“Romance is different now,” says Sara, one of my interviewees. This vulnerability and exposure adds another level to quarantine crushing, and frankly crushing in general. We’ve all had a friend text us in concern after they’ve watched us listen to “Ribs” by Lorde for an hour, or after they’ve spotted the name of a playlist our ex made scrolling beside our profile picture (two things that have unfortunately happened to me in real life). It’s an easy way to gain a lot of insight into a person’s emotional state without having to ask, and it’s also an easy way to tell when you actually do need to ask. Just from a quick scan of the friend feed, you can tell who’s working out (Britney Spears), who’s getting high (Grimes), who’s crying in the shower (Mitski), who just got dumped (Mitski), who’s having a breakdown (100 gecs, Mitski), and who just fell in love (Carly Rae Jepsen and one very specific Mitski track. It makes the deeply personal act of listening to the music you love so incredibly public. You know what they say: Spotify is the window to the soul. I couldn’t literally see her doing the same with Maggie Rogers and Jamila Woods, but on the right side of my screen, in my Spotify “Friend Activity” feed, I could see her listening to the piece of my heart I had recreated for her, and I could imagine. I twirled around my dorm room to Hope Tala, clutched my heart and sighed while listening to Orion Sun. My last pre-quarantine romance began with the two of us constructing long, meticulously curated Spotify playlists for each other and shooting them across the thousands of miles of air between us. Also, this piece was in no way sponsored by Spotify. By request, some names have been changed to protect the privacy of those individuals. This edition of Queerantine features quotes from fellow queers in quarantine.
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