每日外闻54

Love under lockdown

The return of slow courtship to American dating

Under quarantine (检疫隔离期；隔离), video courtship replaces hookup(勾搭) culture

For trevor barnes, a 27-year-old teacher from Hershey, Pennsylvania, quarantine could be terrible. He lives on his own in an apartment attached to the boarding school （寄宿学校） he works at, and he is fully locked down. For ten days he has not been able to go outside even to buy groceries （买杂物）. Yet Mr Barnes has discovered that being cooped up inside at least does not mean he has to give up his romantic dreams. Over the past week he has met several women, all by phone call and video conference. “I go on a lot of dates normally, from Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, all that stuff,” he says, but has never found somebody he really hit it off with （一拍即合）. “This has been a good way to figure out a more serious approach,” he says.

Though older people will suffer the brunt （冲击） of the coronavirus, it is the footloose (自由自在，不受约束的) young who will see their lives turned upside down （颠倒了）. But a generation that is tied to its phones anyway is perhaps also well-equipped to innovate around some of the problems social isolation imposes. And a lot of young people are proving that just because you cannot actually meet somebody in person does not mean you cannot date.

One popular app, Hinge, says that 70% of its users have expressed an interest in going on digital dates. Match Group, the owners of Tinder, are giving away (赠送) some features of the app that usually cost money to reflect the fact that people have more time to kill （有更多时间可以消磨） by swiping left and right. All dating apps are encouraging users to try video dating. One Instagram feed, called Love is Quarantine, has taken off （起飞） by parodying (模仿) a popular Netflix show called Love is Blind. Its creators, Thi Lam and Rance Nix, who share a flat （合租公寓） in Brooklyn, New York, joke that their invention has “gone viral”(像病毒一样传播).

It is not all easy, dating in a lockdown. Kevin, a 26-year-old tech worker, says he met somebody online recently. “After work I set up a hammock (吊床) in my tiny back yard, grabbed a beer from my fridge and we chatted for an hour,” he says. It went well—he and his date are going to have a walk around a local park next. But he wonders what comes after that. “I am comfortable adding one more person to my isolation group if it comes to that,” he says. Whether his three flatmates (合租者) will be equally comfortable is less clear.

Still, it could be worse. “It has brought us back to an older way of connecting with people, which is just talking, not all these visual branding cues on profiles,” says Katie Nelson, a journalist confined to her parents’ home in Minneapolis. She used to despair of men rushing to meet up before she knew anything about them. When lockdowns end, it may be too much to hope that the return of slow courtship will last. But by then some people might have become experts at it.

take off : 起飞，

Your life just took off. 你的人生起飞了。

be cooped up inside 被困在里面，coop本来是名词表示“鸡笼子”，coop up是动词词组，义为“被…困住”，比如[Big Bang生活大爆炸台词]I’ve been cooped up in here too long.我在这里闷太久了。

suffer the brunt of 同 bear/take the brunt of 都表示“承受住某事的主要压力；首当其冲受影响” ，比如：Schools will bear the brunt of cuts in government spending.政府削减开支，学校将首当其冲受到影响。

go viral 病毒式扩散/疯狂传播，我们说的“走红，火爆”就是go viral，一般指视频、广告、文章等在网上迅速走红，“一夜爆红”则是 go viral overnight。

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See you tomorrow