Blog Post #6

It’s really funny to me that this is the week that we’ve been studying relationships and attraction, because that topic is becoming strangely relevant to my life in quarantine as of late (I hope I’m not over-sharing here, but I think this is really interesting from a social psych perspective). I lost my summer job because of COVID, which is a job that I worked last summer and would have been returning to with a lot of the same co-workers, with whom I formed a really tight-knit group of friends. One of my co-workers with whom I was reasonably good friends–but not incredibly close–texted me about how disappointed she was that we wouldn’t get to be going back to our job this summer. We talked for a while about that and related topics, and somehow naturally got into a really big-picture philosophical conversation about the state of the world right now. That led to quite a number of other really great and complex conversations, and we’re now at the point where we’re talking easily every day, often for hours at a time. We haven’t verbally acknowledged anything yet, but it seems pretty clear that there’s something between us–I at least have developed a pretty big crush on her. And frankly, although I know her on an in-person basis, it’s really surprising to me that we (it seems) have developed a mutual attraction through text (as well as a couple of FaceTimes, but really mostly text). We have a lot in common (including some relatively obscure interests which neither of us knew the other had), and the cost/reward assessment checks out because it’s really nice to have a developing connection with someone during a time in which connections are becoming scarce, but all of the physical cues and elements that influence relationships are obviously completely off the table in this scenario. Proximity cannot be a factor. I have been in a somewhat similar situation once before–I began an almost-relationship with someone who I ended up dating for over a year at the end of my first year at Kenyon, so she and I talked regularly and grew close through texting and FaceTiming. But our relationship was clearly going in a romantic direction before the summer, whereas this one moved from an obvious state of friendship to something different purely digitally. This makes me wonder how such a situation influences the development of a relationship–does the fact that we’re able to write out our thoughts make up for the lack of physical closeness? How much does our inevitable current state of loneliness influence our situation? I actually looked up a social psych study about texting and attraction because of this, and it does seem like this is a somewhat normal thing, but I think the current situation certainly influences it in an interesting way.