When me and my partner of four years first self-isolated with coronavirus in our shared flat, we had fevers, coughs, and searing headaches. We shared our paracetamol and tended to each other while trying to keep our distance.
Tricky if you love each other, even more so if you live in London with one bed, one bathroom, and no outdoor space.
I slept on the sofa which at least meant my incessant cough was less of a disturbance, but it was difficult too, I’m sure, because I can vibrate at a highly anxious frequency, pandemic or no pandemic.
These days even watching Frozen II increases my heart rate to the extent I have to mute Elsa’s ‘Into the Unknown’ ballad.
Unsurprisingly, my attachment style in relationships is also ‘anxious’. I go after the spikiest of ‘avoidants’ like a determined honey badger.
It remains to be seen how this will work now my poor partner has nowhere to escape.
After days communicating between rooms, our reunion was like the kind you see in airports, but I’m feeling sentimental generally at the moment.
Toward my nursing friends and key workers, but also I cannot get enough of speaking to my mother, which is a new experience. Even writing ‘hope you’re well’ in emails seems unbearably poignant.
My beloved, now largely recovered, is focused more on meal plans and low printer ink. We all react to stress in different ways, I remind myself, and many of us are developing our own ‘corona persona’, but our eccentricities get starker when there’s no one else to neutralise them.
Inextricable from the corona crisis is how we cope with and care for each other. Internationally, within communities, and within their smallest units. I go into another room to watch the daily government press conferences because I know he doesn’t want to hear about it.
As a freelancer who self-soothes with longterm planning (and whose whole family also has it) this virus has really thrown me, while he is stoic. Obviously, that’s great, but I call friends when I want to talk about it.
Before corona, I remember discussing how much time was too much to spend together as a couple. I mentioned four categories: time spent alone, time spent alone together, time with friends apart, and time with friends together. All were important for relationship health.
Now, we’re looking at an indefinite period of time spent alone together, and I’m low key nervous about it. We’re getting married at the end of summer, if the world’s still spinning then, so hopefully it counts as ‘sickness and in health’ practice that for the foreseeable in order to get away from each other we can only go online or to the toilet.
As one friend in a similar position said of his boyfriend: ‘He’s an introvert and not loving how constantly I demand attention, while I’m an extrovert, so this is hell.’ Another friend with children has no idea if her marriage will survive when schools close down.
Another, in the very early stages of a relationship, says: ‘All the little things that usually take months or years to show themselves develop in a matter of days. I swing between desperately wanting to put distance between us in order to protect the relationship and wanting to get closer. The anxiety cycles that I usually go through over the course of a month have started happening multiple times a day.’
Our general dynamic is that I am the emotional lightning rod in the relationship. I will pick up on even the slightest tensions or withdrawals and take them personally, which will then cause an argument, but in isolation, he is getting better at communicating and I’m getting better at being comfortable with silence.
We can’t have arguments then cool off or forget about them while out and about, but there also aren’t texts to misinterpret. Day 12 is probably too early to call it, but I’m hopeful this might prove to be a bonding experience.
He is doing all the cooking and we’ve had many moments of real tenderness. Namely comforting me when I worry about my Covid-19 positive parents and grandparents.
However, I can imagine couples in that intoxicating first flush morphing rapidly into Kerry and Kurtan Mucklowe from This Country. Whose turn is it to wash the mugs/to take a conference call in the cupboard? Which of you ate the snacks meant to last twelve weeks?
No less importantly: how do you separate work-life from personal-life with no cycle home to decompress? What will you tell each other about your day except for the same news updates?
In the relentless stream of corona memes, you’ve probably seen couples mating in captivity. Maybe you’ve heard speculation that a lot of babies will be born in nine months’ time.
But if, like me, you’ve read the entirety of the Internet this week, you’ll also know that while the number of Covid-19 cases in China appears to be going down, there’s been a spike in divorce applications.
This, according to Chinese registry offices, tells us something about love in the time of corona: that many couples who have been isolated together now want out in every sense.
I wonder how many of those Chinese couples were divorces waiting to happen, accelerated by enforced proximity and subsequent heady freedom. Presumably some were simply stress-tested too far, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the pandemic and/or personal trauma.
Perhaps looking at the other’s face became like revisiting a cell in which they were incarcerated. Maybe cutting loose felt like an opportunity to regain individual autonomy after first the virus, then uncertainty, then draconian measures left them feeling impotent.
Of course, there are much worse things to worry about, and I have that absolutely covered. I count myself exceedingly lucky to not to be in solo quarantine, to say nothing of women in abusive relationships.
But if China’s stats are anything to go by, it would be a shame when the world is finally pulling together for collective action, if, having defeated the virus, a lot of captive couples then gave up.
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