ZoomLove

By Chelsea Wills, Executive Editor

Newsweek, Oct. 25, 2029

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the Trump Virus Outbreak, there will no doubt be endless retrospectives alternately lauding, analyzing, or lamenting the New Normal that transformed not only the United States, but the planet Earth itself. So long have we lived in the shadow of COVID-19 that even the oldest among us struggle to recall what life was like, pre-coronavirus.

We can, in hindsight, only be grateful that this modern-day Black Plague didn’t fall upon us until we had an Internet in place; had it hit in the days before Amazon, social media, and online conferencing services like GoToMeeting and Zoom, the economic and social devastation – to say nothing of the ultimate death count – would have undoubtedly been far greater.

In the first year (Trump’s last), we in the United States adapted with much complaining but little real inconvenience to our periods of sequestration, doing work and school from home. Children taught remotely by teachers got away with murder, and the white-collar workforce grew bleary-eyed from staring into laptop screen gatherings, but nobody died of Zoom. No, it was the casual attitude toward masks and distancing, aggravated by right-wing agitators and Trump’s diehard supporters, that made the Second Wave so much worse than the First.

Yet despite President Biden’s United We Stand program of on-demand testing and AI-assisted tracing, the Third Wave was worse than the second, as angry Red Hats organized deliberate infection programs, forcing even those businesses and schools that were following the president’s UWS protocols and abiding by the Fauci Standard to button up once again. The days of picking a restaurant according to the number of masked diners were over; all restaurants across the nation closed, as did all non-critical businesses and government services, and the Second Great Depression began.

COVID mutated, of course, with the Fourth Wave, and the US death toll was approaching 10 million when President Kamala Harris herself succumbed to the virus in the spring of 2025, infected in a Red Hat terrorist assault. When her successor, President Gretchen Whitmer, came to the brink of declaring martial law, the 119th Congress passed the Beshear Act, effectively restructuring the US economy and both public and private services around the most massive federal commitment to investment in technology since the Manhattan Project.

The West Coast tech giants, you see, had been innovating throughout the five long years of COVID, developing flexible and inventive new technologies that were repurposed to keep us all alive and safe until even the most virulent strains of COVID were vanquished by the PfiNTech Vaccine. When the dust cleared, almost 18 million had died; the economy, shored by the Beshear Act and the rapid reconfiguration of US banks, businesses and services (as well as federal and state offices) around AI and the national adoption of the smartdollar, began to crawl back. And President Whitmer, despite perpetual evisceration in the media and cries of No Confidence, won reelection, with no organized opposition party able to put up a credible challenger.

But here are some statistics you may not have heard.

The second version of United We Stand gave local and state governments the authority to restrict the movement of citizens beyond their homes without approval. This meant that the Biden Lockdown (and subsequent Harris Lockdown) were true lockdowns, in many if not most cities and counties – almost 85% of the entire country. This restriction, decried as Philistine by the far right and the remnants of MAGA, had been made feasible by SkyFare, the famous (and unlikely) partnership between Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates (who hated each other), which made possible an AI-managed deployment of more than 160 million drones that could not only deliver Amazon packages, but warm meals, water, secure medical supplies, and even pets.

And here’s a lesser-known but more astonishing statistic: between 2020 and 2027, more than four million couples who are married today met – and courted! - online.

More than three million of them never met face-to-face before their weddings, due to the limitations of travel permits. And over a million of them were married on Zoom, or something like it, before they ever so much as held hands.

Dating in cyberspace

Meeting online was, of course, nothing new in the pre-COVID days; one in five relationships were already being conceived by Match.com and its many imitators. Prior to COVID, however, these services went no further than introduction; from that point on, potential lovers took it from there on their own.

Meeting online in the COVID shadow, however (and especially after UWS2), meant continuing the budding relationship online, one-on-one in Zoom (or Skype, or something like them). It meant that if dating was going to happen at all, it was going to have to happen in new and different ways.

Joni, a 28-year-old database administrator in Spokane, remembers her courtship with her husband Paul:

“The first date was just amazing,” she recalled. “We’d met on Facebook – he was a friend of a friend of a friend of mine from high school – and we’d started up a private message chat. That became a phone text chat, but he pushed back against that. He’s older than me [36] and had relationships crash on him in the past due to over-reliance on texting. So he got his own Zoom account and we started chatting on Zoom.”

“Within two week or so, we were connecting almost every evening on Zoom,” Paul remembered. “We’d share how our days had gone, laughed some, talked about how we were feeling about things – and we’d go on until we’d forgotten the time and it was very late, just like a really good face-to-face date.”

Then Paul made a decisive move.

“He asked me out,” Joni said. “He said, ‘Let’s have dinner.’ Well, even though we only lived 15 miles apart, there was no way we’d get permits for something that unimportant, and of course there were no restaurants. 

“So we agreed on a time the following Friday evening, and he droned in a warm dinner of seared scallops in white-wine butter sauce with roasted asparagus and a bottle of my favorite red zin. There was even a candle. And for dessert – chocolate mousse!”

Paul had the other candle, and an identical meal on his end of the Zoom session. Paul put on her favorite music. Both said it was the best date of their lives.

