the second bucket and set up conversations to get to know them better. Of those 5, if you feel a connection with 2, move them to the third bucket and set up dates to test your romantic connection, and so on. Continue this process until you’ve found someone you’d like to have a relationship with.

I know this sounds quite mechanic, but rituals work when you perform a specific action. Abstract goals, like “be more sociable” or “meet more people” won’t work as well because you have no criteria for judging whether you’re maintaining the ritual. Without the funnel, you can keep meeting people without creating any romantic possibility, because you’re not taking any specific steps to explore the connections you make.

Now that you know what the challenge is, let’s talk about what you can do everyday to meet new people. Here are 3 things I’ll be trying over the next 3 months:

1. Join Lunchclub

Lunchclub is an online networking tool that’s free and really easy to use. Every week, you’ll get introduced via email to 1–2 new professionals who are relevant to you, and will connect with them over video call. Lunchclub schedules the calls for you, so all you have to do is show up! You can meet people from all around the world, but I’ve set my location to Toronto, so I can meet people who live in my city.

2. Converse with all service staff

Service staff are probably the only people we can still meet spontaneously. And because talking to customers is a part of their job, starting a conversation with them is quite easy. So when you find yourself waiting for your coffee or checking out at the grocery store, ask the person serving you how their day’s going, and try to see how long you can keep up the conversation. Aim to get their names or learn one simple fact about them.

3. Attend 1 online event a week

Eventbrite has a lot of online events for you to choose from, from talks, to trivia nights to online happy hours. Yes, it’s a bit awkward, and you can’t have one-on-one conversations the same way you would in real life. But you can send messages to the people in the group you want to talk to, which, in a lot of ways, is easier than walking up to a stranger in real life. As a rule, try to connect with at least 3 people before you allow yourself to leave the event.