Throughout nearly two years of the pandemic, young people at every turn have found creative ways to connect with their friends and potential love interests. Despite what at many times has been a largely virtual world, teens often came out on the other side of lockdown with relationships that were stronger for the experience. 

Or as one New York City high schooler put it: “If you’ve been through a pandemic with someone, I feel like we’re bonded for life.”

From long-harbored crushes to new friends over Zoom, breakups to hookups, and Bumble DMs to online multiplayer games, young people shared with The 74 their experiences of pandemic friendship and romance, brought to you in the form of seven mini-love stories.

ILA KUMAR

It was the Frida Kahlo poster in the background of her Snapchats that first caught his attention. Ila Kumar was about to be a senior in high school and, stuck inside her family’s home in upstate New York as the early stages of the pandemic raged, she had begun chatting with … a boy. And not just any boy, but a longtime crush.

Over Snapchat, the two quickly discovered that they had each taken AP Art History and planned to major in the subject in college. “That was the beginning of our conversation,” said Kumar. “And then it just kind of went from there.”

Pretty soon, she was begging her mother, who was the more COVID-strict parent in the household, to let her meet up with this new romantic interest. The boy, for his part, offered to sanitize the car before Kumar entered and drive with the windows down. 

The campaign eventually succeeded and in June 2020 they met for coffee on the nearby campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. That date ended in a kiss, which both shocked and pleased her. The pair kept seeing each other, taking COVID tests beforehand if either was worried about a potential exposure. After each date, Kumar had a friend who would come to her house and sit six feet apart on her back porch to debrief. 

“After such a terrible year, this, like, little 13-year-old dream I had totally came true,” said Kumar.

Now, the couple is embarking on what Kumar calls an “experiment in attachment.” She’s at Vassar, living in a dorm next to the cafe where they first met. He studies at the University of Michigan. The processes of navigating long-distance and virus safety together have made them better communicators, Kumar believes. And amid the continued uncertainty of pandemic travel, the pair has developed a deeper gratitude for the time they get to share together.

“There’s something kind of magical about being able to overcome a lot of stuff and getting to see the person who you love so much,” she said.

DORA CHAN

When the pandemic made in-person hangouts impossible for Dora Chan and her friends at Brooklyn Technical High School, they turned to online games. Their favorite was a multiplayer egg-based shooter game called Shell Shockers.

“It’s often really silly, because we’re like, ‘Oh my god, there’s an egg around the corner. Watch out,’” said Chan.

They would form huge Zoom calls to play, and not only would her immediate friends join, but also friends of friends whom she didn’t know well. She quickly developed her own independent relationships. One previously unknown peer asked her to play online games nearly every single day, said Chan.

Alongside the pandemic’s grim backdrop, the high schoolers would frequently jump between lighter topics to more heavy ones, cementing their new connections.

“Sometimes people will be vulnerable with each other, even if you’re strangers and be like, ‘Yeah, my grandma is in the hospital right now and I’m worried.’ And then you have someone else say, ‘Oh my god, me too,’” said Chan. 

“It’s, like, so sad but also heartwarming that we can come together in times like that.”

As national attention turned to racial injustice after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, race and policing would also come up in their conversations, said the high schooler. It would never be the original intent of the call, but the topic would arise naturally, maybe after they got bored with the game.

“It was at those moments that we felt the most connected,” said Chan. “We understood that, despite everything that was happening, we all were going through it together.”

Now, she meets up in the city to spend time with those she grew close to during quarantine. They get food, go shopping and hang out, but Chan remains careful about COVID because her grandparents live with her family. The relationships that she made over the last two years, she believes, are even stronger than those she had before. 

“It has made those friendships open to, like, all topics on earth. We can just talk about anything and everything,” said the Brooklyn Tech senior. “That’s why I think those friendships have lasted.”

JACE WILDER

Jace Wilder and his now-partner first matched on Tinder during early quarantine, but before they could connect, Wilder deleted the app. When the pair again matched on Bumble, Wilder knew he had to reach out.

