The teenage years are a time of great emotional turmoil for young people. Finding a date for the prom, navigating DMs on Instagram, thrashing out familial discord, and negotiating the “unsmooth course” of true love can become shoals upon which many high school students may founder. And while we might have suspected that the pandemic would exacerbate these potential emotional pitfalls, new research says we’d be wrong.
Dr. Pym Pel from Verona Polytechnic Institute in New York (home of the Fighting Montagues) interviewed hundreds of young people attending high schools across the United States in 2020 and 2021. Students answered 427 questions on their emotional experiences during two Covid-impacted school years, ranging from “Dost thou recall a fevered evening of rumination upon another student?” to “Verily, I ask unto thee, did’st thou feel the pangs of dearest joy unrequited within the twelve-month?” Analyzing the responses, Dr. Pel noted two specific aspects of pandemic mitigation whose impacts defied expectation.
First up, social distancing. Rather than carving emotional gulfs between students, required social distancing in buildings reopened to in-person learning appeared to increase both the number of longing gazes in which students engaged and the reported intensity of those gazes. For every additional foot of distance increase above the CDC-minimum six feet, students reported a statistically-significant 0.5 of a standard deviation increase in the number of locked-eye gazes and 0.3 of a standard deviation in the reported “smoldery-ness” of those gazes. Investigating mechanisms for this effect, Dr. Pel zeroed in on the “absence really does make the heart grow fonder” effect.
Second, universal face covering. While lockdowns enacted in the early pandemic understandably reduced “wooing efforts via balcony” more than tenfold, Dr. Pel was even more concerned by data showing that an abundance of caution on the part of school officials prevented students from attending any type of masquerade ball for nearly two full years. However, the return to in-person learning in 2021 yielded surprising data that effectively mimicked both balcony- and masquerade-based outcomes. It turns out that requiring students to wear three layers of N95 face coverings at all times in one another’s presence actually boosted wooing behaviors to pre-pandemic levels. It’s impossible to know exactly why this was, but the ability of the boys to conceal much of their acne and the extra sleep the girls enjoyed by not needing to apply makeup to the bottom half of their faces are plausible explanations. Whatever it was, “The numbers were off the chart. It’s like these kiddos were attending masked balls all day every day!” Dr. Pel concludes.
Taken together, these data give Dr. Pel hope for the future resilience of teenage relationships. “I don’t know much about statistics,” writes the Folgers (Coffee) Endowed Chair in Elizabethan Teenagers’ Krazy Courtship Rituals, “but I know what I like.” Dr. Pel’s upcoming research on the impact of Covid-19 on friars will likely amplify the findings here due to the well-documented intersection of religious personages with young people and their impetuous affairs.
SOURCE: Pym Pel, “Plucky Youngsters in the Time of Great Woe: A descriptive analysis,” Quaint Quicksilver Quips Quarterly (April 1, 2022).
