In the mid-twentieth century, the sociologist Erving Goffman described human interaction as a theatre where we perform specific roles to maintain social order. By March 2020, that theatre had collapsed into a 13-inch laptop screen. What followed was one of the largest involuntary experiments in human bonding the modern world has ever conducted: could the social brain sustain deep romantic connection when stripped of its somatic foundations?

In India, the experiment arrived with particular force. The lockdown announcement gave citizens four hours of notice before 1.3 billion people were ordered home. For Priya, a 27-year-old UX designer in Bengaluru, and Arjun, a banker in Mumbai, what should have been a first coffee became a first video call. Then a second. Then an hours-long ritual of shared dinners eaten separately. By June they knew each other's childhood fears. By August they had spoken more honestly to each other than either had to anyone in years. When they finally met in person in October, after flights resumed and interstate permissions cleared, something unexpected happened. They sat across from each other in a restaurant and both went quiet. The ease had vanished. The person in front of Priya felt slightly wrong, not bad, just not quite the person she had been falling in love with. They lasted two more months before ending it, naturally, over a video call.

This was not a failure of feeling. It was a collision between two kinds of knowing. The pandemic had fast-tracked emotional intimacy through what researchers call hyper-personal communication: in computer-mediated contexts, the absence of nonverbal cues pushes senders toward selective self-presentation and receivers toward idealised interpretation of the other, producing a closeness that exceeds what the same interaction would generate face-to-face [1]. The Zoom era built a cathedral of emotion but forgot to provide a floor for the body to stand on. The pandemic created a dissociation between emotional closeness and embodied presence; it was a state where accelerated emotional intimacy occurred in the absence of physiological synchrony [7], leaving a lasting legacy of touch starvation that continued to affect relationships long after the mandates were lifted. Touch starvation psychology became an important framework for understanding why many digitally intimate relationships later felt emotionally incomplete in person.

The neurobiology and sociology of pandemic bonding:

Human bonding is not a single process. It is a series of coordinated reactions within biological, psychological and social systems, and the pandemic disrupted all three simultaneously.

At the neurobiological level, the social brain evolved to respond to micro-expressions, olfactory and tactile cues and the warmth of physical proximity. Oxytocin, the neuropeptide most associated with affiliation, is released not merely through positive conversation but specifically through physical touch, close-range eye contact, and synchronised physiological states such as vocal and behavioural synchrony [2]. Video calls reproduce these conditions poorly. The brain can process empathy through a rectangle of light. It struggles to register the calming feedback loop that physical presence provides.

Sociologically, early work on computer-mediated communication has shown that screen-based interactions can feel paradoxically intimate because people disclosed more quickly and curated their self-presentation more carefully. An Australian study showed how home-based video technologies became central to enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance during the first COVID wave, as people turned everyday routines like cooking and watching television into shared, screen-mediated performances [3]. A 2023 Swiss study of couples documented ‘visual saturation’: partners sending each other images of sourdough loaves, pet photos and messy desks, building a distributed domesticity that blurred the line between separate households [4]. These were genuine acts of intimacy. But they were also, in important ways, compression artefacts.

Zoom intimacy and the neural idealisation trap

Zoom intimacy is not simply flirting over video. It is a particular combination of technology, timings and emotional disclosure that the pandemic brought into the mainstream. At the same time, Zoom fatigue in relationships began reshaping how people experienced emotional closeness online. Under lockdown, people had more unstructured time, fewer competing social obligations and a heightened awareness of mortality, even as Zoom fatigue in relationships slowly intensified. Those conditions made long, searching conversations feel not just possible but necessary. Home-based communication during the crisis found that video calls were used to recreate togetherness through shared routines, including shared meals, television and virtual social rituals [3].

This environment acted as a catalyst for what communication theorists call the hyperpersonal effect [1]: people disclose more, idealise more and feel closer faster in mediated contexts because the brain fills absent sensory data with imagination. Because the screen filters out olfactory and tactile data, the partner is perceived through a lens of personal desire rather than multisensory reality. Without the full sensory context that modulates romantic perception, the bond formed is real but built on partial information. A recent hyperscanning study confirmed this gap at the neural level: romantic couples showed significantly lower interpersonal neural synchrony in the prefrontal cortex during video calls than during face-to-face conversation in the high-frequency band, a gap that reverses for friends, who synchronise more strongly over video than in person [5]. A female-to-male pattern of neural influence present in person disappeared entirely on screen [5].

