My Covid19 Love Story

From part-time marriage to full-time quarantine

I’ve been hearing a lot of complaints from couples on how this pandemic is causing some problems in their marriage. Couples are not use to spending so much time together, I get that...kind of. After all, COVID spelled backwards is almost DIVORCE.

My husband and I have been together for 19 years. Married for 16.

We met when I purchased a weekend country home, 2 hours out of NYC. We fell in love and then fell into a 2-day a week scheduled relationship. I had an amazing career in publishing and he owned a bike shop in town. I was not planning on moving my life upstate and he was not planning on living in the city, so we continued with a weekend lifestyle, until now.

When Covid19 hit, we both agreed it would be best for me to get out of dodge and head upstate. I am now a full-time fiber artist and work out of my apartment. Not knowing how long I would be away from my studio space, I packed up my crafting supplies (and my dog) hoping I took enough to get me through this time so I could continue to work.

But that was the least of my problems. From part-time marriage to full time quarantine? Hmm, will this work, how long will I be there, will we get along? This would be the first time in 14 years we would be as one for longer than a week. (There was a time in 2006, when I battled with anxiety and depression and spent an entire summer with my husband, but I was not myself and I was not in a happy place...so that doesn’t count)

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my husband very much, we get along fantastically, have a ton in common, never fight (really), we look forward to seeing each other, to especially sleeping together, cooking, gardening and so much more but maybe that’s because of our 19 year arrangement. So, what will it be like to be “husband and wife”, to be like a “real” married couple?

Well, I’m happy to report, it’s been a little over a month and it ends up we really like each other, really! Who knew?

He makes coffee every morning and we sit by the fire in our cozy cottage and listen to NPR for Corona updates. I continue to craft during the day and he works on projects around the house. Early afternoon we listen to Cuomo. Around 5 pm, we have cocktails and play Rummikub. A game I played with my mom. He cooks our Hello Fresh dinner and then we settle in to a Netflix series. This we find the most interesting part of our togetherness. We don’t go to the movies, we don’t watch television series. When you only have weekends together, you tend to do other things. We’ve already binged Tiger King, Ozark, Unorthodox and just started Dexter. We also realized, after 4 weeks together, we needed a new mattress. My body was starting to ache, so since we have another bedroom, and until our Nectar mattress arrives, we’ve decided to sleep in separate beds...just like a real married couple.