Pandemic Love #1: Love and Intimacy from a Short Distance

By Jeanne Donegan

The word “essential” has taken on a whole new meaning in post-Corona times. Some people are “essential” and some people are “non-essential.” People who work in healthcare, food service/grocery, infrastructure -- we would crumble without them. Truly, I want to thank every person deemed an essential worker. Thank you for continuing to work on behalf of the rest of us. I hope you are okay and I hope people are showing you love and appreciation every day.

As we navigate the new delineations between the essential and the non-essential, how does this binary impact our intimate relationships?

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You know that in-between stage of a relationship where you’re deeply in love, sleeping together most nights of the week, back-and-forth between your place and theirs - your daily lives entwined but you haven’t moved in together yet? Maybe you’re waiting for your lease to be up, or waiting to hear back from a job you applied for in another city. That’s the space I find myself in, and it has me wondering what all of our relationships look like after nearly two full months under a stay-at-home order. 

If you and your partner each lived alone before this, you probably still feel comfortable visiting each other’s homes knowing they are the only person you’re exposing yourself to. Or if only one of you lived alone, you probably expedited moving in permanently, or semi-permanently so you could quarantine together. Those are ideal situations given the circumstances. But what if you both have roommates, and your roommate has decided for the two of you, that your relationship is quite frankly, non-essential?

***

My quarantine officially began on Monday evening, March 16th. That was the last day I was physically required to go into work. If I’m being honest, I kind of enjoyed it all at first. Of course, it was under the umbrella of terrifying circumstances, and learning how to provide support and guidance to my young students is really challenging. But, as a teaching artist, I had been hustling between several jobs for so long - overworked, underpaid, and spread thin. The guise of a paid “break” felt like a relief, and in these first few weeks I was still able to freely see my partner, who I’ve been with for a little more than a year and a half now.

It felt like a gift when we were suddenly able to spend time together that our typical work schedules don’t allow. I rarely get to see him in the daylight. Usually, the majority of our time together is between 10 p.m. and 12 a.m., the brief couple hours from when he gets off of work until I fall asleep mid-conversation. He is a bike courier for a food delivery service, and since the restaurants closed in March his company has been busier than ever. For us to now be able to spend all his off hours together, while I flexed my at-home work schedule to match his was beautiful. We watched movies together, cooked, went on long strolls, played basketball, and read books aloud to each other in bed every morning before he left. It was the one area of my life that felt good and stable.

***

When isolation began in March, my roommates and I had a conversation regarding boundaries and expectations in the household. They were still having small groups of friends over at the time and I was okay with that, so long as they were okay with my partner staying over. I decided to avoid spending time at his house because of his many roommates. I thought it wise to limit my contact to only him. All was agreed upon.

However, as the severity of the pandemic grew, things inevitably changed. After a couple of weeks working from home, one of my two roommates left to quarantine at her parents’ house out-of-state, and the other was becoming increasingly anxious about how we were sharing our space. Exactly one month in she confessed to me, while I was in the middle of frying eggs one morning, that she was uncomfortable with my partner being in the apartment, given the “essentialness” of his job, and the amount of exposure he has to the public. (I’m wondering if she read the NYT article released a couple days before titled, My Roommate’s Boyfriend Still Visits Despite the Outbreak. Can I Object?)

I felt my eyes burning and my heart racing as she said this to me. Panic set in while I tried to wrap my head around what all of this would mean for us. Surprised by her emotional appeal, I reacted quickly and agreed to not have him over to the apartment anymore. I scraped my, now burnt, eggs into the trash in a daze and went back to my bedroom to break the news to my partner, still soundly asleep in my bed. He jumped up and started hurriedly packing his things. We decided to take a breath, and a walk, to try to clear our heads before parting ways, not knowing when the next time we’d be able to see or touch each other would be.

***

By the end of the day, I had at least thirty tabs open looking for one bedroom apartments we could move into by May 1st. Ignoring the fact that hiring movers and breaking my lease would be an egregious amount of money that neither of us could afford to waste right now, not to mention the arduous nature of moving during a pandemic. And since there physically wasn’t space for me to move into his house with his roommates and all of their partners already quarantining there, it seemed the only thing that would resolve this problem was time.

