It was my first heartbreak. I was 21 years old and home from college for the weekend. I sat solemnly at my kitchen table, not bothering to pretend to eat. My mum sat beside me, spreading marmalade on toast.

“What if I never meet anyone else?” It’s an unremarkably common fear when fresh off a break-up.

My mum looked at me and said “You don’t need anyone.” She was, alarmingly, the better feminist between us.

After that, I dated my way through college; I dated while on a summer J1 in California; I dated into adulthood in Dublin; I dated across New York City while working abroad for a year. I’ve done the apps, I’ve met ‘the one’ on a dancefloor, and I’ve turned friends into boyfriends and back again. In the throws of modern dating, one thing was abundantly clear: There will always be someone else.

I have never experienced anything other than today’s digitised version of courtship. Even at 16, that boy from the heartache above asked me to be his girlfriend over Facebook, where we chatted until midnight, when my dad would turn off the WiFi in an attempt to get me to sleep.

Modern dating is ruled by an abundance of choice. I need never have worried about meeting someone new, because that very week my friends would introduce me to Tinder – an app where I only had to swipe left or right to find my next suitor. The dating game has evolved in line with these swiping habits. Even when we do meet people, we still stay on the apps. We keep swiping, waiting for the next one to come along and be better. The sheer quantity of options is totally unique to this era of non-romance. There’s little motivation to get to know someone over the long term if they don’t WOW us within ten seconds of happening across their profile.

As I found crushes on Bebo and cemented my first relationship on Facebook, after school I watched reruns of Friends and Sex and the City. In those classic TV shows, people met in bars and galleries. They called each other on telephones with curly cords attached to the wall and asked each other on dates. I can still quote iconic lines from those shows, but I’ve never been asked on a date via phone call.

Multiple men in my life have told me that when using dating apps, men say yes to everyone, and then filter only through actual matches to engage further. While living in New York, my friends and I would swap phones and impersonate each other on Hinge, to embarrass each other as painfully and hilariously as possible. In any case, people online don’t have the value they would if we knew them. Meeting online means that, for a large part, people aren’t ‘real’ – they don’t have feelings, stories or depths of personality. I took comfort in the fact that I had the power to meet someone whenever I wanted to, even while wearing PJs and eating Chinese food.

In March 2020, I went on a day date with a new Hinge prospect. We spent an afternoon in Howth, topped off with pints. The date was nice, though in hindsight he was too introverted for me. Our second date was canceled on the eve of the COVID-19 lockdown, when I decided to quarantine in my parent’s house in Wexford. I had visions of being locked in my apartment 24/7 with no access to outdoor space. In my parent’s four-bed semi-D, I could breath and take what I thought would be a two week break from adulting.

Thirteen anxiety-filled weeks later, I returned to Dublin, to my apartment of dead plants and seriously gone-off milk. I quickly met up with the boy from Howth for the second time, having dated over Zoom for over three months.

While exiled in my hometown, I partook a premature long distance relationship with someone who I had spent only one afternoon with. We Zoomed each other multiple times a week, took up yoga together via Instagram live classes, and mixed the same cocktails on the weekends, all the while talking about everything and anything. It had all the makings of a lockdown love story.

By mid-June, I was eager to see him again. He met me at the Dart station, and within 20 terrible seconds, I knew that this person was wrong for me. He was as kind as ever, but every second I spent with him made me sick with the knowledge that this wasn’t right.

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about modern dating is how perfect someone can be on the screen, only to fall flat in real life. The spark is everything, and it can’t be bottled and sold. It’s either there or it’s not, and you’ll have to spend time with someone in person to know for sure. Three months of Zoom dating didn’t tell me what a second date could.

Ending things is different in a pandemic. For the first time in my life, the prospect of meeting someone else wasn’t guaranteed. The decision to be single would be semi-permanent.

Being single isn’t a negative. I’ve had days where I’ve hated being alone, but I’ve had an equal number of days where I’ve shuddered at the thought of owing anyone anything. Having to text someone if I don’t come home or consider somebody else in my weekend plans has often seemed repulsive.

But what happens when there’s no chance of staying out all night? When there are no weekend plans and no distractions? When the choice to be single is, in fact, the choice to be alone, you’d better be sure about sending a nice guy or girl away. Love is fleeting, and when we can’t actually meet new people, it’s also damn near impossible to find.

The prospect of being alone for however long a global pandemic might last is daunting — and making that choice reinforced my belief that there is nothing on earth worse than being with the wrong person. The feeling of ending something and then walking home, breathing in the free air, is what I imagine it’s like to be told I might die and then to walk away with my life intact. The relief is unparalleled.

Another firm belief of mine is that we meet people when we least expect it. Live your life, say yes to every opportunity, and it will happen. Even if, at least for the time being, we might only be saying yes to truly being alone, dive in head first. You don’t need anyone, anyway, according to my feminist-icon mother.

We know that we’ll meet someone else, because people are fundamentally unable and unwilling to go without human intimacy, even after we’ve been conditioned to stay two metres apart and only meet outdoors. We’ve grown sick of Zoom quizzes and virtual events; we want actual in-person interaction. Technology and Tinder can’t replace chemistry and electricity.

Sitting single and waiting for the world to reopen is an exercise in patience. Baking all the banana bread in the world won’t make you forget that someone has pressed the pause button on your life. But if we come out of this in a few years and see meeting new people as a rarity rather than a given, being single might be vastly improved. We might go out and meet someone, rather than stay in to swipe on someone, because it’s been so long since we sat in a pub with a stranger. And then the next day, we might wait by the phone to be asked out on a date, like Rachel Green or Carrie Bradshaw.