Americans have been living and dying in COVID-19’s gruesome shadow for just over a year now. Last Valentine’s Day—before quarantine orders and awareness of COVID’s severity took hold—couples overpaid for molten chocolate cake at restaurants, and dreamers could still wish for a future soulmate to ask if the empty barstool next to them was taken.
But as of Feb. 4, bars in just 24% of states are fully open; bars in half of all states are open with capacity restrictions. The prospect of cozying up to a stranger on the next barstool—or even getting close enough to flirt—is anathema. Tables are spaced far enough apart that accidental contact is nearly impossible. Even half of your server’s face is hidden behind a mask.
These restrictions are necessary to prevent the spread of COVID-19—but they also endanger the way millions of Americans find love. According to a 2018 report from The Economist, more than 20% of couples (gay and straight) met at bars or restaurants in 2010. Along with meeting online, this was the only interaction that showed an increase of people coupling up since 2005. When dating site Plenty of Fish surveyed 400 of its former users who married partners they met through the app, drinks at a bar was the third-most-common first-date activity, behind a restaurant meal and going for a walk. Not even meeting through friends proves an easy path to love these days, and COVID has created what is effectively a lost dating year.
“The loneliness was just overwhelming,” a 21-year-old student named Mattie Drucker told Vox, explaining why she reconnected with an ex-boyfriend during COVID. “I was craving intimacy, and I just wanted to be with someone who made me feel safe.”
Bars are just a piece of what’s gone. We’re losing what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called our “third places,” the communal spots where we gather outside of work and home. (Even many “first” and “second” places have now collapsed.) Third places might include coffee shops, barbershops, restaurants, civic centers, VFW halls, street corners, laundromats, and of course, bars. They’re places where community is built, and where love is born.
When we lose those melting pots, we lose an element of chance and randomness. In a romantic sense, we lose the potential for kismet. And even those who are already partnered off lose the places that invite us to tell our stories to each other, the places that help us to continue to fall in love with the people we are always in the process of becoming.
People can still safely meet outside, of course, or get to know each other via Zoom. But as Bill Savage puts it in a lovely piece for the Chicago Reader, “Virtual bars necessarily lack many of the joys of actual Third Places: running into an old pal unexpectedly, or having some random person turn out to be pretty insightful about sports, theater, or politics. Virtual connections along established lines don’t allow for new connections to spontaneously grow.”
Society is generally suffering a loss of spontaneity, or chance, or serendipity. Most romantic-comedy plots couldn’t translate to the COVID era; mainstay sitcoms like “Cheers” would be entirely off the table. Third places are social bingo hoppers, shuffling people around in a pleasant, democratizing frenzy, and maybe creating a few lucky pairings in the process. Now they’re closed, or remain open in ways that require us to stick with our prearranged group. How many of us can say we’ve meaningfully gotten to know someone new in the last year?
As Oldenburg writes in his article “Our Vanishing Third Places,” published in 1996 in the Planning Commissioners Journal, there is a tantalizing neutrality to third places. Unlike workplaces or private homes, individuals come to third places without context—anyone could be anyone. If two people aren’t clicking, there’s no responsibility to engage with each other. It makes the spark of connection even more intoxicating, and worth chasing. Pre-COVID, that place of figurative intoxication, with some help from the literal, is where one in five relationships began.
“On neutral ground, people avoid the obligations of both guest and host and simply enjoy the company,” Oldenburg writes. “They come and go without making arrangements or excuses; they may leave the very moment it suits them to do so. It is a very easy form of human association.”
Third places bring us into contact with strangers, but they can also awaken our own realization that we are strangers to someone else. We are, ourselves, waiting to be discovered. Such meetings open the door for reinvention in real time. We can reveal ourselves to be whoever we want to be, depending on who’s listening. In comfortable places like a favorite bar, we can take chances. The chance might be telling the truth to a stranger—or testing out a clever falsehood.
Under COVID, we’re in danger of losing this element of unpredictable possibility. Dating apps rely on algorithms to pair people with their mathematically calculated match. Bars, at least, left open the possibility that there’s a place for fate or luck in romantic proceedings—that people have a sliver of control over their own destiny, even if it’s just choosing which bar to visit.
