Love in the Time of Covid
The stress felt in our personal relationships mirrors enormous social and economic dislocation, leading to high levels of confusion and insecurity. It is a challenging time but also one in which we can make huge strides towards improving our relationships and our skills, deepening and strengthening our connection to each other and our communities.
How is the Pandemic affecting our Relationships?
The resiliency of committed intimate relationships rests on four interconnected components. Through extensive research early in my career, I found that strength in these four areas is essential to the success of long-term partnerships.
For many couples, sheltering in place has put strain on all four of these areas.
Your partnership is at its BEST when you both are able to manage these four critical aspects effectively:
Bond between you,
Emotional Health of each partner,
Sources of Social Support and Stress that affect you, and
Transitions over Time you encounter.
Let’s look at how these four factors have been affected by sheltering and what we all can do to protect our relationships.
B – We need a Bond strong enough to keep us warmly connected and flexible enough for us to discuss differences and resolve conflicts.
Confined with our partners 24/7 and separated from friends, family, work and social contacts, the pressure to get all of our needs met with one person or inside a family tests our ability to stay lovingly connected. Close quarters, combined with fewer opportunities to engage in playful, distracting, or relaxing activities can cause affection, good will, and positive behaviors to fray. At the same time, conflicts may increase as we need to negotiate multiple changes while managing our distance and closeness in a limited space. The stress we are experiencing can make it even harder to be calm and think creatively enough to find new solutions.
E - We need two Emotionally healthy partners who can see situations and hear messages accurately, regulate their emotions, think through issues constructively, and act with kindness and compassion towards themselves and their partner.
Sheltering affects each of us individually in ways that challenge our emotional well-being. Isolation and associated loss of support, combined with fear for our health and the health of our loved ones, friends, and neighbors, can increase our anxiety. Changing jobs and working conditions, engaging in fewer meaningful and enjoyable activities, and facing financial hardships can make us sad, afraid, and angry. These feelings are heightened for those who are essential workers and first responders as well as those confined in small spaces with limited access to nature. If these emotions are not addressed constructively, they can morph into depression or anger directed inward or towards a partner. Prolonged stress impacts our ability to emotionally regulate ourselves, making it less likely that we are able to listen empathically, stay emotionally calm, and act in carefully considered ways with each other.
S – We need a shared Social support system that accommodates our differences and protects both partners from external sources of stress.
The need to shelter at home to stay physically safe and reduce transmission of the disease affects nearly every aspect of our social support system. It can create a great deal of social and economic dislocation, including the loss of jobs, income, childcare, schools, and restricted access to friends, family members, recreation, and community. Separation also results in a loss of support from extended family, neighbors, friends, teachers, and anyone hired to help maintain a home, adding to the task load both partners carry already. Often, changes affect each partner differently, both in terms of loss of support and risk of infection, creating differences in perspectives and roles that can lead to conflict. Many aspects of household management—from buying and preparing food to laundry and cleaning to parenting—need to be renegotiated, often exacerbating assumed gender roles that the partners had never before discussed. We are also becoming increasingly aware that these external stressors are affecting families differently, and we are seeing social inequities much more clearly. Added to all of this, conflicting sources of information from media can cause a breakdown of trust in institutions, creating confusion and ambiguity, and magnifying political differences between partners or with extended family.
T – We need to know how to traverse Transitions over time together as a collaborative team, flexibly negotiating roles and responsibilities as needs change.
The speed and scope of the changes set in motion by the pandemic threatens our ability to be a resilient team. The transition to sheltering was precipitous; to reduce the spread of infection, many were asked to socially distance, then shelter for a couple of weeks, which became a few months. This set off massive changes in our daily lives—who we see, what we do, where we go—and things have gotten more complicated. With little time to prepare and no precedents to follow, our lives, schedules, and relationships are in disarray; we feel disoriented.
All partners committed to each other for the long term will go through transitions together, but many of those they can anticipate and prepare for. Facing the upheaval of unanticipated change always presents an added challenge for a couple, but facing it globally ups the ante significantly.
