Love in the Time of COVID
By Chris Bullivant
November 2021
Last May, I walked to a Mexican taco place here in Charlottesville to reward myself for a successful visit to the Department of Motor Vehicles. On the way, I rehearsed the Spanish for “two fish tacos, rice and black pinto beans, please.” I successfully delivered my lines. Yet the server replied in English. I felt defeated. I’ve been speaking Spanish since I was thirteen. In 2013, I even gave ten hours of lectures in Spanish to government officials in Mexico City. Plus, I once spent two days with the Spanish Shadow Cabinet, discussing the post-2008 social and economic crisis. Now I can’t even ask for dinner.
It was this failed encounter that motivated me to practice my Spanish more regularly, and after a quick search I came across Tandem: a sort-of cross between Tinder and WhatsApp. Tandem is a language app developed in Germany. You set up a profile, add pictures of yourself, and describe your ideal language partner, plus the languages you want to practice. Once you’ve chosen the sorts of things that you want to talk about—video games, daily life, food—you can message, send voicemails, or have video calls with anyone that wants to talk with you.
It has been fascinating. Social media that is positive. Over the past six months, I have spoken regularly to individuals in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, as well as across Spain. Everyone feels bound by a positive force to meet new people, to practice a language, and to learn about different cultures. Personally, as someone who grew up thinking video phone technology would never happen, I find it tantamount to miraculous—the ability to be in touch with almost anyone anywhere in the world, to learn about their cities and their lives and to talk in person whenever you have a spare moment.
Quickly, I learnt much I hadn’t come across readily in the news. In the summer, people in Cali, Colombia were asked to stay in their homes—not because of COVID, but because of street riots. I learnt that there had been civil unrest across Chile after students in Santiago had protested against an increase in metro fares. Almost everyone I speak to on the app is learning a new language because they are desperate to leave Latin America—its ailing economies and dysfunctional politics. Even the Venezuelans who have managed to escape to Santiago in Chile or Buenos Aires in Argentina are now looking to leave for North America, Europe, or Australia as their newly adopted countries deteriorate fast around them.
Diego in Buenos Aires has become my de facto personal trainer, instructing me in what I should eat, what exercises to do at the gym, as well as introducing me to intermittent fasting and the concept of manscaping. In exchange, he gets me asking him about it all in English. He’s a part time photographer, DJ, as well as a gender violence police officer. He and his wife are looking to move to Spain this year after youths tried to rob him at gunpoint in his car.
John, in a Buenos Aires suburb, is incredibly gregarious with photos of himself playing soccer and bounding about shirtless on the beach. (A lot of Latin American men post shirtless photos of themselves on Tandem.) John is gung-ho about America, wearing the stars and stripes as pants. It is his dream to live in the U.S. He loves the photos I send him of high school football stadiums, hot dogs, burgers. He sends me Argentine wine recommendations, footage of the streets corners of San Isidre in the rain-drenched dark. It looks like the outskirts of Barcelona. But our exchange takes a turn when he reveals that he could have moved to America two years ago, but didn’t want to leave his dog, a golden retriever who only has a few years of life left. “I want to make them the best for the dog,” he explains. Suddenly his Instagram photos, every other one a picture of his dog, take on a peculiar aspect. I note that most people in Argentina have a golden retriever.
I immigrated from London last year to the United States, returning to pick up a life I had begun here before with my wife, this time with our infant daughter. We slipped away as soon as restrictions allowed and settled in Charlottesville, Virginia, where we enjoyed a slightly looser lockdown than London’s as the city moved into the Fall and made appearances in the Presidential debates.
It has been slow going socially—working from home via zoom, as astronomical used-car prices plus no credit history left us carless until this month. The only people I’ve met are a handful of my wife’s ex University friends and a next door neighbor or two. I didn’t even meet my boss or his team for ten months, everything being done online.