“You had me at nonprofit,” he messaged, responding to a mention on the potential love interest’s profile that he had founded a charitable organization.

It kicked off a months-long texting conversation. When COVID numbers eventually began to subside in September 2020, they decided to meet up for a socially distanced dinner. The two, who are both transgender men living in Tennessee, bonded quickly.

“It was just one of those times where we immediately were connected by the fact that we were both trans, we were both connected by the fact that, you know, he went to Belmont (the Nashville university Wilder attends) … and had switched schools,” he explained. 

Their conversation stretched on, covering “everything under the sun,” recalls Wilder. In that moment, he forgot the fear and uncertainty of the pandemic world in which they were living. “It felt normal,” he said. “Things felt normal for a second.”

As they continued to date, at first casually, and then as an official couple by spring 2021, the pair simultaneously navigated COVID surges and the fact that they lived an hour drive apart. It meant that, at times, they relied on video calls for their hangouts. But Wilder was pleasantly surprised to find that the remote dates didn’t bother him.

“It feels like I’m just right there with him because the conversation builds that bridge between that virtual gap. … Whenever I’m just having a conversation with him, it doesn’t feel like it’s there at all,” he said.

As the relationship progressed, Wilder found more and more to love about his partner. He is a great storyteller, he learned, and makes beautiful art on the side. The two share a mutual admiration for each other’s opposite academic pursuits: Wilder studies political science and public health, while his partner is pursuing psychology and genetics.

“We both kind of feel like we can take over the world together,” he said. “It’s never like, ‘Everything is bad, being trans in the South is bad.’ It’s like, ‘It’s good in this moment, even if it’s just right now in this moment, it’s good.’”

IRA HABIBA

Stuck inside and feeling lonely at the beginning of lockdown, Ira Habiba was scrolling TikTok when she came across a pen pal site called . Wanting to meet new people, she signed up.

“I would just, like, close my eyes and pick a random country, and then I’d pick a random person to talk to,” said the West Quincy, Massachusetts high schooler.

Pretty soon, she was chatting with people from Korea, France and Finland. They added each other on Instagram, and messaged back and forth with conversations that stretched over days and weeks. Her French pen pal would send voice messages in English, and Habiba would respond in “broken French,” she said. Her pen pal described living on a farm in the French countryside, where she would tend to horses and cows.

“For her, you know, living in the countryside, having a farm, those things are simple for her. But to me, it’s like a completely different experience,” Habiba reflected.

Not only did she learn about worlds beyond her Massachusetts suburb, but as the conversations went on, she began to feel comfortable sharing about more vulnerable experiences like her anxiety attacks or moments of emotional distress.

“You tend to trust strangers a bit more because you know that they won’t judge you,” explained Habiba. “And they would listen.”

SAMANTHA FARROW

Samantha Farrow hadn’t yet completed her freshman year at Stuyvesant High School in Brooklyn, New York when the pandemic shut down in-person classes. Going into sophomore year with only nascent friendships was “a little bit scary and a little bit lonely,” she recalled.

But Farrow and some peers took to Zoom for hangouts. Her friends brought their friends. And soon she felt that her social network had become more full. The group played charades and watched Korean dramas. Other times, they’d log in and each do their own thing.

“Everyone was doing whatever they wanted to do, but we were just there together and it kind of brought this feeling of solace,” said Farrow.

Practically no one she knew was dating during remote learning, she said, and the short flings she heard about mostly fizzled out in a matter of weeks because it was difficult to meet up in person.

“You don’t need anyone, girl. You’re strong by yourself,” her friends would tell each other. “You can depend on us.”

Now, as school has reopened, Farrow admits that the return to normal socializing hasn’t always been smooth. 

“I definitely don’t look the same so I don’t know if some people will remember me,” she said. “There’s people who I talked to before the pandemic, and I didn’t talk to them during the pandemic. And I don’t know if I should say hi to them or not. So there’s a lot of, like, awkwardness.”

But with her core group of friends, her relationships are rock solid, she says. They’re trying to make up for lost time by going over to each other’s houses whenever possible — in small groups to stay COVID safe.