This scenario has replayed, of course, tens of millions of times. Since the early days of SkyFare, dozens of new similar businesses have sprung up, offering dinner date packages like the one Paul came up with. The new industry is approaching one billion dollars a year, and similar models have been adopted by other socially-motivated paradigms, including family gatherings, wine clubs, and class reunions.

The Joni/Paul courtship model – frequent Zoom contact with regular “formal” dates – became a social norm in Europe before the US took it up, but by early 2022, it was everywhere, as it became clear that flesh-and-blood courtship was on hold indefinitely. Millions of Zoom dates had taken place by the end of that year, resulting in hundreds of thousands of new relationships.

The psychology of cyberlove

Scott LaJoie, Director of Health Sciences at the University of Louisville, commented on the trend in 2023 on the Analogica podcast: “You’d think that online relationships would be fragile and, to an extent, artificial,” he said, “but we’ve seen through studies that the opposite turns out to be the case.

“To begin with, since the smartphone, we’ve had an over-reliance on texting as a relationship connection,” he continued. “Couples will get together and will then stay tethered to one another through the day, with a wake-up text, text updates all day long, and finally a good-night text. And that includes ‘sexting’.

“Now, that’s all fine, connection itself is healthy; but it can all sort of collapse and go to hell for no good reason, because when we just text, we’re depriving ourselves of our partner’s voice, their face, their eyes, their smile – all those warm, non-linguistic connections that represent our true bond. There’s that famous Internet meme, ‘Texting is a perfect way to miscommunicate how you feel, and to misinterpret what other people mean.’ That’s more true than you might imagine, and countless perfectly good relationships have blown up for that one stupid reason.

“Zoom, on the other hand, gives us back many of those healthy components of intimacy – the sound of our lover’s voice, their body language, the happiness of their smile, the intimacy of their gaze. We go from no sensory engagement in text, apart from eyes reading words, to sight and sound. That’s a big leap forward. 

“Smell and taste and touch are still hugely important, of course, and essential for bonding in an actual long-term relationship; but that’s up ahead, for the patient couple. You know what they say: Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.”

Getting to know you

Match.com and its siblings do service courtship beyond introduction in some situations, argues Kelsey Thompson, a sociologist at Purdue University.

“Sometimes, two people will be a perfect match – compatible in every meaningful way, their interests deeply aligned – and be defeated by distance,” she wrote in Wired in 2024. “This has been happening for 20 years, and many of us have experienced a connection like that. You like this person, you enjoy this person, you come to depend upon and eventually to love this person, and even if you’re doing intermittent rendezvous, visiting each other or meeting each other halfway – there comes a point at which you have to fish or cut bait. One partner or the other will have to move.

“COVID created a situation where many if not most relationships-in-progress were in that same boat,” she continued, “even couples five miles apart were essentially in long-distance relationships.”

But this, according to Thompson, was ultimately a plus:

“The advantage of a long-distance relationship conducted over the Internet is that puts emphasis on what really matters, and removes much of the time-wasting frivolities,” she wrote. “Many relationships quickly devolve into hundreds of hours in front of a television, with little meaningful interaction. Zoom relationships aren’t like that; the nature of the media is on-going synchronous communication, constant dialog, a committed sharing of thoughts and feelings. It may not be a heart-to-heart lying next to each other, or holding hands and sharing on a park bench, but it’s the next best thing.”

Ellen Burse met her husband Trey on Facebook, but rapidly migrated with him to Zoom, where their experience bears out Dr. Thompson’s thesis:

“At first, the Zoom sessions with Trey felt like a kind of pressure,” she said. “You knew that you were about to spend two hours or more in constant conversation, with no movie or TV show or time on the dance floor to give you a break. But that pressure quickly passed; more and more, he took a genuine interest in what I thought and felt, and it became easier to give him what he wanted – just time with me. I didn’t have to be clever or profound; I just had to be me. That’s what he really wanted. It often seems that way early in a relationship, but it’s an easy thing to pretend to – not so much, online. If you’re doing those Zoom sessions with someone, day in and day out, you gotta want it. I knew he was being authentic, because I often wasn’t particularly clever or profound, and there was no sex at the end of the call. I knew he meant it; he just wanted time with me.”

Interestingly, Trey was feeling the same thing.

“There’s this vibe in our culture, a patriarchal vibe, that implies that it’s a woman’s job on a date to please the man, so there will be a second date,” he said. “I’m sure that’s true in some situations, but it’s ultimately bullshit. We all want to be liked by someone new,  both men and women - we want to be accepted, but it’s not gender-specific. I’ll be honest with you, the first dozen or so Zoom sessions with Elle, I wasn’t at all sure I was connecting, and I had some anxiety over that. She seemed like she was trying to fill the time, and frankly, so was I, and we were missing all those white spaces that a real-world date provides.

“But there comes a point at which you’re all-in, and you can’t keep up with the anxiety of wondering if this is working or if you’re offering what’s expected – you just collapse into yourself and be who you are. That’s what intimacy online, whatever it is on the surface, really turns out to be. Before long, I knew Elle – I really knew her. And she really knew me. And we’d gotten there in half the time it would have taken in the real world.”

