What Dating in a Quarantine Can Teach Us About True Isolation

As a pandemic quarantines many of us inside our homes, I figured it’s a good time to catch up on some movies.

I watched the 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling. It’s about a shy young man who falls in love with a life-sized plastic doll. Bear with me. It sounds strange, but it got me thinking about life and love in an age of coronavirus and social distancing.

In the movie, Lars lives self-isolated in a building outside his brother and sister-in-law’s house. 

He longs for human connection, but dreads it. 

One day, Lars tells his family he met a girl on the Internet. They’re excited for him. Until they realize he ordered a plastic doll to be his companion. 

Lars names the doll Bianca. Understandably, his family is concerned. They compel him to see a doctor who decides to gently go along with Lars’ delusion to see if she can help him. The doctor tells Lars’ brother: “There isn’t a pill for lonely.”

In Lars’ mind, Bianca is the perfect partner. She is always there, she doesn’t complain or argue with him. She can’t disappoint him or die.

But there’s the catch. She can’t die because she’s not alive. 

Emotionally, neither is Lars. With the help of his family and community, he must learn to face his fear of abandonment and become truly alive.

In one scene, Lars asks his brother: “How do you turn into a man?” 

That’s the question of the movie (and for all of us): Can Lars continue to live like a child or will he “turn into a man?” Will he cling to Bianca or will he risk love with his flesh-and-blood coworker Margo, a real person who might defy him, disappoint him, or leave?

So, does Lars move beyond Bianca and become a fully alive human being? I won’t spoil it for you. Check out the movie. I’ll just describe a scene at the end…

Lars and Bianca are sitting by a lake as a storm approaches. The movie’s script says: “The sky is part promise, part threat.” Is there a better way to describe the challenge that Lars is facing? He, like us, is being challenged to let go of Bianca, but it won’t be easy. 

Real life and real love are part promise, part threat.  

When we meet someone online, it’s like they’re Bianca. They seem perfect. They can’t hurt us. At this point, they can only fulfill our wildest dreams. But they’re not yet fully real. When we venture beyond the computer screen and get to know someone in person, they become real, with all the risk and all the wonder it brings with it. 

None of us really wants a Bianca. We want someone fully human, fully alive. Someone real. But it will always require courage and risk. That’s just the way it is. 

Will we sometimes be disappointed? Yes. But we won’t be fake. 

At one point in Lars and the Real Girl, Lars is sitting in church and his pastor quotes 1 Corinthians 13:11: “When we are children, we behave as children. But the time comes when we must surrender childish things.” Lars is being challenged to grow up, let go, and risk loving and letting himself be loved. 

Eventually, the coronavirus will pass and we’ll all start to venture outside our homes again. Our quarantine will be over. If we’re meeting people online, we’ll have to eventually get out and engage them too. 

Let’s be like Lars and accept the challenge. Then we can live out the words of Saint Irenaeus: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”