For a lot of Americans, sports equals normalcy. So the return of professional sports last summer brought a sigh of relief and a hope that things might be returning to normal, albeit a strange new normal of bubbles, air high-fives and fans checking the day’s COVID tests instead of scores. But amid all the weirdness, there was also the comfortingly familiar—the slam-dunk, the slap shot, the corner kick, the crack of the bat.

Yes, pro sports were back.

College sports—not so much.

College Sports in Limbo

All across the country last summer, colleges were faced with the impossibility of holding fall sports as usual in the face of an ongoing pandemic. Unlike their professional counterparts, they didn’t have the option of wrapping themselves up in a protective bubble.

“I was on a call the other day,” says Pomona-Pitzer Director of Athletics Miriam Merrill, “and a parent said, ‘Well, do you think you all will use the professional bubble philosophy?” And I said, ‘No, because we’re not professional athletes. The students need to be integrated into the community just like the rest of their peers.”

As the summer surge receded and the fall surge began, just about the only part of college sports that tried to bob and weave its way through the pandemic instead of ducking and covering was major conference football. In the process, America’s favorite college sport became the poster child for how not to prevent the spread of COVID-19, as coaches and players—in some cases what seemed like whole teams—tested positive. As this goes to press, 81 games (and counting) had been canceled or postponed due to the virus.

For some sports programs that were already facing challenges, the pandemic proved to be the final straw. Pomona-Pitzer’s oldest continuous sports rival, Occidental College, announced in October that it was eliminating its football program after 133 years. Losses like these will be felt by future college athletes—not to mention fans—for many years to come.

But even as the virus resurged in the fall, there remained a slender thread of hope that at least some fall sports at places like Pomona might not have to be canceled—just delayed. Merrill noted that changes in NCAA policy have opened the door to the possible shift of fall athletic seasons into the spring, pandemic permitting. “There is conversation now of  ‘How can we support competition in the spring?’” she says. “And that would be fall, winter and spring sports, all happening during spring semester. Ultimately, we’d love to provide an opportunity for students to have a sport-related experience.”

In the end, however, the pandemic will decide what’s possible.

Pro Sports in a Bubble

While college athletics remain in coronavirus limbo, professional sports managed to make a tentative comeback in 2020, but not without some dramatic changes. Venues were empty of fans. Seasons were abbreviated. Several leagues, from the National Women’s Soccer League to the National Basketball Association, opted for the bubble approach—sequestering all of their teams in a single location until the season was over.

Mike Budenholzer ’92, head coach of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, credits NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s office and the NBA Players’ Association for working together to come up with a workable solution for basketball in a bubble. “The collaboration between those two groups,” he says, “has put us in an environment where we can have a very safe and healthy space and an opportunity to compete and play basketball again and bring NBA basketball back to the fans, and the chance to compete and crown a champion.”

Pandemic seasons were also seasons of experimentation. Major League Baseball probably set a record for significant rules changes in one year—and with none of the usual pushback from its famously traditionalist but now famished fans. Seven-inning double-headers? Sure. Runner on second at the start of extra innings? Fine. The designated hitter in the National League? Why not? Expanded playoffs? Absolutely. A World Series in a neutral-site bubble? Whatever. When the alternative is zilch, it’s amazing what fans will accept.

How many of those changes will become permanent? No one knows, but with COVID lingering, the smart betting is on most.

According to John Tulchin ’83, CEO of The Promotions Department, a company in Torrance, California, that provides in-stadium promotional materials for some 35 pro teams, the pandemic has simply given pro sports a hard shove in a direction it was already headed. “In so many ways, and in our industry too, COVID-19 is mostly an accelerator of other trends, trends that were already going on,” he says. “So, you know, things like remote viewing of games and ways to reach fans outside of the arena experience and enhancing the arena experience with technology—all of those things were happening, and this is just sort of ratcheting things up and making them happen quicker. It’s forcing teams to move more quickly in some of those areas.”

Planning Ahead

Today colleges are looking ahead, trying to plan for a variety of scenarios, including the possibility that the coronavirus never completely goes away. What’s possible, Merrill said, depends in part on the sport involved. “The NCAA has categorized sports based on risk level,” she notes. “So there are low-risk sports, like golf or tennis, where you can socially distance; you can wear a mask. And then there’s medium risk, and then there’s the high risk, which is where people are on top of each other, like in contact sports.”

