Skip to main content

Love Is Quarantine: Instagram dating show pairs couples in ‘pandemic pods’

Love doesn’t have to take a backseat during COVID-19

In the style of Netflix’s breakout reality show Love Is Blind comes the Instagram version, @loveisquarantine — where Instagram users interested in friendship, or romance, are matched up via Google Docs and connected for their own “pandemic pod” date that very night. But here’s the catch: the “pods” aren’t pods, but just wherever participants are self-isolating from the coronavirus

Roommates Thi Lam and Rance Nix launched the @loveisquarantine account Tuesday night, and it works like this: Users access the Google Doc and enter their first name and what sex they are interested in meeting, along with their phone number. Later in the evening, if chosen, each participant will be paired with someone they don’t know and entered in a group chat with the match and Lam and Nix. 

View this post on Instagram

Texting our contestants!!!

A post shared by LOVE IS QUARANTINE (@loveisquarantine) on

Participants then call each other for 30 minutes to start the date, after receiving some basic guidelines from the creators. Before, during, and after the date, each participant makes a video talking about what the experience was like. Each video is then posted on the @loveisquarantine account in sequence, showcasing all the dates from that night. Tuesday night’s experiment consisted of 12 pod dates — 24 people — and some even found success. It seemed Tuesday night’s “it” couple was Brooke and Red, according to social media users sounding off in the comments. 

Don’t want to participate yourself? You can watch the whole thing play out on the Love Is Quarantine account. Creators Lam and Nix live-stream from their personal accounts, as well as frequently post to the @loveisquarantine account throughout the selection process and dates.  

As of Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the account was created, over 370 new people signed up for “Season 2” via the Google Doc link, and the Instagram account’s following reached over 4,000 followers, and grows by the minute. Shortly after Elite Daily published a story about the experiment, submissions for season 2 closed. Lam and Nix confirmed to the publication that the selection process is totally random, and that they plan to keep the project going “until we have jobs again.”

Wednesday night’s episode will air tonight at 7:30 EST.

Editors' Recommendations

Meira Gebel
Meira Gebel is a freelance reporter based in Portland. She writes about tech, social media, and internet culture for Digital…
X seems to have deleted years of old Twitter images
The new X sign replacing the Twitter logo on the company's headquarters in San Francisco.

The social media platform formerly known as Twitter and recently rebranded as X appears to be having trouble showing images posted on the site between 2011 and 2014.

The issue came to widespread attention on Saturday when X user Tom Coates noted how the famous selfie posted by Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscars in 2014, which quickly broke the “most retweets” record, was no longer displaying. Later reports suggested the image had been restored, though, at the time of writing, we’re not seeing it.

Read more
X says it’s squashing the bug that deleted Twitter images and links
The new X sign replacing the Twitter logo on the company's headquarters in San Francisco.

X, formerly known as Twitter, says it’s working to restore potentially millions of images and links that suddenly and rather mysteriously disappeared from the platform in recent days.

“Over the weekend we had a bug that prevented us from displaying images from before 2014,” the company said in a post on its Support account on Monday. “No images or data were lost. We fixed the bug, and the issue will be fully resolved in the coming days.”

Read more
Snapchat hopes its new AI selfie feature will be a moneymaker
A screenshot of Snapchat's new AI-powered Dreams feature.

Snapchat Dreams

Snapchat was quick to jump aboard the AI bandwagon when it launched its “My AI” chatbot in February. And now the platform has released another feature that, like My AI, also harnesses generative AI.

Read more