Ellen elaborated: “Real connection is about how deeply you can safely share who you are, and enjoy yourself in the process. So many relationships end up being about something that isn’t that – taking care of someone needy, or being in the grip of someone who just wants control. Having a partner and loving them and enjoying being with them can only happen when the connection is free of all that, and built on the freedom to say what you think and share what you feel and just have a hell of a good time being together. You can do that online. Face-to-face, and all that comes with it, can happen later.”

Flesh and blood

For all the psychological benefits of online connection and intimacy, it still lacks the essential impact of holding your lover in your arms. Partnership isn’t all about sex, but sex is a big part of it, and COVID put a real damper on human copulation.

“The numbers are somewhat misleading,” said Christian Bowyer, a senior counselor with the Office of Human Wellness in the Indiana Department of Human Services. “It’s no secret that birth rates plummeted, disastrously so, during COVID; we’ll be a generation or more getting back to where we were, birthrate-wise. 

“But the fact that the only actual sexual activity happening was between persons sequestered together just accounts for physical sex acts of the sort that produce babies, explaining those low numbers. But sexual intimacy is also about bonding, and the truth we’ve learned in recent years is that there was tremendous bonding going on during COVID, between separated partners. We are now more or less certain that there was more intimate activity happening remotely than in person.”

Wired Magazine coined the term teledildonics in the 1990s, referring to sex tech that would work over the Internet to physically connect two remote lovers via toys wired together. On television, The Big Bang Theory explored this concept briefly, hilariously, and disturbingly, when Howard and Raj field-tested two sets of artificial mouths that were wi-fi-connected and mutually responsive by deep-kissing them, as Leonard looked on in horror.

We know, of course, that SkyFare partnered with Zoom and several other tech giants to create ZoomLove, a virtual intimacy platform, combining telepresence with wi-fi-connected sex toys and AI-driven sensory support.

Joni remembers her honeymoon with Paul.

“We were married over the Internet,” she said, “on January 26, 2026. We had never met in person. But we were more in love than I can imagine our parents being, or anyone else I know. We were ready to be a couple. 

“There was the matter of the honeymoon,” Paul reported. “This was before the conjugal provisions of UWS2 were universally approved, and we just wanted to connect. If either of us had broken quarantine, we could have been formally sequestered, and then our contact would have been regulated, and that wasn’t acceptable.

“So we were one of the first couples to try ZoomLove. It was inexpensive, even in the beginning.”

Joni continued: “The thing about sexual intimacy is, if you’re a woman, there’s a question of when and whether your partner is fully present. Sometimes he is, sometimes he isn’t. And you can tell: there’s that moment when he’s going all out to please you, and there are times when he’s just digging for China. And a woman rapidly senses which is which.

“With ZoomLove, it’s like the dates – you're constantly engaged, always paying close attention to your lover, and he’s always paying close attention to you. I’ve gotta tell you, sensing that deep closeness and connection, even when he wasn’t right here with me – there's something more intimate about that than the physical connection itself.”

Paul agreed. “I felt more wanted and needed, as a partner, than I ever had before, even though we weren’t in the same bed.”

Contact

SkyFare and its ancillaries eventually begat SkyWalker, a service by which a COVID-clear individual could safely and economically be diagnosed infection-free, then droned to a pre-screened location. By this path were millions of sequestered individuals safely transferred to new locations – including Joni and Paul, and tens of thousands of other virtual couples.

“When he stepped off the drone, looked around and saw me, and walked toward me, my heart melted,” Joni recalled. “There he was – my husband – a word that fills my heart! - and even though it was the first time I was really meeting him, he was already more real to me than any man I’d ever known. I can’t tell you how it felt when he took me in his arms for the first time.”

Couples like Joni and Paul were, literally, one in a million: their experience was shared across the United States, and continues today, post-COVID, among those economically challenged to bridge long distances.

“COVID, its bungling, its mutation, and the horrific social challenges of the past decade have opened up new horizons in human intimacy,” said Thompson. “It has refocused many of us on what’s truly important in a relationship, on how communication should work, and on the truly potential of human intimacy.”

“There’s an irony in the fact that lockdown, of all things, resurfaced the physical joys of human contact that we’ve enjoyed since long before civilization began,” added LaJoie. “It has revealed the dangers of relying improperly on technology in our communication with one another, and reasserted the importance of face-to-face interaction.”

“If there’s one thing COVID has done,” said Bowyer, “it is that it has reminded us what bonding means. We don’t just want to connect for biological reasons; we want to connect for emotional reasons.”

Calling the advent of ZoomLove a boon to human intimacy may seem a stretch, and even here, its impact may seem exaggerated; but the numbers are what they are. Far more couples than not connected and built relationships online during COVID, and many (though not most) of those took their relationships so far that they made the choice to marry, even in an era when marriage is on the decline.

That says a lot about who we are. It says a lot about the difference between deferring to technology and relying on it. And it says that we are, in the realm of intimacy, deeper and more resilient, more adaptable and more fraught with possibility than the poets ever dreamed.