“We just want to take in as much of each other as we can,” said Farrow. “We’re really close now because, like, if you’ve been through a pandemic with someone, I feel like we’re bonded for life.”

ROHITH RAMAN 

It wasn’t until prom 2021 that Rohith Raman saw most of his classmates in person during his senior year. He had stayed online as a precaution for the safety of his grandmother, who lives with his family in their Houston home. Other than games of Call of Duty Warzone and FaceTimes here and there, it had been tough to stay in touch with peers who were outside his inner circle.

But he and his friends had long looked forward to bigger social hangouts.

“We had kind of talked about having a lot of gatherings or hosting stuff. And just having fun with a lot of people,” said Raman. “Prom was the catalyst for that kind of thing.”

By late spring, he had received both vaccine doses and COVID rates were falling. So he and his friends organized a small pre-prom get-together. At the event, he found himself gravitating to one person in particular. It was a new feeling, because during remote learning, the high schooler hadn’t developed many crushes — it had felt pointless knowing they would never be able to meet up, he said. 

But the two kept talking throughout prom and, afterwards, Raman asked her whether she wanted to spend time one-on-one. Despite the awkwardness of re-learning how to socialize in person after so long in quarantine, spending time together over the course of the summer “was kind of easy,” said Raman. “I kind of knew, at least, what I was feeling.”

Fast-forward eight months, and the pair have parted ways, but the now-college freshman remains grateful for having had the chance to return a small bit of normalcy to his senior year. Now at Tufts University in Boston, waves of increased COVID-19 transmission have forced the school to periodically clamp down on socializing. It has meant that students looking for love often have had to pivot their search online. 

Five or 10 of his friends downloaded the Tinder app in the last week alone, Raman said. He hasn’t yet, but it probably won’t be long, he laughed.

“You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.”

ESMÉE SILVERMAN

Esmée Silverman was in a relationship when COVID-19 struck, and “by all accounts we were a happy couple,” she said.

But as someone who felt most at ease with others when she could be physically close, social distancing seemed alien. Her relationship with her girlfriend eventually began to feel more taxing than fulfilling.

“Online communication is exhausting, and having to rely on that exclusively made everything feel more muddled,” Silverman recalled.

The pair split up. It was a difficult time for many queer youth, said Silverman, who is transgender. Some weren’t out to their parents and/or relied on spaces outside their family’s household in order to be their most authentic selves. But in lockdown, that was all taken away.

“I had heavily relied on physical spaces and physical gatherings to meet other queer youth, especially through my school’s ” said the Easton, Massachusetts teen. “That was gone within the blink of an eye.”

But the young person found ways to cope. She met with other queer youth virtually, and eventually, when she was ready to consider romance again, began casually dating some people she met online. She noticed that on many dating app profiles, people shared political views like “BLM” or “Stop Asian Hate,” which, to her, seemed like a shift. 

“Beforehand, the common consensus was politics were best kept quiet until a few dates in,” she said. “Today, they are fueling matches in a way that common interests do. Queer people are tired of having to break down complex political and social nuances to confused potential dates, and now prefer to be more straightforward.”

Reflecting on the last two years, Silverman can trace her inner growth.

“The experience of being locked down and the move to a virtual environment definitely hit a reset button in me, it allowed me to figure out what I individually needed in relationships,” she said. “I was alone and able to focus on myself and my needs.”

It was only Feb. 27, 2020 — a mere 17 months ago — that the first school in the United States due to COVID-19.

Somehow it seems longer in pandemic time.

For students, like everyone else, that temporal elasticity could be chalked up to a host of things, from the monotony of quarantine to isolation from family and friends to the mostly invisible barriers between the spaces where we worked, played and dreamed.

In March 2020, The 74 launched “Pandemic Notebook,” an intimate series designed to capture, in their own words, how students are living through this strange period.

Few understood how long it would last. Initially, it just seemed like Spring Break was taking . But then the goalposts for a return to normalcy kept shifting: the end of the school year, the fall, the conclusion of Biden’s “First 100 Days.”