For some sports, there may have to be some creative rethinking of rules, in the same way the pros have done. “Like cross country—maybe we can check times for everyone, and instead of everyone starting at once, maybe we have wave one go, and then wave two,” Merrill explains. “So there are all of these out-of-the-box ways of thinking about the sport while still staying true to the essence of the sport.”

For Budenholzer, it’s all about keeping his team going until the fans return, whenever that may be. “When that is, we’re not sure,” he says. “You know, the league and everybody will have to figure out how we get from here to there and how we can survive and be good and solid financially. But long term, I think, everybody is hopeful that we’ll be back with playing in front of the fans, and all that that provides.”

Part of the Show

In the absence of flesh-and-blood fans, pro sports leagues have experimented with a range of simulations, from low-tech (cardboard cutouts to fill seats) to medium-tech (recorded crowd noise) to cutting-edge (real NBA fans cheering from virtual seats on giant screens).  All that effort to simulate their presence is a reminder that fans aren’t just consumers—they’re an important component of the show itself. The title of an article in The New York Times last summer maybe said it best: “If a Dunk Echoes Across an Empty Gym, Is It Still Must-See TV?”

“We really miss the fans just from an emotional point of view,” Budenholzer says. “They’re a big part of the game, and you start talking about the business side of it—the role that our fans play in our sport is critical. We’re all hopeful that eventually we’ll be back to playing in front of fans and stadiums with excitement.”

The tentative return of live fans actually began this fall with the start of both major college and pro football seasons and baseball’s World Series, but the numbers admitted were only a fraction of stadium capacity. With the virus threatening to hang around much longer than originally expected, teams may have to find a way to survive with sharply reduced levels of ticket sales—not to mention crowd noise—well into 2021, if not beyond.

Though Tulchin’s company can’t sell the usual quantities of bobbleheads or rally towels right now, he’s been having discussions with teams about what it will look like as they welcome back fans with health protocols still in place. “How do you get people in and out without it being crowded?” he asks. “How do you avoid concession lines? So they’re having to figure out creative ways around that, with mobile ordering and that kind of thing.”

Tulchin’s firm had already been helping teams obtain hard-to-find masks and hand sanitizers, both for use internally and as branded outreach to fans. But now he sees a need for a range of new logistical items geared to the pandemic. “There’s a whole host of things that we’re likely to be involved with—not only things that might be promotional items in the arena, but, you know, how do you promote social distancing?” he says. “You’re going to need a lot of signage, a lot of floor decals, and you’re going to need personnel that may need to be identifiable. How do you block off seats so that people don’t go and sit down somewhere where they’re not supposed to? So those are all things that potentially are opportunities for us, although I’d much rather provide 10,000 flags that everybody gets as they come in the gate than this other stuff.”

Manhattan, New York. August 26, 2020. A man wearing a mask walks in front of a temporarily closed movie theatre on 42nd street in Midtown.

We all have our own memory of the moment when our world abruptly shut down: the cancelled trip or postponed birthday party, the day the office or school announced it was closing its doors. The way veteran film producer Linda Obst ’72 recalls it happening in Hollywood is that “Kobe’s plane went down, and everything went down with it.”

“That was the L.A. zeitgeist horror,” she says of Bryant’s death in a late-January helicopter crash. “And then all of a sudden, we were told, no reason to come into the office. You all can work out of your homes. The next thing I knew, I was on a Zoom call—and, of course, I didn’t know what a Zoom call was.”

For Aditya Sood ’97, it was a different celebrity who marked the moment: Tom Hanks’s COVID diagnosis happened the same day that Sood and his colleagues at Lord Miller Productions had agreed to send their staff home for the week and suspend the productions they had in progress—what felt like just in case, but turned out to be just in time. “We had already decided, but there was something about that that was so earth-shattering, particularly in Hollywood,” he says.

The pandemic came at what was already a tense moment for the film and television industry: The imperatives of an international business and the advent of streaming had already been producing creative, financial and technical upheavals, threatening the multiplex model and the dominance of the traditional movie studio. And yet in lockdown, what is there to do but consume whatever content we can get our hands on? Netflix alone added nearly 16 million paid subscribers globally in the first quarter—double the number it had predicted for that period. That’s a whole lot of money to put toward ordering new shows.

