Exploring the impact of COVID-19 on mobile dating: Critical avenues for research

In this digitally mediated world, initiating sexual or romantic intimacy now frequently occurs on mobile dating apps, which both requires people to navigate new technologies, but also enables them to explore different possibilities for intimacy. The opportunities that mobile dating holds for creating intimacy, and how people take these up, is particularly relevant in light of the global pandemic of COVID-19, when human connection and contact are entangled with varying worries about viral contamination, risk and future uncertainty. But how does the pandemic impact on mobile dating? How are affect and risk intertwined-or even negotiated-by people in their search for intimacy in this pandemic? What possibilities do mobile dating apps hold for people in their search for connection with others? In this commentary, I provide a brief overview of how risk has been examined previously in mobile dating research and explore what future directions could be taken in this field. I argue for research that acknowledges and prioritises: the plurality of people's sociomaterial conditions; the interrelationship between people, digital technologies and COVID-19; and the discursive context that furnishes people's sense of risk and emotional possibility across different sociocultural contexts. These new directions in the field offer opportunities to conduct critical research that is responsive to this dynamic context, and that illuminates the various ways that people are navigating intimacy, risk and emotion across different living conditions during this pandemic.