It still hasn’t happened.

For students in a once-unthinkable year two of pandemic school, the stories deepened as quarantine wore on. Some grappled with young love in a time of virtual connection; others, locked inside their homes, experienced the deep trauma of parental abuse. They faced issues that are perennial: privilege, college and equity, making new friends. They also tried new things. A fifth-grader in Michigan took advantage of learning from home to care for a neighbor’s ducks and chickens. A high school junior in Chicago recommitted to education and his love of physics after a 3 a.m. epiphany watching Neil deGrasse Tyson videos on YouTube. And a New York City senior who scoured her apartment building for a decent Wi-Fi signal discovered something better: her neighbors.

Here are their stories.

‘Returning’ to school

WELCOME TO PANDEMIC SCHOOL, YEAR TWO: For students starting a new school year, there are advantages to going virtual. An extra 45 minutes of sleep, for one. Not having to pack a lunch. Avoiding the disgusting bathrooms that are seemingly impossible to avoid in any building occupied by so many adolescents. But as Sadie Bograd writes, much is lost: “Going back to school simply didn’t feel like much of a meaningful shift after a similarly Zoom-filled and homebound summer.” Her school in Lexington, Kentucky, started the semester entirely online. But as she started school, moving from class to class, or link to link, she found several small reasons to be hopeful. Some teachers adorned their Canvas pages with virtual Bitmoji classrooms, their avatars guiding students to important links. Others went on fascinating tangents and rambling digressions. “In short,” Bograd writes, “my teachers’ personalities managed to come through the small box they occupied on my laptop, reassuring me that even without the possibility of face-to-face interaction, I’ll still be able to make meaningful connections.”

Read Sadie’s story here.

Pain and loss

A GRANDFATHER’S DEATH & A MEDITATION ON COVID’S MENTAL HEALTH TOLL: “The day I found out my grandfather died, I cried so hard I threw up,” Cindy Chen writes. “Two days later, I went back to school.” When Chen’s parents, both Chinese nationals, tried to start a new life for their family in New York City, her grandparents raised her in China, where she lived until she was 5. It was her grandparents who “took me to the park, cooked my favorite meals and tucked me in at night.” She remembers mischievously hiding her grandfather’s cigarettes and how he’d chuckle and call her a “bed egg.” His death, a world away and during the pandemic, was devastating. “I walked through the front doors holding back tears,” the New Jersey high school junior writes. “It wasn’t that I felt uncomfortable crying in public. I just wanted to avoid combining a mask with a runny nose.” In this piece, she reflects on the pandemic’s mental health toll and how the effects have fallen harder on young people, like her, who suffered from loneliness and depression even before COVID-19.

Read Cindy’s story here.

DOMESTIC ABUSE DURING QUARANTINE: “For as long as I can remember, I was a bird trapped in a golden cage. On the outside, my world was a glittering array of debate trophies, academic titles, college scholarships and a picture-perfect family. But no one knew the fractured portrait that was my abusive household.” So begins one student’s story of coping with toxic parents as COVID-19 took away the safe haven of school. As of 2020, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 children reported being victims of domestic abuse, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and the pressures of quarantine are likely to worsen those grim statistics. The author, who wrote anonymously out of concerns for her safety, said that like many teens who have been victims of abuse, being forced to stay at home was a prescription for danger: “In essence, my home life was a ticking time bomb.”

Read the full account here.

Trying something new

HOW NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON SAVED MY YEAR: Shortly after the pandemic began, Chicago high school senior Jimmy Rodgers “fully expected everything to just continue going downhill as the world made less and less sense.” The idea of being locked in the same room made him unimaginably depressed. The only time he got to leave the house was to bury his grandmother. But everything changed one day at 3 a.m., when he watched a video of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on YouTube. “I came to a startling conclusion,” he writes. “I was the person needed to solve the mysteries of the universe.” Tyson’s optimism and passion were infectious, Rodgers said, pushing him to do better in physics and commit himself to a career teaching and helping others in the Black community. “To my surprise,” he writes, “education gave me something to be happy about, rather than numb, at a time when all my days felt the same.”