Research has consistently found that self-disclosure rates tend to be higher in computer-mediated communication than in face-to-face interactions, and this accelerated disclosure correlates with subjective feelings of intimacy in the short term [1]. The key phrase is short term. Intimacy gains achieved through digital disclosure alone do not straightforwardly predict relationship satisfaction over time. What is missing is physiological synchrony. In face-to-face interactions, people unconsciously align their breathing, heart rate, skin conductance and movement. This biological alignment is itself a component of felt intimacy, not merely a byproduct of it [7]. You do not just talk your way into closeness. Your body participates in it, and video calls strips that participation away almost entirely.

So when Priya and Arjun finally sat across from each other in that Bengaluru restaurant, their bodies were encountering each other for the first time. Smell, micro-movement, the particular quality of someone's physical presence in space: all of these fed data into systems that had been forming expectations for months. The mismatch was not a failure of love. It was a sensory shock. The neural map the brain had carefully constructed from pixels simply did not match the three-dimensional person who had arrived to claim it.

For India, this effect carries an additional cultural layer. Dating apps had been rapidly normalising emotional disclosure among urban young adults before the pandemic, already creating a tension between the speed of digital intimacy and the slower pace of family-mediated courtship. Lockdown collapsed that tension into a single, pressurised channel.

Touch starvation and the body that remembers

While digital bonds were accelerating, bodies were running a deficit. Touch is not just sensation. It is a dedicated social-affective language, and the pandemic silenced it for millions simultaneously. The long-term touch hunger effects of lockdown became especially visible among people living alone for extended periods. A 2020 fMRI study placed participants through ten hours of total social isolation and ten hours of food fasting on separate days. After isolation, midbrain dopaminergic regions showed increased activation to social cues in a pattern that closely mirrored the response to food cues after fasting [8]. Participants reported craving social contact in a pattern similar to how they craved food when hungry, a finding that later became central to research on touch starvation psychology.The brain treats prolonged touch and social deprivation as a fasting state and generates a corresponding craving signal in reward circuitry. Pandemic conditions repeatedly evoked this state in everyday life across months and waves.

Large-scale surveys on affective touch perception found that longing for touch increased alongside the duration of social distancing regulations and that individuals reporting higher touch longing also rated videos of both affective and neutral touch as more pleasant, suggesting that deprivation had sensitised the perceptual system to even vicarious contact [9]. These findings demonstrated how touch hunger effects altered emotional perception during prolonged isolation.

An Indian psychiatry paper during COVID defined touch hunger as the psychological and physiological consequences of reduced physical contact and noted that the restrictions had produced exactly the conditions that foster touch deprivation for millions at once, with links to aggression, lowered self-esteem, elevated anxiety and impaired communication [10].

The paradox of forced proximity:

Many couples joked that surviving lockdown together proved they could survive anything. Research consistently finds that it is the quality rather than the quantity of shared time that predicts relationship wellbeing and that chronic stress erodes both.

The neurobiological explanation is precise. The ventral tegmental area governs the issuing of the reward signal of romantic love through dopaminergic pathways: it is activated when we see a partner, and its activity is directly linked to feelings of focused attention, motivation and euphoria [11].

Perhaps the most significant rupture came not during lockdown but after it. When restrictions lifted and the social world reopened, many couples expected to resume the relationship they had paused. Instead, both people had changed inside a container.

Platforms like Zoom, WhatsApp and FaceTime made it possible to maintain and deepen emotional bonds across material separation. People improvised with remarkable creativity, from video-call gardening to parallel cooking to always-on shared screens that simulated domestic co-presence [3, 4]. These were genuine achievements of human adaptability. But behavioral neuroscience and social psychology are consistent in showing that certain dimensions of closeness do not virtualise. The 2025 hyperscanning study makes this concrete: a conversation between romantic partners produces measurably lower prefrontal neural synchrony over video than face-to-face, a gap that does not emerge for friends [5]. Social isolation experiments show that the brain generates a craving signal analogous to hunger when social needs go unmet repeatedly [8]. For many people, that craving ran as a background hum beneath even apparently close digital relationships.

