CARACAS, Venezuela (news agencies) — Victoria Estevez finally met someone who saw past her shyness. They spent two months learning about their likes and dislikes, texting about their families and friends, and walking around their hometowns on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast. On a trip to the capital in December, they held each other for the first time.
I-like-yous followed, and by February, they were calling it a relationship.
And then came heartbreak.
“Remember I had told you that I have a brother in the Dominican Republic? Well, I am going to leave the country, too,” Estevez, 20, recalled reading in an early March WhatsApp message from her new boyfriend. He was the second guy in a row to blindside her with imminent plans to emigrate.
Nothing, not even love, has been spared the uncertainty that plagues everyday life in crisis-ridden Venezuela, which has seen several million people leave in the last decade or so. As a presidential election looms later this month along with questions about Venezuela’s future, many more are considering emigrating, wreaking havoc on the country’s economy, its politics and its dating scene.
Young people are debating online and among themselves whether it’s worth it to start a relationship — or whether to end one. Others are wondering when it is too soon or too late to ask the crucial question: Will you leave the country?
“How had he not told me that there was a possibility he would leave?” Estevez asked after she was crushed.
The last 11 years under President Nicolás Maduro have transformed Venezuela and Venezuelans.
In the 2000s, a windfall of hundreds of billions of oil dollars allowed then- President Hugo Chávez’s government to launch numerous initiatives, including providing ample public housing, free health clinics and education programs.
But a global drop in oil prices, government mismanagement and widespread corruption pushed the country into the political, social and economic crisis that has marked the entirety of his successor’s presidency: Decent paying jobs are rare. Water, electricity and other public services are unreliable. Food prices have skyrocketed.
The country that once welcomed Europeans fleeing war and Colombians escaping a bloody internal conflict has now seen more than 7.7 million people flee its shores.
The government faces its toughest test in decades in a July 28 election.
A nationwide poll conducted in April by the Venezuela-based research firm Delphos showed that roughly a fourth of people are thinking about emigrating. Of those, about 47% said a win by the opposition would make them stay and roughly the same amount indicated that an improved economy would keep them in their home country. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Accountant Pedro Requena has seen many a friend leave, but the news hit differently when the woman he had spent three “incredible” months dating in 2021 told him she was moving with her mom to Turkey. Requena, 26, was swooning over her, but he was committed to finishing his university degree and did not consider migrating.
With no guarantee she would ever return or he would ever be able travel across the world to see her, they still decided to give long-distance a try. They woke up early or went to bed late so that they could have video calls despite their seven-hour time difference. They watched movies and TV shows simultaneously. They texted and texted and texted.
“Venezuelans adapt to anything,” he said. “The crisis changes you.”
Indeed, Venezuelans adapted their diets when food shortages were widespread and again when groceries became available but unaffordable. They sold cars and switched to motorcycles or stopped driving, when lines at gas stations stretched kilometers (miles). They stocked up on candles when power outages became the norm. They used the U.S. dollar when the Venezuelan bolivar became worthless.
But that unpredictability is disastrous for forming lasting bonds.
“With the dating scenarios in Venezuela now, there’s like a certain built-in insecurity, or lack of safety, in the system because people don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Dr. Amir Levine, a psychiatrist and research professor at Columbia University. “The political instability actually introduces the instability into the relationship or into dating in general.”
Bumble, Tinder, Grindr and other dating apps are available in Venezuela, but education student Gabriel Ortiz has used a feature of the messaging app Telegram to connect with people near him. That is how he found a man in October with whom he exchanged messages for a month before they met up.
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