The past year has posed unique challenges and offered unique opportunities to the industry, so we consulted Obst and Sood, both of whom have multi-decade careers under their belts, about how lockdown has shaped Hollywood and what the consequences of those changes might be in the years to come.

All of Obst’s projects were in development in March, she says, so there were no sets to shut down. Still, she notes, since then it’s been hard to move those projects forward when the options for releasing them are so limited. “It’s very easy to keep things in development in the best of circumstances,” she says. “So now, when there’s a real reason not to give a green light… We were in a very productive swarm of shows getting made before this happened, and now much less is getting bought than before.”

That’s in part, she continues, because while sets are slowly opening back up again, they’re more expensive than ever to operate, thanks to the need for COVID plans and protocol supervisors, as well as testing and PPE. That means there has to be a lot of obvious financial upside to a project for it to be worth kicking into gear. “It was very easy for Nicole Kidman to get The Undoing back at HBO Max, because it’s what HBO Max depends on for you to order a subscription,” she says by way of example, adding that Disney’s The Mandalorian is in a similar position. “If you’re part of the mandate of a new streamer, you can get ordered. But if you’re not part of that mandate, Netflix doesn’t need you.” And if you’re hoping for a theatrical release, for now, there’s nothing doing.

Hollywood execs have long been worried about audiences preferring to stay home and stream rather than pay for an expensive movie theatre ticket (plus parking and popcorn), and there’s been some concern that lockdown will only accelerate that trend. But Sood is bullish about the future of movie theatres. “I think that people are going to come out of this really craving that large communal experience in a way they were maybe taking a little bit for granted,” he says.

Plus, “there’s something different about watching a movie in a theatre. Not just the big spectacle movies either. I remember seeing The Big Sick at the Cinerama Dome at the ArcLight, which is not a movie you think you need to see on a 50-foot screen. But it actually was transcendent that way, because all of a sudden, these very simple, domestic, mundane things became larger than life. The dinner scene, when you see it with 300 other people—it’s just different than watching it on your home screen.”

The biggest challenge for Lord Miller as a company, he says, has been making sure that everyone feels connected to one another—that they aren’t just talking work but finding ways to make up for the office camaraderie that usually comes from the hours spent in the same room together. To that end, the company has instituted a virtual movie night. “We’re on our third go-round,” he explains. “Every Tuesday night we watch a movie together and text about it, and it’s been a really nice way for people to stay in contact beyond the work stuff.”

Both Obst and Sood have spent multiple decades in the industry, and while they’re worried about the changes the virus will bring, they also note that this is not the first time the movie business has weathered what feels like an all-encompassing sea change. To those who think the future of film is iPhone shorts released straight to Netflix, as well as the camps convinced that we’re in for a lifetime of mega-blockbuster tentpoles that require a crew of thousands to make, Sood says, “We’re never all or nothing. This has happened before: In the ’60s, the studios decided, ‘We aren’t going to compete with television, so we’re only going to make the biggest entertainments possible.’

“At the same time, you had this new guard of filmmakers that were making these really gritty independent-feeling movies, even though at that time they were still distributed through the major studios. There was a countermovement that started at the same time. Much of the industry today is grown out of that part of the business, more than the classic studio business.”

Obst also notes that, unlike those changes, which were industry-specific, the coronavirus is a global phenomenon. “There’s no technological issue that’s fundamentally changing the foundation of the movie industry,” she says. “It’s just that if we can’t get people back into theatres, they’re going to be watching everything at home. So the question is, how long will it take to get people back in the theatres?”

“This is a sea change for everyone,” she says, “that we have to go through with everyone else.”

The changes aren’t just limited to the limitations imposed by lockdown. Sood points out that one of the most lasting shifts in Hollywood might not come from any of those considerations but from the social unrest that simmered in the U.S. over the summer and the effort to diversify the industry that’s come out of it.

“I think there’s a recognition that behind the scenes, behind the camera, in front of the camera, in the executive suite, there is a real change that needs to happen,” he says. It feels like Hollywood is ready for “changing representation of whose stories are being told, and by who. And the thing that I tell everybody is: More than ever, authenticity is a prized commodity. If there was ever a moment to be how you are, to embrace the stories that you want to tell—this is the moment to really seize these opportunities.”