The best way to navigate transitions as a team is through understanding, communication, and collaboration. While this is possible to do in our own relationships, the lack of coherence in leadership, response, and conversation on a national as well as global level has intensified the confusion, disorientation, and frustration we feel in our own lives, and the job has gotten much harder. If on top of this, a couple has resentments from past life transitions that have not gone well, they will find themselves under significant strain.
As these disruptions affect the bedrock on which our relationships are built, it is not surprising that many of us are having trouble.
Most of us will not be at our best when faced with all of these challenges. At times we might regress to bad feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. But if we get a new perspective, it is also possible to use this time to remember to be our BEST with ourselves and with each other. We can even learn new skills and develop better resiliency so we can continue to be part of a strong team—a team ready to meet new challenges when the time comes to safely and incrementally resume a less guarded lifestyle.
A New Perspective
Blueprint For Your BEST Relationship
We can represent each one of these components on paper, and together they create a Relationship Blueprint. This schematic shows how each component interacts with the others, and how a change in one can reverberate through the whole system.
Your BOND is a result of the interactional process between you, including the ways you show your love for each other, argue, make up, tease, discuss differences, and resolve problems. We diagram this process as an Interactional Circle. Understanding your exchanges as circular helps you see that
“How I feel depends not only on how you treat me, but on what I said or did before that prompted you to treat me as you do.”
We also add details to the Interactional Circle, bringing to light the specifics of your exchanges. When you Perceive an Action from your partner, you have an Emotional response and Thoughts about the message you took in before you respond with behavior or Actions of your own.
Each of you brings different perceptual, emotional, thinking, and behavioral skills and habits to your relationship. You have learned these skills and habits over the course of your lives, and you continue to update them as you encounter new experiences and interact with each other. Observing your Individual Process helps each of you learn to be your best self with each other, regulating your EMOTIONS so you are supportive and not destructive, thus maintaining trust, respect, and closeness. We draw self-reflective arrows within the Interactional Circle, spotlighting each individual’s process and their ability to reflect on their actions and behavior and regulate their emotions.
Your individual and shared SOCIAL contexts can bring support or stress to your relationship, affecting your interactions. Knowing this helps you understand that as a team you need protect your partnership and manage external pressures that could otherwise cause conflict between you. Your social context includes your extended family, culture, and social, economic and cultural influences. Any of these external influences can be a source of strength or strain on your relationship, and some may provide a little of each or may be a support for one partner and stress for the other. Extended family, for example, can provide a lot of help, but may also create more tension. Lowering stress and building social support by understanding and resolving external problems together will help you solve stubborn conflicts and avoid blame and resentments. We list these sources of support and stress in brackets on either side of the Interactional Circle.
Anticipating the challenges you may face as you move through TRANSITIONS over time helps you plan ahead so you can approach major changes effectively as a team. Resolving issues as they arise helps you lay down a positive history with few triggering memories that can erode your closeness over the years. If you have any triggering memories thus far, you can defuse them when your stress is low enough to do this delicate work. We represent time on the Blueprint by adding perspective to the diagram. We can cross-section the historic flow of a couple’s trajectory at any point.
As you begin to internalize the four components of the Blueprint, you will find that you are building a kind of Internal Scaffold you can use to elevate your perspective so you can see your whole relationship system.
From this vantage point, you can view what strengths you two already have in place as well as what areas you might want to work on to make sure your relationship is at its BEST.
For example:
If one individual loses a job (Transitions over Time),
It will affect that partner’s mood (Emotional Health),
And change the income flow
(Social Support).
Both of which could damage the partners’ (Bond),
In a relationship, if any component is weakened, the whole is at risk. So it is important for partners to identify stressors, talk about them constructively, and find solutions to problems that satisfy both partners before they begin to blame each other and build up resentments.
We will use the Blueprint as a guide to help you see what’s working and where the weaknesses are so you can employ the most effective tools to support your marriage or partnership.