That is beginning to change as I moved into a coworking space this week. This morning I see someone walking into the brand new building grinning widely as he carries an archive box. He looks like he’s being fired, but in reverse. He lands at his new hot desk and quickly tells me he is a real estate attorney: working from home he’d been conducting all his client meetings on Zoom. “I can’t wait to be working with people,” he says, as he puts his box down and tells me his life story in five minutes, “Knock on my door anytime.” I slip away, playing it cool, but am similarly grateful to be seeing new people in the flesh.
While I was messaging with different guys from across Latin America—from home, the gym, sat by the pool, late at night after an evening of Netflix—these language exchanges slowly became friendships and my main source of socializing.
It was here that I began to really encounter difficulties in practising another language. “I really like you”, “You’re cool”, or even “Love you, man”—those important language thresholds in a developing friendship as it moves on from acquaintance—would get lost in translation. Often, they were a car crash.
John worked on an oil field off the coast of Colombia, spending weeks apart from his wife and children, practising English in his evenings. We had talked about our experiences of raising children, The Brothers Karazamov, life in Colombia, the U.K versus the U.S. At one point, when the conversation turned to soccer, one of his stated interests, I said I couldn’t help out much with that. But, if it was a consolation, I was interested in getting to know him. “I’m not gay!” he said. What?
After combing through my messages, it turned out I hadn’t said, “I am interested in getting to know you”, but something more like, “But you interest me, wink wink.”
I’ve since asked my friend Fred in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and David in Barranquilla, Colombia, to clarify South American norms. “I like you” is reserved for very close friends who you’ve known for a long time, and “love you” is reserved almost exclusively for sexual relationships, or immediate family. What Argentine men do instead with male friends is to kiss each other on the cheek and sign off a message with “hugs” (“Abrazos”), which is used in the same way English speakers might sign off an email, kind regards.
I have developed a paranoia about some of the connections I make. Is the person even real? I wonder. One user in Mexico City seemed to be online all the time, and his texts seemed to issue from a different personality anytime I interacted with him. Was “he” actually a “collective”, working together around the clock to draw people into some phishing scam? This concern was heightened after a person, describing themselves as a male in their 30s with profile photos suspiciously similar to a men’s denim catalog photo shoot, sent a photo of their balcony and its plants. The dim reflection in the window looked like the selfie of an elderly overweight woman. After that I asked if people could send me a selfie to show they were who they said they were. One man refused to. When I put his profile picture through a google image search it turned out it was a photo of a US Congressman.
Around that time, Instagram and Twitter then threw up some research on my phone about ‘parasocial relationships’, the imagined friendships you can have with a fictional TV character or real life celebrity that can then be maintained through social media channels. I wondered if the bonds developed through an app were similarly fantastical. Was this sense of friendship with someone online, the urge to say “I like you” after a few weeks of chatting, just synthetic? When the urge to express a forbidden expression of affection welled up, such as “I like you, Diego”, was it counterfeit, or imagined? If I met Diego the personal instructor in real life, would he even be someone I would want to kiss on the cheek?
During this last year of COVID, with few chances to meet new people and zero opportunities to travel, Tandem has felt like a lifeline. It has taken me to new cities, to meet new people, and talk with those in professions I never get to chat to ordinarily—factory workers building cars, planes, or bottling soft drinks, as well as software entrepreneurs, public sector workers, teachers, chemists, engineers, data analysts. But I wonder, still, how real any of these relationships are.
When I finally met my boss, after ten months of working for him, he was taller, younger, and better looking than he appeared on Zoom. Team members who had just started to work back at the office said they played a similar game: guess how tall a Zoom person would be in real life when they walked in the room. I apparently was what they were expecting. But when I met the team I’d been working with for so long, it seemed normal to be in their company, like we’d been meeting in person the whole time. So there is hope yet. That these online instant access penpal friendships across Latin America and the sense of bonding that occurs through a digital app is real.
What is certain is that I am more confident in my conversational Spanish. Last week, I burst out in Spanish when the server at the local wine bar explained that she was from Argentina. I asked if she could show me the Argentine empanadas she was making at the bar. I take a photo and send it straight to Diego, the personal instructor, police officer, DJ and dear friend in Buenos Aires.