He knows that following a nontraditional career path might feel especially daunting at a moment when everything seems to be in flux, but he encourages those interested in entering the industry to “know it’s possible, and that there’s been a great democratization of access to this industry that’s happened.”

“But also know there’s a long way to go,” he adds, “and the more people land on the beachhead and secure positions, the more they can change that and be part of that conversation.”

He particularly hopes that some young filmmakers will find a way to tackle this period in their work, to offer modern audiences a way to digest what’s happening to us, but also to memorialize it for future generations. “I think there will be great art that’s made about [the pandemic],” he says. “Interestingly, there’s very little great art that was made about the Spanish flu—the culture seems to have forgotten that period of time, maybe because it was so traumatic. But it would be nice to have some of that to help inform our thinking today.”

Images of an empty Times Square at 8PM during the COVID-19 crisis.

Thurgood Powell ’10 recalls walking through Times Square at 8:30 on a Saturday evening last July. A newly minted MBA from Penn’s Wharton School, he was starting a job at Goldman Sachs in New York. “It was really, really bizarre,” he says of the scene. There were a few homeless people wearing masks and gloves, some police on regular patrol—and no tourists. What he remembers is that “the lights felt overpowering. There are just so many of them. You don’t notice until that’s the only thing there.”

The COVID-19 pandemic that emptied out Times Square has also upended the U.S. and world economy in 2020. More than 30 million Americans filed first-time unemployment claims in just six weeks in March and April. Whole industries, such as travel and hospitality, faced sudden crisis. Small businesses struggled to hang on—and many didn’t make it. The U.S. Congress temporarily overcame political polarization to pass pandemic response spending bills totaling more than $4 trillion.

At some point—a study by McKinsey & Company estimates it is most likely to be in the second half of 2021 or later—the U.S. will reach herd immunity in the pandemic, allowing some kind of “normal life” to resume, to our great relief. Restaurants will fill up. Students will learn in person again. The lights will go on as workers return to megacity offices coast to coast and around the world.

Or will they? Will a few superstar cities like New York still dominate, post-pandemic? Or will work-from-home continue and make possible an exodus to places less crowded and more affordable? Is globalism dead? What will the new normal in the economy look like?

While some might think the sudden supply-chain disruptions and closed international borders of the pandemic year might take the luster off globalization, Manisha Goel, associate professor of economics at Pomona, says, “I’m a skeptic about that.” The reason why goods in various stages of production have been manufactured in multiple countries and shipped to markets around the world is because it was cost-efficient. “As long as the pandemic is not going to occur every three or four years, people will want to go back to the way they used to do things because that is what made the most rational sense,” Goel believes.

“COVID has accelerated trends,” says Powell, an associate in Goldman Sachs’s Merchant Banking Division and a member of the Urban Investment Group’s acquisitions team. “Like delivery. A lot of us use Amazon, but I’d never gotten groceries delivered. Now I can’t imagine not having groceries delivered. I just have to go to my phone and type in what I want.”

Yet there is a price for this convenience, often paid by small businesses. Fernando Lozano, chair of Pomona’s Department of Economics, sees a concerning trend in the closure of small and medium-sized businesses during the pandemic. “Larger firms have increased market share,” he notes. “Less people are accumulating assets. The distribution of wealth becomes more and more unequal.”

Industry consolidation, as smaller players are squeezed out, also increases the power of industry leaders to hire workers with lower pay, less benefits and worse conditions, says Lozano. “Whenever large firms increase their market share, they increase their own bargaining power.”

Goel describes a potential K-shaped post-pandemic recovery as top earners, many of whom can work from home, do even better, while those below them on the pay scale fall farther behind. She believes future tax policy needs to be more progressive. “The marginal tax rates for the rich should not be lower than for the middle- and lower-income households,” she says. “They should be substantially higher. The trickle-down policies haven’t really worked.”

Four months into his new job at Goldman Sachs in New York, Powell has never been to the office. He is part of the huge cohort of workers for whom “Zoom” is now both proper noun and verb. “I’m working from home, doing everything I would do in the office. I’m using a technology that makes it so I have the same desktop I would have in the office,” he says. “A lot of businesses,” he notes, “are thinking, ‘Do we need all this office space?’”