I was devastated. I found myself in a strange position where I had no choice but to distance myself from the person I love most at the behest of someone I met on Craigslist. As we got further into the first week apart, my mental health took a dark dive. Without the physical and emotional comfort of this person in my day-to-day, I was suddenly faced with nothing but discomfort and fear. What would I do if he got sick? What would he do if I got sick? I don’t have family anywhere near Chicago, he’s my emergency contact. Without being able to cocoon myself in the security of my relationship, I was finally starting to feel the full weight of the pandemic. It took everything in me to walk out of my bedroom each morning and swallow my resentment. The logical part of me knew that my roommate was completely valid in feeling the way that she did, and that she has every right to feel safe in her home. But knowing all of this logically didn’t make me feel any less trapped.

This claustrophobic sensation grew a little more each day - exasperated by feelings of longing when I would try to see him while staying six feet apart - followed by feelings of guilt when I inevitably found that distance to be impossible. Working from home became extraordinarily difficult. I couldn’t sleep more than a few hours a night because my brain was so wound up, and this led to frequent excruciating migraines. The uncertainty of how long this would last was overwhelming. 

Time feels so incomprehensible right now. It feels like months, but I only existed like this for 3 weeks before I hit a breaking point. Last week, as I was walking back to my apartment, I became consumed with dread the closer I got to my front door. I didn’t plan to, but the moment I walked in, I broke down to my roommate in an anxious and emotional outburst that I now regret. I tried to explain how much I was struggling mentally, how suffocated I felt in this space, how hard it was for me to maintain this level of distance from my partner. I was begging for a renegotiation of boundaries, but the stakes were too high, and there was no compromise to be made. 

Now I’m finishing this essay while sitting on the couch of a quaint Airbnb plastered with signs that read “our adventure begins” and “friends and family gather here” and one over the bed that says “love.” -- it’s a page out of a Home Goods catalog, but it’s quiet and peaceful and it will be a safe space for me and my partner to be together. This is my temporary home for the next 30 days. I really can’t afford it, but credit cards are for emergencies, right? This started to feel like an emergency, and while I’ll be paying off this balance for longer than I care to think about right now, I can’t explain the amount of relief I felt when I arrived here. It seemed like the only thing I could do to preserve my own sanity in the midst of all this. I’m hoping that by mid-June things might ease up a little bit, if not I’m looking at a hardcore isolation in my bedroom when I return to my apartment. No thoughts seem perfectly rational right now -- but I know that I needed this break.

***

I didn't have many friends in my particular situation that I could relate to on this, so I posted on Instagram asking my network how they were navigating their living arrangements while maintaining intimate relationships. I heard from a few people who were gracious enough to share their stories with me and also offer me support in return, which was deeply appreciated. Some folks have roommates and partners who all have the ability to isolate and thus still feel safe visiting each other, others meet up for secret walks that are less than six feet apart, and some are dating healthcare workers where the stakes are simply too high and they truly cannot physically see each other right now in any capacity.

What if you were just beginning a brand new relationship when this all started? What if you are single, living alone and come down with Covid-19? What if you’re married and you find out your emotional responses to isolation are completely opposite? What if you’re in an open relationship that is now forcibly closed? How does a virus that forces us to distance ourselves from one another alter the way we experience love?

***

Moving forward I will be hosting Pandemic Love, a sex and relationship column here at Drawstring Magazine. 

While I navigate how my own relationship functions during this pandemic, I want to hear stories from you! Tell me about your love life, whether you’re single or committed, monogamous or poly, queer or straight. What challenges are you all facing when it comes to love, intimacy, and safety right now? 

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Note: I am in no way professionally licensed to give advice, but I will say that I am the #1 non-official relationship therapist-friend for a lot of my community, I listen to a lot of sex podcasts, and since isolation began I’ve already convinced two friends to purchase a Magic Wand (it really is the only thing to get you through this). Love is very, very important to me. I study it, I read about it, I make art about it, I thrive on it. For lack of a better term, it is my religion. I have a lot of feelings about it, and I’d love to share them with you.