Essay on: life during lockdown
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I was going to start this essay by writing that, even at the best of times, long-distance relationships are difficult. But that’s not true at all. At the best of times, a long-distance relationship is wonderful, even ideal. After all, my boyfriend and I are both grown-ups. We have our own incomes, our own homes, and our own children. We have our lives figured out, and I am quite content to manage my affairs on my own, and to have my own space to breathe in. Spending time with him is always something to look forward to, and it is always exciting. He travels a fair amount for work, and that is usually when we see each other. What could be better for a hard-working single parent than romantic getaways to exciting cities, luxury hotels, and fine restaurants? Harried mom by day, Bond girl by night. That is how our relationship makes me feel. I’m happy with the distance, most of the time—even longing for someone who is far away has its own romance. Yet often I am asked by my coupled friends, “Sure, this all sounds very glamorous, but where is this relationship going?” To which I have replied, “I am going to Paris next Saturday. Where will you be going with your husband? Home Depot?” God, I can be smug.
Still, it’s true: at the best of times, a long-distance relationship may be the most perfect combination of intimacy and independence. But these are not the best of times, not by a country mile—and there are many country miles that now separate me from my lover. Miles, and a closed border; I live in Canada, and he in California. The pandemic has abruptly ended the luxuries of our relationship. Worse, it is because of our decadent travel-rich culture that the pandemic has arrived here in the first place. Because of this, I suspect that non-essential travel will not be encouraged or even accessible for at least a few years to come. All the romance of our relationship has abruptly been replaced with an as yet undetermined but certainly long period of doing nothing but waiting. And waiting. And of course I think of my coupled friends who have at the very least another adult to talk to, and at best a friend and lover with whom to spend lazy mornings in bed. I’m not so smug anymore. Now I have to wonder if my long-distance relationship can outlast the lockdown. Now I have to ask, “What is a relationship for anyway?”
Traditionally, a romantic relationship formed the basis of the family unit, which in turn was the bedrock of civilization. My students and friends are commonly shocked to discover that relationships have been the same, more or less, for centuries. In Shakespeare’s England, for instance, around 400 years ago, the average age for a man to be married was around 27, and for a woman, 24. My friends are also surprised to learn that most marriages were not arranged couplings, but were mutually agreed unions by the young woman and man because the two simply liked each other and fell in love. Arranged marriages were of course the norm for the upper classes who had property and wealth to consider, and very often it was mothers, aunts, and grandmothers who engaged in the diplomacy required to arrange such marriages—fathers are, let’s face it, often pretty weak at social networking.
But most people were not upper class, and for the poorer classes even unofficial common-law couplings were, well, common (that’s why it is called common-law). Romantic relationships were for sexual fulfillment and friendly companionship, and also for economic and social stability. Marriages based on mutual attraction would, ideally, continue to foster romance, even under the humdrum realities of domestic life. The pull of sexual desire, far from being an instinct that social controls were to curb, was in fact the opposite: It was the very foundation of a society in which the private lives of couples formed the structure of the economic and social whole. We are seeing a return to this right now: With our modern institutions of state-run schools and daycares closed, it is once again the home economy and the family unit that is keeping society together. What a relationship is for has, in this way, come into focus for us in ways that have been opaque in modern times.
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