COVID-19, Powell believes, is also making employees rethink their own housing situations. Some are asking, “Why am I paying $4,000 a month for a 900-square-foot apartment with a screaming child in the bedroom next to me?” he remarks. For some slice of those now working remotely, the answer is to move to a place like the Hudson Valley or North Carolina or Reno.

Work-from-home, if it becomes widely accepted long-term, offers potential benefits for women, whose workforce participation during the pandemic has dropped to 1987 levels, Goel says. A vital need is accessible, quality childcare. Without it, she says, women dropping out of the workforce “may end up being the new normal.”

Academia, like the rest of the economy, has faced major adjustments in the transition to work- and learn-from-home. “In today’s world, what is the value of the physical space?” asks Erika James ’91, dean of Penn’s Wharton School. “I personally believe that the value of physical space resides in the ability to create community and culture and sociability, which also drives performance,” she says. “Zoom and Microsoft Teams and all these platforms are great for providing a mechanism to converse and to exchange ideas, but sometimes those ideas happen most creatively when you can build on a thought someone else has, or when you have a thought and walk down the hallway to step into someone else’s office and say, ‘I’ve been thinking about something. I want to run this by you.’ That option doesn’t really exist with these online platforms.”

As a member of California’s newly formed Council of Economic Advisors, Lozano cannot reveal the group’s confidential discussions. But, he says, “it is safe to say all of those in the council are really concerned with equity, with social justice, with how to alter the very perverse consequences of the pandemic.” One area he singles out as an urgent need in the new normal economy is equitable access to broadband so that students and employees don’t have to go to McDonald’s to get online for school or work. Universal health care is another essential change, he believes, in the shadow of a pandemic in which laid-off workers not only lost jobs but their health insurance as well.

Both Lozano and Powell see merit in universal basic income—an idea championed in the 2020 presidential primaries by Andrew Yang. Lozana disputes the idea that “if you pay people, they won’t have incentive to work,” saying that argument “has been refuted over and over.”

The political will to bring about such major changes in access to technology and in the social safety net may well come from young adults in Powell’s age group or the current Pomona students Lozano teaches. One of them is Erika James’ son, currently a freshman at Pomona. “This moment in time has so fundamentally changed his trajectory in some regards, and what he cares about, and what’s important and what’s not important,” she observes. “I think that will last a lifetime. This is a defining moment for a generation.”

Powell notes that millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, have already faced four huge challenges in their relatively short working lives—the Great Recession, housing inflation, wage stagnation and now COVID-19. He tells of four friends, three of whom recently lost jobs—a restaurant manager, a flight attendant and a construction worker. “They feel they can’t catch a break,” he says. People he knows who have never taken an interest in politics were planning to vote this year. “In the next eight to 10 years, I think you’ll see an FDR-type New Deal,” he predicts.

Indeed, it is the generations coming into their own that give people like Lozano and James and Powell reason for optimism. “The people joining the labor force right now, I think they are more aware, not only of the environment but of those around them,” says Lozano. He sees in his students “a large sense of kinship and also a sense of political activism to make things better.”

“It’s so easy to frame what we’re currently experiencing as negative and bad, and it is for so many reasons, especially for people who have been physically affected by the pandemic,” says James. “But it is in these moments that innovation occurs, and the world makes shifts that, over time, are really positive.”

Change, James notes, “doesn’t feel good in the moment. But there will likely be a day, however many years from now, where we look back on this time and can’t believe how backward we were. ‘How could we have ever thought or acted or done those kinds of things?’

“Because of COVID,” James concludes, “we’ve had to innovate in new ways that are fundamentally going to change our future. We can’t predict what they are now. This is one of those defining moments in history, and that’s a good thing. There will be good that comes from this. We don’t know what it is yet.”

Last spring the number of travelers passing through our nation’s airports, as tallied by the Transportation Security Administration, plummeted from an average of about 2.5 million per day to a low on April 14 of just 87,534—a reduction in airline traffic of more than 96 percent. Hotels suffered a similar debacle, with occupancies plummeting by three-quarters. And after coronavirus catastrophes on a couple of cruises, the whole cruise industry slipped into a kind of induced coma.

