Love In The Time Of Lockdown

Eve Jones finds that there’s a big difference between living with someone and L-I-V-I-N-G W-I-T-H S-O-M-E-O-N-E.

When you decide to move in together you have an element of confidence that you know what you’re letting yourself in for. You like their sense of humour, you know how they like their tea, whether they have good table manners and whether or not they wear teeny-tighty whities or billowing boxers. The things you didn’t know – such as they dream of immaculately ironed under crackers – soon become obvious and accepted as amusing quirks. After a while you become familiar with the finer details. You begin to wash each other’s smalls (or not so smalls), stake claim on the TV remote, and you share a bathroom, the ultimate booster in the getting-to-know-you stakes.

Lockdown presents a new level of personal space sharing. Previously, you just thought you were living with someone. What you were actually doing was having dinner or planning DIY together, going to bed, waking up in the morning, having a little spoon – a little fork if you were lucky – then trotting off to work for the day, returning home for dinner. Before lockdown it didn’t matter that you were actually a slatternly tramp because the magic house cleaning fairy would come once a week and a 10-minute whip round of discarded clothes, papers, half-drunk mugs of tea, sticky dog bones and dead flowers was all that was needed to keep harmony and peace. Since the age of lockdown, you are no longer living with someone, you are L-I- V-I-N-G W-I-T-H S-O-M-E-O-N-E.