For relationships that formed primarily through digital mediation, the evidence points toward what researchers call embodied investment: deliberately creating shared physical experiences, not just activities, before drawing conclusions about compatibility. Physiological synchrony can be built intentionally through exercise, cooking and shared movement.

The pandemic asked a question most of us had never thought to ask: what is the minimum viable substrate for human connection? And it gave us a live answer. We can form genuine emotional intimacy through screens. We can feel known, understood, even loved, across digital distance. But the kind of knowing that happens between bodies operates in a space that language and image cannot fully access.

What did the pandemic teach us about human relationships?

The pandemic was an involuntary experiment, but it was also a clarifying one. It stripped human connection down to its smallest transmissible unit and forced us to confront what survived the reduction, what didn't and what we had never noticed we were relying on.

What survived was emotional language. People proved, across millions of relationships and every time zone, that confession, curiosity, humor and longing can travel through a screen. The conversations that occurred in those months were often among the most candid people had ever had, precisely because everything “extra” had been removed. No restaurant to navigate, no commute to time, no crowd to perform for. Just two people in the only rooms available to them, talking until someone had to sleep.

What didn't survive, or survived only in degraded form, was the body's contribution to knowing someone. The pandemic made clear that intimacy is a physiological event, not just an emotional one. People found that the structure they had built on language alone was real, but falling short in ways they hadn't anticipated. It held until it had to carry the weight of an actual person. Modern discussions around touch starvation psychology now increasingly focus on the limits of digitally mediated intimacy.

The communication lesson is perhaps the most practically useful. We learned, at scale, that different channels create different kinds of knowledge about another person and that those kinds are not interchangeable.The era of Zoom fatigue in relationships revealed that constant communication could not fully substitute physical presence. Text and video are extraordinarily powerful tools for emotional disclosure, narrative intimacy and the management of connection across distance. They are poor tools for reading a person's physical presence, for synchronising nervous systems, or for generating the kind of trust that comes from repeatedly occupying a room with someone. The mistake the pandemic encouraged was treating digital and embodied knowledge as versions of the same thing, when they are better understood as complementary and partially non-overlapping. The research that emerged from the pandemic years points, quietly but consistently, toward the same conclusion: presence is irreplaceable not because screens fail to carry information, but because some information only exists in the space between two bodies.The signal is the proximity itself.

References:

1. Walther JB. Computer-mediated communication: impersonal, interpersonal, and hyperpersonal interaction. Commun Res. 1996;23(1):3-43.

2. Feldman R. Oxytocin and social affiliation in humans. Horm Behav. 2012;61(3):380-391.

3. Watson A, Lupton D, Michael M. Enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the COVID-19 crisis: the sociomaterialities of home-based communication technologies. Media Int Aust. 2021;178(1):136-150.

4. Tarnutzer S, Lobinger K, Lucchesi F. Baked bunnies, couple selfies, and video-call gardening: visual communication in couple relationships during COVID-19. MedieKultur. 2023;73:122-151.

5. Wu X, Hao Y, Zhang S, et al. Love in the time of Zoom: how intimacy modulates brain and behaviour synchrony in face-to-face versus video communication. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2025;20(1):nsaf070.

6.Nguyen et al. (2022). Staying connected while physically apart: Digital communication when face-to-face interactions are limited. New Media & Society, 24(9), 2046–2067.

7. Feldman R. Bio-behavioral synchrony: a model for integrating biological and microsocial behavioral processes in the study of parenting. Parenting. 2012;12(2–3):154–164.

8. Tomova L, Wang KL, Thompson T, et al. Acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses similar to hunger. Nat Neurosci. 2020;23(12):1597-1605.

9. Meijer LL, Smeenk M, de Waal MWM, et al. Affective touch perception and longing for touch during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sci Rep. 2022;12(1):3997.

10. Golaya S. Touch-hunger: an unexplored consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Indian J Psychol Med. 2021;43(4):362-363.

11. Fisher HE, Xu X, Aron A, Brown LL. Intense, passionate, romantic love: a natural addiction? Front Psychol. 2016;7:687.

About the author:

Sharvani is a bioinformatics graduate and neuroscience enthusiast passionate about understanding behavior, emotion, and connection. She enjoys exploring how science and technology influence modern relationships. In her free time, she loves watching films and reading. Connect with her on LinkedIn