Read Jimmy’s story here.

FOR THIS FIFTH-GRADER, SCHOOL WAS FOWL: For Zora Borcila-Miller, a fifth-grader in East Lansing, Michigan, the pandemic has sometimes been lonely. Once, she got so bored she made a twin out of her clothes, a pillow and some broomsticks. She’s been learning remotely since the pandemic began, but when she and her dad moved to a new house in downtown Lansing, six blocks from the Capitol, she met her neighbor’s ducks and chickens. Zora describes the “hands-on and interactive” education she got while school was virtual. “When I’m at school, I’m usually on the couch with my computer,” she writes. “I have never talked to my teacher in person, only on Zoom. And it’s OK. But, in school, we never got to meet a duckling born the day before.”

Read Zora’s story here.

Equity and privilege

COVID-19 RAISES STAKES FOR COLLEGE ADMISSIONS: Bridgette Adu-Wadier always knew she would enroll in college — the more prestigious, the better. But as the daughter of Ghanian immigrants, she didn’t always know how. For her family, education was the Way Out, she writes. “It was also a way to set a precedent for my younger siblings, lift my family up from poverty and potentially change their economic trajectory for generations.” The pandemic placed fresh obstacles in the way of that pursuit. Because of her parents’ work schedules, she had to homeschool her younger siblings. That, in addition to her rigorous academic routine, caused her to lose sleep. “I discovered a glaring similarity between college admissions and the pandemic,” she writes. “Both are difficult for everyone, but harder for some students than others.”

Read Bridgette’s story here.

MASK CONFUSION, AND A LESSON ON PRIVILEGE: In May, high school senior Ianne Salvosa crossed the graduation stage at Liberty High School, outside St. Louis, and accepted her diploma. But the lessons she’ll be taking with her to college will go far beyond academics. The past year of fighting over mask requirements has left her with some uncomfortable feelings about her classmates. Students, many of whom openly doubted the efficacy of vaccines, fought with teachers over wearing masks. Long before vaccinations were commonplace, administrators frequently walked the halls with masks down. “Like all seniors who have lived through the past year, I understand burnout,” she writes. “But it appears our academic fatigue has seeped into our response to the pandemic.” The cavalier attitude toward masks, she said, “feels like some sort of show we put on so that the rest of the world can believe we did our part. It’s an ugly feeling I’ll take with me into college and beyond the current crisis.”

Read Ianne’s story here.

Making connections, finding love

SEARCHING FOR WI-FI, STUDENT DISCOVERED HER NEIGHBORS: When New York City’s schools went remote in March 2020, Ilana Drake was stuck. Knowing the strongest Wi-Fi signal in her family’s small apartment emanated from the front closet, she set up base camp in a common hallway outside, across from the elevator. Then a strange thing happened: She began to listen. “You can hear everything in the hallway,” she writes. “I heard snippets of conversation from nearby apartments: marital arguments, frustrated parents, stock trades, kids engaging in homeschooling and, of course, a symphony of barking dogs.” She also got to know her neighbors and the building’s staff. Drake has a learning disability and recently graduated from the city’s High School for Math, Science and Engineering. But in the hallway, she learned that everyone had some sort of “academic backstory,” including the neighbor who dreaded standardized tests and the service technician who had been an engineer in the Dominican Republic and helped her with calculus. “Working in the hallway,” she wrote, “provided me with a passport to conversations that went beyond ‘hello’ and ‘have a good day.’”

Read Ilana’s story here.

YOUNG LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19: Ila Kumar remembers her pre-pandemic dating life with a whiff of nostalgia: the “charming absurdity of pretending you are older than you are, wearing itchy sweaters in bad restaurants, knowing the 15-year-old across from you is going to insist he pays for your slice of pizza.” Now, Kumar writes of the difficulties of navigating the tricky waters of teenage romance at a time of swiftly changing guidelines regarding masks and social distancing. “Maybe I forgot what it means to get to know someone — to uncover their secret talent for impressions, learn the way their hands move when they dance to music in the car and remember how they smell,” she writes. “Every corner of a relationship requires work, and the specter of something as small as unanswered messages, wanting eye contact and being left without it, and midnight arguments requires the singular power of trust.”

