The End Of My Pandemic Affair

Who wants to say that marriage and divorce can reveal that the way we love is often as much about circumstance as it is about choice? Not me.

- By Haley Mlotek

“I know what everyone is thinking,” a man said to me on the phone late one night, almost six months into the pandemic. He was telling me that the woman he had met a month earlier was— she was!—the one. He was maybe going to marry her. “I know it sounds crazy,” he continued. “I know people are just going to say it’s the pandemic. But it’s really not.” He sounded a little breathless, like he had run too fast and still couldn’t rest.

I believed him. I tried to reassure him. I mostly wanted him to exhale. His love sounded sincere, I said, and I trusted that he knew his life better than anybody else did. But—I started gently—let’s say, just for the sake of argument: What if there was something to that question of why this love was happening now? What if living through an unprecedented moment of total disaster had fundamentally altered him forever and then, in turn, the way he thought about how his relationships took shape in his life? Would saying that the pandemic had changed him, and changed his commitment to an intense love affair, somehow cheapen that feeling?

In the early months of the pandemic, I had lots of conversations along these lines, all variations on seeing the crisis in front of us. We talked about parents in long-term-care facilities, neighbors we spoke to who had been abandoned by the city in their homes, friends expecting their first babies or approaching their last chemotherapy treatments, and eventually yet suddenly, the people we knew who were testing positive for Covid-19. Our fears were different, but the feelings were always a version of the same question: Who would take care of us?