Sarah Casey Botwinick and Jason Gabriel Pollack were undergraduates at Lehigh University at the same time, though they didn’t meet until post-college, in February 2020, on the dating app Hinge. At first, “it was slow going,” Mr. Pollack said. “It took her a week to answer my messages. I would answer immediately.”

“It’s Hinge,” Ms. Botwinick explained. “There are a lot of matches.”

They began messaging on the app and also exchanged Snapchat handles.

But just as things were getting good, things in the world started getting bad as Covid began to take hold. On March 7, 2020, just days before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, Ms. Botwinick left her apartment and roommate in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood and went to stay with her parents in West Caldwell, N.J. Mr. Pollack remained in his Murray Hill apartment.

Despite the pandemic, their connection took off.

“We snapped every day,” Mr. Pollack said of their messages and photos on the social media platform, sometimes of their runs. “Like a 75-day streak.”

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Then, on March 23, Mr. Pollack sent one message that was a game changer. “He snapped me, ‘Can I have your number?’” Ms. Botwinick said. She said yes.

The two stayed in touch on FaceTime and Snapchat and had virtual binge-watching sessions of streaming programs. “We watched so many shows,” Ms. Botwinick said.