Crash and burn: the intense and fleeting romances of the Covid era

The unspoken rules of dating went out the window as people found themselves deeply alone - perhaps it's no surprise these couples didn't make it

On 4 July 2020, 34-year-old Samantha Higdon, a tech worker in Austin, Texas, was swiping through the dating app Hinge when she came across a profile that made her thumb pause and hover over the screen.

His smile struck her as warm and somehow familiar: He just felt right," she says. And so it began.