Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds.
It’s a beautiful sentiment around which to build a Shakespearean sonnet, but in real life not everyone adapts to the dramatic changes thrust upon them in a pandemic with the apparent grace of Kate Garraway. The TV presenter’s husband, Derek Draper, almost died of Covid; he is now back home after months in intensive care, but needs round-the-clock nursing. He can speak, but can’t hold what most people would regard as a conversation. It cannot be the life or the marriage either of them dreamed of in their early 50s. But as she said hopefully at the weekend, she thinks they have found “a new way to be in love”, a relationship of complete trust and reliance. “That’s a positive thing to come out of this, to have that certainty of each other. He and I are very close.”
It’s easily overlooked among the more obviously dramatic ways in which Covid has changed our lives, yet when the history of this pandemic comes to be written, love will deserve its own chapter in the story. The last two years have obviously been tough on the single and the lonely, on those trapped in abusive or just downright miserable relationships, and above all on those bereaved by Covid. But they have not been without challenge, either, for plenty of couples who were rubbing along fine before, only to find that nothing exposes the hidden cracks in an outwardly happy life like a period of intense and unrelieved togetherness edged by fear. For every smug couple trilling that lockdown had brought them closer together, there was probably one either actively longing for their other half to go back to the office, or at the very least feeling the need to take the dog out for extremely long lockdown walks. (While a third of Britons felt their relationships had improved during the pandemic, according to a YouGov survey in the autumn of 2020, one in nine thought it had pushed them and their partner apart).
As for predictions of a lockdown baby boom due to all the wild sex couples were bound to start having once they were trapped indoors – well, that gave way pretty quickly to elasticated waists, comfort eating and a birthrate that plummeted in 2020. Like pandas, it turns out humans don’t mate very well in captivity, and perhaps especially not if they already have manic toddlers bouncing off the walls with boredom. Nor is there anything enormously erotic about having a job hanging by a thread, or lying awake at night worrying about money.
And then there’s the direct impact not of lockdown but of the virus itself, with all the grief, loss and fear it has brought first and foremost to the bereaved, but also to key workers who have spent their days steeped in death and have come home traumatised – either unable to talk about what they have seen, or unable to stop.
Glib talk of “life-changing” injury or illness like Draper’s, meanwhile, obscures the often painful everyday reality of relationships transformed overnight, either by Covid complications or by long Covid; from partnerships of equals into carer and cared-for. Relief that the loved one survived all too often mingles with grief for a future now slipping out of sight and occasional fierce pangs of resentment, followed by guilt for not always managing to live up to the unswervingly loving ideal of Shakespeare’s “ever-fixed mark”. For the clinically vulnerable and those who love them, meanwhile, the government’s breezy insistence on lifting all restrictions at the end of the month spells not relief but fresh anxiety. What is the loving choice if you daren’t bring the virus back home, but have to go back to the office to make ends meet?
And yet, at the not-quite-end of it all, here millions of us still are; still together, still faintly dazed by the whole experience, but perhaps with a new understanding forged in crisis of what long-term love is all about. It’s not all Valentine’s hearts and flowers, tables for two and tickets to Paris. It is absolutely about kindness, patience, tolerance and the ability to pull together as a team in times of unexpected trouble. For love is not always love that stays rigidly the same when circumstances around it change. Post-pandemic love is perhaps just as often the kind that good-naturedly adapts, and is flexible enough to withstand a shock.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
