Are We About To Experience A Break-Up Influx?

The easing of restrictions is proving difficult for some lockdown couples.

- Megan Sutton

When Falguni*, 26, met a new guy on Tinder at the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020, what started as walking dates soon turned into an official relationship, the exchange of ‘I love you, and seeing each other every day while working from home.

The relationship was going amazingly well, until the world started to open up again. Falguni had really missed her large group of close friends throughout lockdown and was prioritising seeing them again, and she could tell her boyfriend was ‘put out’ when he wasn’t included in the limited, inflexible group numbers. When more people could meet outside, she encouraged her partner to join her socializing, but it became even more difficult. “We were talking, trying to iron things out, and he said he knew how much my family and friends meant to me but he needed it to just be us so we could work on our issues and become tight again. I felt like I needed him to meet my friends and family and to see him in those social situations so I could see whether we would work in ‘normal life’,” Falguni says.

Ultimately, even though she used to miss him a lot, Falguni ended things with her boyfriend when he became impossible to be with. Looking back at 2020 (not a sentence that is fun to write), the term ‘turbo relationships’ was coined to describe couples racing into more intense relationships and quickly hitting milestones like moving in together, because of lockdown.

While it sounds like a lot, therapists at the time said the majority of people in turbo relationships were actually experiencing really positive outcomes of fast-track cohabitation.