On Twitter, people who met significant others at bars recently shared their stories. All of them involved some degree of serendipity.
Couples met while traveling or even when they were on dates with entirely different people. There was Mike and Christine, who met at a bar and discussed the possibility of getting married that very night. (They’re now married and have been together for 20 years). Another match happened when one of the two people needed a partner to play pool. Another story began with the pair meeting by chance at a bar—exactly one year later, they saw each other again in the same spot, and went home together.
Abby Heilbron met her husband, Scott, 16 years ago at a San Diego beer bar, O’Brien’s Pub. He threw a coaster, intending to hit someone else, and hit Heilbron instead. The start of their relationship, she says, was “a soggy coaster and a few choice cuss words.” In the course of the coaster incident, and subsequent apology, Abby and Scott found out they had a handful of mutual friends. The two didn’t immediately begin dating; for a year, they continued to hang out with mutual friends at O’Brien’s.
At the time, Scott was recently divorced and Heilbron’s dating life was “a mess.” She had two rules for herself: She wasn’t going to date anyone coming out of a divorce, and she wasn’t going to date anyone she met at a bar. The year spent with Scott over pints at O’Brien’s convinced her to break them.
“I don’t know if our relationship would be the same if we didn’t have that year,” she says, referring to the year she and Scott spent meeting up weekly for drinks at O’Brien’s. “It was really important to have that time to develop that friendship.”
Greg Redman met his wife, Stephanie, 10 years ago at a Lexington, Michigan bar called The Cadillac. He was working the door when she winked at him from across the room. He later met her at the jukebox; he put Bob Seger on; they’ve been together since. The magic of bars is so important to the couple that years later, they opened their own, Water Tower Sports Pub, in the same town—population 1,011.
“Without that little place, without that jukebox, and me needing to be a bouncer at The Caddy, us and Water Tower doesn’t exist,” Redman says.
As a bar owner, Redman sees firsthand how the pandemic has changed the way people socialize. He’s mourning not just the lost business, but an even more precious commodity: fellowship.
“Those moments of being able to interact and be together … it was shoulder-to-shoulder packed at the bar the night we met,” he says. “I can’t imagine if we’ll ever get back to that.”
People miss more than meet-cutes without access to bars. Bars are also central to so many couples’ dating lives. What does it mean that we can’t raise an eyebrow and propose “another round?” What does it mean that we can’t unspool our own stories and gather in someone else’s, one glass at a time?
As contributor Mark Spence said on GBH’s A Thousand Words podcast about beer and love, “even if the date is going well, that ‘one more drink?’ requires significant conversation.” By the second round, “the lights are a bit fuzzy, the colors are a bit lusher, and your eyes are probably a bit glassy. Looks linger a bit longer; smiles are a bit wider; participants’ wit is a bit sharper; and maybe, just maybe, knees may lightly graze.”
Without the alchemy of dim lighting, strangers, music, and alcohol, we lack some crucial supports for intimate storytelling. There are fewer conditions for personal history-making, the heady process of presenting who you are to a new person. When we do that in a dating context, we’re sculpting a sense of our own identity, and offering that to another person. Then it’s reciprocated: Here’s who I profess to be—do you like what you’re hearing?
When people meet at third places like bars, their identities are shapeless, ready to be chiseled into whatever form they wish to reveal. The jokes we make, the memories we retell, the details we include and leave out may or may not be conscious choices. But they are choices, each one contributing to a cohesive presentation of self. We choose whether to present ourselves as someone who went to a certain concert; as someone who dropped out of college; as someone who is close to their family.
Without these conversations over drinks, we’re not just losing places where we tell each other who we are. We’re losing places where we better understand ourselves, and where we find the people who want to do that with us. Ironically, during the pandemic, people who live alone are spending more time solo than ever before. But in pausing late-night, neon-lit, drinks-fueled efforts toward connecting with someone else, we’re also missing out on a crucial way we relate to our own selves. Stories aren’t only told for the listener.
Words by Kate Bernot