I’ve Unlocked the Secret to Making First Dates (Mostly) Bearable

Earlier this year, Zoom announced a Byzantine policy change that, if I had thought about it at all when it happened, I probably would have expected to have almost no impact on my life: One-on-one video calls, which had previously been free and unrestricted for all nonpaying users of its platform, would now have a 40-minute time limit just like group calls. I would love to leave the reasons for this sudden Zoomaissance vague and retain one emotional support shred of dignity, but there’s no real way to explain the rest without disclosing the following: I had decided it was time to “get back out there” and was using Zoom to go on video dates. I was mostly hoping to get confirmation that the person on the other end of the Zoom wasn’t a bot, murderer, or anti-vaxxer, and I was secondarily trying to determine whether I might like to meet them in the real world—that is, if I had sufficiently convinced them that I was also worth meeting and not a bot, murderer, or whatever identity was a deal-breaker for them. Now, though, I knew that I’d just have to get through a few more minutes and then I could say something like, “Oh no, it looks like we’re getting to the free Zoom limit! In one video chat, a guy correctly and devastatingly diagnosed me as a big childhood Harry Potter fan and very earnestly asked me, “Have you always been nervous?” A few other guys weren’t good matches; a few ghosted; and a few I went on honest-to-goodness in-person dates with.