Read Ila’s story here.

There is a breed of champion racehorses, which in order to win, bite their own necks to get more oxygen. I think about these horses a lot.

Once, in an easier time, I pretended to browse a sushi menu with great intensity. I don’t even like fish. Across from me was my date, and next to me was my best friend sitting in front of her date, who was sitting next to his friend who was sitting across from his date. It turned out the third couple didn’t like fish either — they each ate a bowl of white rice. By the end of the night, their bill was two dollars.

A few months later, I scoured the menu at an Italian restaurant which had plastic grape vines hanging from the ceiling. Another one of these dates. I recognized with embarrassing clarity the flavored coolness of our young waitress’ breath — perky, minty breath only achieved through a tiny ghost rushing out of a menthol Juul pod.

I remember my life before this year with fondness because a) that is the nature of nostalgia, and b) there is something charming in the absurdity of pretending you are older than you are, wearing itchy sweaters in bad restaurants, knowing the fifteen year-old across from you is going to insist he pays for your slice of pizza; being smushed into the space between two couch cushions at a basement party; using a lighter, a needle, and a red delicious to add two more holes to your ears.

Now, I am a senior in my last semester of high school. It has been over a year since quarantine started. We have run out of nutmeg. How does that happen? There have been a lot of days like this. Although the evenings of making my hair smooth and eyelashes spidery are far from over — this year nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it.

The world was reaching out to us in the form of bad news. The warmth of the summer came with a background glow of violence and tragedy: the twin emergencies of COVID-19 and racial injustice. Growing up, metabolizing hatred like daily bread, drinking shock along with our morning coffee.

In June, this boy would send me pictures of his breakfast. Homemade huevos rancheros impressed me. Soon enough, I was taking breath mints before we talked on the phone. I remember begging my mom to let me see him. He begged too, in a more subtle way — offering to sanitize the car when he got to my house, and he’d drive with the windows down. Whatever I was doing — cultivating a taste for navy blue sweatshirts and at-home workouts, reading books on my roof to feel like I was out of the house — was a life of sustained waiting, anticipation pooling like day-old rainwater.

I remember the first time he drove me home. His hands never left 9 and 3 on the steering wheel. The third time he drove me home, his left hand stayed on the wheel, but the right was in my hand. The thirty-fifth time, he drove to my house alone. His left hand was driving and his right hand was gripping the glass shoulder of a vase, trying to prevent water from spilling. He brought me roses, and a note that said he was sorry.

It could be my distance from everyone else that amplifies my closeness to him. Maybe I forgot what it means to get to know someone — to uncover their secret talent for impressions, learn the way their hands move when they dance to music in the car, and remember how they smell. Every corner of a relationship requires work, and the specter of something as small as unanswered messages, wanting eye contact and being left without it, and midnight arguments requires the singular power of trust. When we fight, I never need to bite my own neck for oxygen in order to win. Instead, it’s like we’ve raced each other up a set of stairs, and we are pausing, out of breath, thinking about how foolish it was.

In the coming fall, we are both going to college, but we are committed to our hairy experiment in attachment. Sometimes, I think maybe this is the kind of optimism that is going to hurt to look back on. Like I have slipped on a banana peel into love, or I’ve fallen out of a moving car into oncoming traffic into roadkill kind of love. Except — when I look at him, I feel safe. After this year, that’s more than I could ever ask for.

Ila Kumar is a senior at Oakwood Friends School, a private school in Poughkeepsie, NY.

“Pandemic Notebook” is an ongoing collection of first-person, student-written articles about what it is like to live through the coronavirus pandemic. Have an idea? Please contact Executive Editor Andrew Brownstein at Andrew@The74million.org.