Since then, there has been a slight recovery in some sectors—airline traffic has rebounded somewhat, to about a third of last year’s norm—but as a whole the travel and tourism industry remains on life-support. What all of this means for the long-term future of leisure travel and tourism is still unclear. But at least in the short term, there are signs of a shift in the way Americans think about travel.

Taking It Outside

Alison Mathes ’05, CEO of AVA Rafting and Zipline, first saw those signs way back in May, when the rafting season opened up on Colorado’s rivers. “We were a little bit shocked actually at the volume of interest when we opened up in the spring,” she says. “We were expecting a tiny trickle of interest, a few people who are a little bit more adventurous, willing to try group activities, willing to try getting out, doing things in public again, but really, it’s apparently what everyone wants to do.”

According to the U.S. Travel Association, 60% of Americans now consider outdoor recreational activities relatively safe—something that can’t be said for most other kinds of outside-the-home entertainment in a time of pandemic. After a slow start, attendance at national parks around the country boomed all summer long as Americans sought to escape from their confinement into the relative safety of the great outdoors.

“I think people really are itching to get outside, both from having been cooped up for so long but also looking for something that they feel comfortable doing, and outdoor recreation seems to tick all those boxes,” Mathes says, noting that her outdoor outfitting company remained booked up all summer long.

The biggest challenge, she says, has been ensuring the safety of both customers and staff. “For all of our activities, we have tried to do as much outside as possible. So rather than having people come inside to check in, we’re doing outdoor check-ins at all locations, requiring masks on-site. Transportation—we’re doing half capacity with staggered seating so that people aren’t too close together, keeping all windows open, requiring masks on vehicles, loading back to front and then unloading front to back, so that people aren’t crossing each other.”

They also do a lot of screening. “We ask at the time of reservation if they’re feeling ill or have any symptoms, and then we also ask the day before that they review and make sure that they do not have any symptoms, they’re not feverish. And that if they are feeling any of those symptoms, they’ll call us in advance and cancel, and we’ll give them a full refund in that context. And that seems to have worked. We have not had people show up exhibiting symptoms that needed to be turned away.”

One change that Mathes witnessed throughout the summer was a surge in the number of people who were trying activities like rafting, hiking or zip lining for the first time. “It’s been nice to see how much people seem to be connecting with these outdoor activities,” she says. “And I think a lot of people will continue that after this. Even if, let’s say, we magically get a vaccine in the next six months, I think we’ll continue to see people looking to get outside and enjoy nature-based activities more than they have historically.”

A lot of those newbies, she says, are turning into enthusiasts and investing in the experience. “People are going out and buying a mountain bike for the first time,” she says. “They’re investing in fly-fishing gear. They’re buying a tent and sleeping bags. They’re really putting money behind these activities, and I think they’ll continue to use that equipment moving forward.”

Road-Trip Revival

Another change from previous years, Mathes says, is that her clientele has become overwhelmingly local, as vacationers look around for nearby opportunities they’ve overlooked in the past. The tourists who used to fly in from the coasts for an outdoor adventure and then fly out again have been replaced by car traffic, mostly from Colorado and neighboring states, though she’s seen a few license plates from as far away as Massachusetts. “What I’m seeing is people are really comfortable jumping in a car and driving to a destination to get outside,” she says.

As a result, the old-fashioned road-trip vacation seems to be making a comeback. That was the fallback choice of Chuck and Maggie Seaca of Anchorage, Alaska, whose summer plans for a big wedding and a honeymoon in the Galápagos Islands were overturned by the pandemic.

“We were supposed to get married in a big celebration with lots of friends who were going to come out to Alaska,” explains Chuck Seaca ’14 (known to his classmates as Chuck Herman). “And we had rented out a big campground, and it was going to be a big celebration where everybody camped and had fun. Sadly, that was unable to happen due to coronavirus.”

Instead, for their wedding, the couple decided to take a small party of local friends back to the site of their engagement—on top of a glacier in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. “We hiked seven miles total,” Seaca recalls. “Maggie did the whole thing in her wedding dress.”

Next they had to make a decision about their honeymoon plans. “We kind of kept up that hope for a while,” he says, “and then realized that probably a cruise ship out to the Galápagos, which is essentially the main way to go out and see them—that it was not the ideal time to do that.”

