None of this surprises Sandra Langeslag, who studies the neuroscience of emotion and motivation at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Of course people’s romantic impulses are going somewhat haywire under the circumstances. For one thing, people who are suddenly cooped up at home without anywhere to go or anyone to see “may just have more time to think about another person, and are then more likely to act on it,” she told me.

Some people have come to the conclusion that confessing their feelings will be easier when the object of those feelings is far away—and out of range of any awkward encounters if things go badly. Marin, a 19-year-old college student, had been eyeing a classmate of hers all semester, and in mid-March, when it was announced that students would all be dismissed from campus for the rest of the year because of coronavirus concerns, she texted her crush to ask if he’d like to hang out and get to know each other better. If he said yes, they could get together in the next 48 hours, before everyone went home—and if he said no, she reasoned, they didn’t have the same major, so she’d probably never have to see the guy again.

Initially, Marin told me, her crush opened the text and didn’t respond. (Marin, like most people I interviewed for this story, requested to be referred to by just her first name, for fear of being forever linked online to an embarrassing story. As she put it, “Nobody wants their last name included in a story about them getting left on read!”) Hours later, he texted back: Who is this? “It was pretty rough,” she said. Still, she told me, she’s glad she said something. Although her tale of bravery came to a pretty humbling denouement, if she hadn’t spoken up, she might still be hung up on what might have been.

Others have been inspired to profess their feelings not because quarantine is keeping them safe from any uncomfortable run-ins, but because of the deadly threat of the coronavirus itself. “Because this is an emergency situation, people may think about what really matters to them in life,” Langeslag said.

Savanah, 20, told me that she first contemplated telling her crush she liked him when it came up as a joke: Offhandedly, she’d remarked to a friend that maybe it was time to tell her crush that she liked him—so that if, God forbid, the virus took her or her crush, “at least I’d had the nerve to tell him.” As she thought about it, though, the idea became less and less ridiculous. Savanah and this guy were good friends, and because she’d traveled a few states away to shelter in place with her family, he was far away now. She missed him. She had no way of knowing when she would see him again. Why not now? She composed a text—“Okay so before the coronavirus possibly wipes us out, I guess I’ll tell you that I may or may not have this little crush on you or whatever, lol”—and sent it.