Covid-19: To Date Online or Live in Seclusion
By: Mahmoud Ahmed
@Mahmmoud.Yong
As the Egyptian government continues to enforce a curfew from 7pm to 6am to prevent gatherings in a bid to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, meeting new people is becoming more challenging.
With social distancing now the new normal, people have started to look into alternative ways to meet new people and express affection and validation.
Social media platforms have increasingly made it easier for people to get connected, but is it now more acceptable to perceive online dating as a step toward forming relationships in the real world?
Due to how widespread social media usage has become, some people can easily forge relationships through social media, and these can turn into relationships in the real world.
Ahmed Saker is a mechanical engineer who jumped head first into a relationship that initially started on Facebook and became very real soon enough.
“In 2015, I was working as a mechanical engineer in a workshop repairing and checking jet skis in Dubai. She was my sister’s friend in university. My sister advised me to add her on Facebook to speak with her.…..She accepted my request and our relationship started to form through chats and calls,” Saker said.
He remembers that he met her three times before the engagement and the first one was the hardest.
“I was on a vacation in Cairo. My sister told me that Sara was visiting her aunt. My wife Sara’s hometown is Suez but she used to study and visit her relatives in Cairo. I texted her to meet somewhere and talk face to face. It was really hard but I liked her so much. She was shy and beautiful,” Saker said.
They got engaged in 2018 and married at the beginning of 2019.
Some people are supportive of online relationships if it builds into a meaningful bond offscreen.
“I cannot marry a girl that I knew from social media within a short period of time. I do not know how real she is. But I think if I am assured that she is a good person, why shouldn’t I introduce her to my parents and marry her,” Ali Tarek, an Accounting junior, said.
Some people avoid online relationships like the plague because they find them lacking depth and reality.
“Personally, I don’t know any people who met each other through social media,” Communication and Media Arts junior Noor Ahmed.
“I don’t think … my family would be okay with the idea of getting married to someone that I knew from social media.”
Hendri Coetzee, visiting professor at the Psychology Department, believes online dating is an option for some because many are all so very busy these days.
“An online relationship is a kind of ‘quick fix’ option to get access to potentially new relationships without having to invest a lot of energy and resources in it,” he told The Caravan.
Coetzee says that online relationships can be as satisfying as the ones in the physical world but it depends on the type of relationship that the individual is after.
Saker, for example, knew exactly what he wanted.
“An online relationship worked for me because she was always real and my circumstances forced me to depend on this form of communication to find my second half,” Saker added.
But there will always be some obstacles that online relationships face that ordinarily are not present in relationships that begin in the real world.
Because of the lack of non-verbal aspects of communication online, some find it difficult to establish long-term trusting relationships.
Coetzee believes that respect is another challenge, because sometimes people say things that they would not normally say during face-to-face interactions.
Coetzee considers honesty as a big challenge, because people often hide undesirable characteristics and tend to create a more perfect version of who they really are.
That’s why some, like Essraa Ibrahim, a 25-year-old electrical engineering graduate from Al Mansoura University, say they do not accept online relationships under any circumstances.
But Ibrahim admits that she knows a married couple who started their relationship on Facebook.