So instead of flying and sailing, they decided to think local and do something neither of them had ever found time to do in their years in Alaska—drive north past the Arctic Circle. “We got pretty lucky with Denali National Park,” he remembers. “Normally you’re never allowed to drive in on your own. You have to take a shuttle or a big bus run by a tour company. But because there are so few tourists, they opened up a pretty limited permit system to let you drive in on your own.”

Self-described nature lovers, the couple tallied a wide range of animal sightings—including 11 grizzly bears, nine caribou, six moose and very few people—during a road trip that took them more than 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle and then, after a few days of camping and hiking, 700 miles back to Anchorage. “While the honeymoon wasn’t to the Galápagos like we’d hoped,” Seaca says, “we got to explore parts of our own state that we’d never seen and had a delightful time north of the Arctic Circle with the bears, moose and caribou.”

Lock, Stock and Barrel

On the flip side of the rediscovered road trip, Mathes says, she’s also seen another growing trend—people who are moving lock, stock and barrel to the places where they used to vacation.

“We’re seeing a lot more people move out to these vacation destinations in Colorado as well,” she says. “I think people, as they’re able to work remotely, are shifting their whole lifestyle in order to be closer to the activities that they want to do and closer to the places they would normally spend a lot of money to visit for a week once a year. So it’ll be really interesting to see how that shakes out, but that seems to be what people want to do, at least in the short term.”

Dating has always been fraught with emotional pitfalls. Even before the pandemic hit, in an October 2019 survey of singles by the Pew Center for Research, two-thirds of all respondents said their dating lives were going either “not too well” or “not well at all.” Almost half (47% to be exact) said they believed dating was harder than it had been a decade before.

That was before quarantines and masks and social distancing added a whole new level of complication. Before everyone’s lives moved almost entirely online—including, for many, the trials, disappointments and potential joys of dating.

Taking It Online

Online dating services are nothing new, of course, but they’re clearly on the rise as isolation and curiosity continue to drive singles across the country to dating apps. Match Corp—which controls 45 dating brands and more than 60 percent of the dating app market, including such well-known apps as Tinder, Hinge, Match and OKCupid—reported a 15 percent bump in new subscribers during the second quarter of 2020 alone.

Among those trying dating apps for the first time last spring were Will Swanson ’06 and Marianna Heckendorn ’16.

Heckendorn had a couple of Sagehen friends who had used Hinge, and she enjoyed hearing their stories, but she’d never really been tempted to try it herself. Then the pandemic came along, and she decided to take the plunge. “I was unemployed and a bit bored,” she recalls, “and also, I was, like, ‘I want to meet some new people.’ And so, I wasn’t really looking for a relationship. Just chatting with people and meeting them. And also just, kind of, out of curiosity—like, ‘What is this dating app?’”

For Swanson, trying a dating app seemed like a natural extension of the rest of his increasingly online life. He chose OKCupid because it offered more information than most sites. “It’s not one of the swiping ones—like Tinder,” he explains. “Well, yeah, you can swipe with it, but it’s more fleshed out than the ones that have just, like, pictures and then a quick little blurb.”

The ability to flick through a series of photos as you assess them for attractiveness—a kind of speed-shopping known in the industry as “swiping”—is a common feature on most dating apps. But counterintuitively, the combination of dating apps and pandemic quarantine seems to have had an opposite effect on dating in general. In many cases, it seems to have slowed things down.

Slow Dating

A resident of Seattle, Heckendorn was visiting her parents in Massachusetts when the lockdown began. So when she decided to try her luck with Hinge, she focused on guys back home. That’s how she met Javier.

“Javier and I met just a couple of days in and pretty immediately dove into some really interesting conversation,” she explains, “We tested it for about a week and then had a phone call, and I think at some point, I explained that I was in Massachusetts and not Seattle. And he’s funny. He was like, ‘What the heck?’ And he wasn’t mad or anything, but he was surprised. And I didn’t even think of that being an issue because I was thinking, ‘Well, if we were in Seattle, we wouldn’t see each other anyway because of COVID.’”

Whatever the main reason—COVID or being a continent apart—they took it slow, not meeting in person until five weeks later, when Heckendorn flew home to Seattle. But even so, Heckendorn believes that their relationship actually deepened more quickly because of the pandemic.

