The new trend in millennial dating: waiting for the end of lockdown to dump your boyfriend

We all know that  being locked down together during Covid has spurred some couples to break up. But from speaking to friends, it sounds like there’s a silent majority who want to break up, but can’t bring themselves to do it yet. Lockdown is already enough to make you want to stick your head in the nearest Hotpoint appliance, even without heartbreak.

One guy is only with his girlfriend because he can lock down at her 40-acre, four-poster-bed country estate rather than his grotty house-share. Other friends have confessed, eyes darting guiltily, that they’re not sure their boyfriend is “The One”. I don’t need to hear the rest — what would be the benefit of splitting up for either party? Singledom currently consists of scratching though Bumble — there’s no spontaneity, no galvanic liaisons with handsome strangers. It’s far better, they reckon, to have one in the hand than two in the bush — and a threesome in a bush would land you in jail right now.

As with Glastonbury, getting an STI test, and Curtis and AJ Pritchard’s dance tour, the esprit du temps is that major life events can be delayed until the world “goes back to normal” — whenever that may be. It reminds me of Ashley Cole who, after admitting to multiple affairs, asked Cheryl if she might be okay to wait it out until the World Cup was over to finalise their break-up. Imagine if Gorbachev had waited a decade to break up the USSR.  

I’m not sure Covid is wholly to blame though — my generation has always been bad at breaking up. I’ve always suspected the millennial penchant for probiotics arises from our collective lack of gut when it comes to relationships. For all our “dump him” feminist-slogan-chanting, we can’t tell people straight up we don’t fancy them — instead we block numbers and leave lovers in a stasis of self-doubt for days. We’re so terrified of confrontation we text rather than pick up the phone. Last year I got so fed up of my friends ghosting that I sent a template break-up text round the girls’ group chat — in the hope they’d at least send it to guys before going AWOL.

Once this is all over, there will be lots of break-ups. Half of us will be on a rebound spree after dumping the person we felt stuck with for the last year. The other half will be at home — heartbroken and bingeing on the other types of BJ — Bridget Jones and Ben & Jerry’s.  The “two tier society” post-pandemic won’t just be between the vaccinated and un-jabbed — it will be between dumpers and dumpees.

Let me explain the hysteria over GameStop briefly: GameStop sells video games — which means, like Blockbusters, it was considered kind of past its shelf life. This meant its shares were “shorted” — where investors borrow, then sell, then buy intangible objects — and apparently make lots of money in the process. Anyway, this month users on a Reddit forum decided to rally against those Wall Street bros who’d bet on the price of shares dropping, and invested in GameStop, to drive up their stock price.Yesterday, GameStop’s share price reached $24.5 billion — which, as you can imagine, wiped the smile off a few hedge funders’ faces. We used to be so dismissive of those dudes on subreddits who want to “take on the big guy”. But they literally did it — and they won. Imagine the traffic-calming measures local councils would have to agree to if a Mumsnet thread really got going.