The Zoom Meet Cute

Trying to Make a Connection Online.

By Kaleen Luu

Tell me, friends, how am I supposed to find a love connection with someone over Zoom when my Wi-Fi struggles to let me sit through an hour of class? I can’t even try to pretend that I’m getting my tuition’s worth.

As the pandemic drones on and the countdown to my remaining days left of university, I’m starting to feel antsy about the “meet cute” expectation of meeting someone in college. All my life, I’ve watched romance movies depicting college as the place where couples meet, fall in love and get their happily ever after. Maybe the quirky heroine drops all her stuff and of course, her One True Love (OTL) just so happens to be walking by and is the one who helps her.

Or maybe they meet in the library, reaching for the same required-textbook-by-the-professor-butwe’ll-never-actually-use.

The point is, my OTL is nowhere to be found, because they sure are not running into me anytime soon. The virtual reality of our education is the sad bearer of more bad news. It seems fitting that OTL is an emoticon used to symbolize crying on your hands and knees because honestly, that’s how I feel.

Not only do I miss out on meeting the love of my life, I lose out on getting the full scope of an education, too. To my professors, it must feel terrible to lecture to a screen of students who are all muted with their cameras off. It’s a lose-lose and there goes the so-imagined college experience. That’s half the point of university, isn’t it? To build connections—oh sorry, I mean, “networking.”

So boo-hoo, I can’t find love. Not only that, I’m struggling to make new friends as it is. Joining clubs isn’t the enriching and enjoyable experience that it could’ve, should’ve and would’ve been. My dragon boat team has practice over Zoom and it’s just not the same… like hello, we can’t even be out on the water!

But I digress.

The Zoom meet-cute fantasy maybe goes like this. Both students are part of the select five that actually keep their cameras on during class, and volunteers to answer the professor’s question. (Kudos to you if you’re that person, for speaking up so our instructor doesn’t have to answer themselves like a sad rendition of Dora the Explorer). By some miracle, they end up in the same breakout room, hit it off, and there goes another Netflix rom-com movie!

Okay, but it doesn’t actually happen that way in real life. Or at least, not for me. I’ve tried committing to having my camera on this semester and speaking in class (which is definitely more terrifying than in person because EVERYONE sees your face as it dominates their screen, whereas in person, they’re probably staring at the clock the whole time.

The hardest thing about school being online is how difficult it is to make a stable connection. Much like my Wi-Fi, it’s a fleeting moment.

If I have a class with someone cute, I can’t casually strike up a conversation like I would in person. On-campus, I could actually see my classmates and maybe tell someone, “Hey that’s a cool shirt, I like Inner Wave too,” and it would be chill and friendly. But on Zoom, private messaging someone seems so… direct. It’s like, zeroing in on someone and with most students keeping their camera off, I feel like I never get the opportunity to even find a common ground.

Breakout rooms seem like a great opportunity. The problem with that is they’re usually short, you’re grouped with several students and you have a discussion point for the class that you’re supposed to focus on. It’s never enough time to actually establish anything. Plus, it’s hard to gauge people’s reactions when we’re messaging over Zoom. In real life, it’s easy to tell when someone is disinterested by their body language. That’s my cue to back off. Online, I just hope that the human on the other side of the screen wants to be friends, too.

Can we make it a thing that if you’re open to making connections, change your Zoom icon to include Barney? Yes, that purple dinosaur. He was ahead of his time. The one who would sing me “I love you, you love me” taught me that caring, sharing and learning is the key to love. So please, let there be a way to make it easier to know it’s OK to reach out, it’s such an isolating time.

The only bright side of this whole thing? “Breaking up” has a whole other meaning to me now. I don’t have to be crying over being dumped, breaking up can also mean that I’m missing half of what my professors are saying. Maybe there is a silver lining to lectures being straight from the PowerPoint.