“We’ve actually gotten really close a lot faster than I normally would have,” she says. “I think partly that’s because there isn’t a lot else to distract ourselves with, and also, there’s a level of just, like, the only thing we can really do is hang out and talk. It’s not like going to a concert or going out to eat or even hanging out at friends’ houses. A lot of our dating is conversation-based, which means we’re getting to know each other pretty well.”

Similarly, it was early May when Swanson first noticed Ruth Siegel’s profile on OKCupid and sent her a message, using the app’s chat feature. From back-and-forth chat messages, the relationship progressed first to phone calls and eventually to Zoom dates.

“He wanted to go straight to Zoom,” Siegel remembers, “and I was like, ‘I don’t know. That’s a little fast for me.’”

“‘I’m a conservative gal,’” Swanson interprets dryly. “‘I don’t go straight to Zoom on the second date.’”

They didn’t agree to meet in person until more than a month later. “By then, I knew all kinds of things about Ruth’s family,” Swanson says. “She knew about my family. We’d had a long time to get to know each other before there was even the possibility of hugging each other or touching each other.”

A Question of Trust

“I think it is quite a conflict that people who are single are in—young adults and older adults,” notes Professor Emerita of Psychological Science Suzanne Thompson, who has studied how people react to inconvenient health warnings. “And it’s all the rewards of dating and relationships—the social contact, the physical closeness, sex—and, on the other hand, you could be exposing yourself to a serious disease. So it’s really quite a quandary to be in, and certainly, based on research I’ve done over the years on denial, in those situations, it’s very tempting to assume that this is a safe situation.”

Neither Swanson nor Heckendorn, however, took the decision to meet in person lightly.

Heckendorn lives with four housemates, so she first sought their approval before bringing Javier into their shared circle. “I definitely had to check that with them, and they were like, you know, ‘We have to trust your judgment.’ They had a rule that everyone could have one plus-one. So it was basically me, the four housemates, and then everyone’s plus-one.”

Before finally meeting in person, Swanson and Siegel took some time to work out the ground rules. “One of the things we had to discuss was how we were going to manage physical contact,” Swanson says. “Like, were we going to be able to hug each other on our first date after having talked for a month? And were we going wear masks? How were we going to navigate that stuff?”

“And if we don’t wear masks,” Siegel adds, “then how are we acting outside of dating each other? Like, how are we interacting with the world so that we can feel confident that we’re not going to infect each other—that we can have trust in each other when we’re still getting to know each other?”

“And so I think we erred on the side of caution,” Swanson concludes, “but when it came to dating, we decided to just go ahead and incorporate each other into our social bubbles.”

Simplifying the Rules

Looking back on their own experiences, Swanson, Siegel and Heckendorn all agree that there were some real advantages to online dating during a pandemic. For one thing, the inability to get together in the flesh removed some of the awkwardness and complication of normal dates. “I find a lot of the dating rules to be a little confusing in the first place,” Swanson admits. “So one of the nice things about this is that there is kind of a reset. And we had to talk about everything and make everything explicit.”

Siegel adds: “It really takes away a lot of the pressures of dating in certain ways. And then there’s no expectation for physical intimacy before you really get to know the other person, which I also think is, like, a cool aspect of it.”

In fact, they say the challenge of getting to know each other without breathing the same air pushed them to be more creative. “The templates were basically erased,” Swanson says. “So you had to come up with your own template for what a date is. And that was interesting and kind of fun, in a way. And so I think it was, like, a good way to get to know each other outside of all the weird pressure that can sometimes be loaded onto dates and a way to see the other person instead of how this person fits into what you were expecting in a normal date.”

For Swanson and Siegel, that inspired a series of themed Zoom calls during which they would watch marble racing together or play show-and-tell with a framed artwork or a favorite item purchased abroad. For one date, they set themselves the task of making the same complicated cocktail to drink together at opposite ends of the Zoom line.

Heckendorn has now become an advocate for dating apps. “I think I actually have sold a lot more people on online dating,” she says. “I go to church with, like, a lot of folks, and I think there’s a feeling, always, that online dating is just about hookup. And it’s really not. There are a lot of people who are looking for a sincere relationship.”

But for now, at least, her own online dating experience is over. “Javier and I met within days of signing on to the app,” she says, “and then we both deleted the app two weeks later. Hinge’s tagline is ‘Designed to be deleted.’ And, at least in our case, it worked out really well.”