March was a rough month for nearly everyone, and celebrities, as is their wont, took it upon themselves to provide some inspiration. Some of the attempts were obvious failures, like the Gal Gadot–helmed “Imagine” cover, while others were more practical, like Gwyneth Paltrow’s lesson in personal protective equipment. But over the past couple of weeks, no one has been as consistent in giving the public insight into their quarantine lifestyle than pop stars Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello.

For the past two weeks or so, the couple has been spotted taking regular walks outside the Miami house where they’re weathering the coronavirus crisis. In some ways, they’re simply modeling appropriate social distancing: exclusively wearing the strangest loungewear they own, limiting their contact to the people in their household, and never letting any paparazzo get within a six-foot radius.

Eventually, some strange things started to happen. First came a shot last Thursday, which showed them holding a set of coffee cups sideways, as though they were just props. It drew accusations of fakery—until someone pointed out that they had just dumped out their coffee a few minutes earlier. Then on Tuesday, someone caught a video of them shuffling down the street at an uncannily slow pace, and it immediately ricocheted around social media.

Clearly, they’ve been learning how to showcase their best angles during quarantine—and it’s been working; the pictures have gotten a lot more flattering. But maybe, just maybe, it’s also a metaphor. We’ve all been slowing down our lifestyles, after all, and for people like Cabello and Mendes, whose jobs entail getting their pictures taken, working from home might just mean making things easier on the photographers who still need to pay their rent during this unfolding economic crisis.

The photos also encapsulate the fun-house-mirror quality of the pair’s blooming relationship. Last June, Cabello and Mendes were still saying they were just friends when they released their collaborative single “Señorita.” It came at the height of the “Old Town Road” frenzy but stuck around, eventually reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 at the end of August. It was the second time the two had worked together, after 2015’s weirdly compelling “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” but this time, the pair’s chemistry was undeniable. When offered the track in late 2018, Mendes reportedly said Cabello was the only person he would be willing to record it with. By July 2019, they were spotted kissing, and in September, they confirmed that they were dating in real life too.

At first it seemed like a modern-day version of the old Hollywood romances between movie stars invented by studios and dramatized by fan magazines, a tradition that the K-pop industry has kept alive in the 21st century. You’re already on shaky ground if you ever have to come out and say your relationship is “definitely not a publicity stunt,” like Mendes did last September.

Yet, there is an authenticity to both the early-20s ease of their relationship and the effusive way they talk about each other in interviews. If you watched their impossibly steamy performance at the American Music Awards, which Camila followed with a dorkily enthusiastic shout-out to “Shawn’s mom Karen who’s watching in Toronto,” it’s hard to deny that the couple’s bond is legitimate in some way.

And now, in the time of coronavirus, the adage “Love the one you’re with” has never been quite so literal. It makes sense that Gen Z’s answer to Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake are performing that love in a way that’s somehow simultaneously more showy and way more ironic than their forebears. There’s something refreshing about a couple showing us exactly how to have a banal quarantine that is also conveniently keeping some amount of publicity going. May all celebrities learn from their approach.

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