This is what it’s like to end a long term relationship during a pandemic
tw: mention of sexual abuse, suicide.
Like pretty much everybody, I got really into gardening over the course of the pandemic. Turns out I’ve got a pretty green thumb. Early on in the first lockdown I grew spring onions from stubs and regenerated lettuce and leeks in the kitchen window. Later on I turned my hand to propagating my houseplants and cultivating vegetable plants. This summer I’ll have my second ever crop of baby tomatoes, and a small cluster of early strawberries are ripening on the windowsill right this moment.
Sometimes plants die. Sometimes you overwater them and have to leave them to dry out for a good while. Sometimes you underwater them and they wilt in a forlorn swoon. Sometimes you do everything right and it still insists on dying.
Often, you have to cut a dying plant right to keep it alive and encourage it to thrive again. It kind of feels counterintuitive to strip away flowers and leaves and branches, the very things that make a plant what it is. But it’s necessary to conserve and redirect its energy into new growth and a stronger plant.
Couples who quarantine together… break up?
Fifty-five days into the first UK coronavirus lockdown, I ended my relationship of almost six years. We had cohabited for five years; we had a joint bank account and two furry babies. We shared a huge pool of mutual friends, and were very entwined in each other’s families and lives. The break up had been a couple of years in the making, but lockdown pushed it the last few yards over the proverbial cliff.
Two and a half weeks later I moved out of the flat we had shared together near the harbour and pitched up in a rented room in an empty house in the east of the city, cat (singular) in tow. When I went to sign the lease I took the bus across town with only my cast iron plant, clasped firmly between my knees. Cast iron plant, or aspidistra elatior, is notoriously hardy and tolerant of neglect. I put it in the middle of my new empty room – a kind of strange symbolism, I suppose.
We stayed on good terms in those early weeks, my ex and I – he helped me move my belongings into my new place, sampled the local chippy with me over a movie, we hung out as friends a handful of times. Hell, I even threw him a ‘moving away’ barbecue in my newly-acquired garden with our mutual friends.
Cast iron plant, or aspidistra elatior, is notoriously hardy and tolerant of neglect.
I put it in the middle of my new empty room – a kind of strange symbolism, I suppose.
On the eve of his move back up north to his parents’, he brought over the last of my belongings and my other cat. We watched him tentatively peek out through the open door of his travel crate and assess his new environment. As Marius earnestly sniffed his way round the perimeter of the room, my ex said to me, “I think you absolutely made me a better person. I’m not sure I did the same for you.” I think that was his way of apologising.
We hugged, shed a few wayward tears as we said we’d miss each other, and wished each other well.
Then he left, and I sat in my new, empty house with my cats and my things and I fell to pieces. I’m not sure I’ve ever sobbed the way I did that evening. I didn’t know I had the capacity for it, and I didn’t expect it at all. I couldn’t quell it; full-body heaves and loud sobs, waves of grief flooding over and over me until I couldn’t breathe and triggered a full on panic attack. I felt like my insides were burning and my head was going to roll off my body. My friend called me and talked me down, steadied my breath, coaxed me to bed. I stayed a zombie nearly all summer.
Grief is a confusing and heavy thing
This would have been a big deal in any world scenario, but the unique circumstances of a global emergency made it exquisitely difficult. Breaking up in a pandemic is, above all things, lonely. Having begun dating at 20, I hadn’t lived a post-uni adult life without him; suddenly, I was out on my own, in a city miles from my family and most of my closest friends, in the middle of a pandemic.
There was no scope for travelling cross-country to visit my best friends for cuddles, crying and cocktails. It was unsafe to catch the train a few counties over to be looked after and comforted by my adoring and supportive family. My ex quickly did a 180 and decided he didn’t want to be in contact. The mutual friends he and I had sat awkwardly on the fence and faded themselves out gradually. When I later spoke out about the abuse he had inflicted on me, more people dropped out.
Spending so much time by myself initially felt like getting to know myself again, but the novelty quickly soured. On my worst days, I couldn’t just pop out for a coffee with a beloved friend or get my sister to visit for a weekend. There was no routine of work life and days in the office to channel my focus into. And when I started therapy to process some of the things that had happened years prior, I was largely alone with my newly-excavated trauma on a cycle of reflection and rumination. Layered on top of the grief of losing a partner, a life, a whole family of people, it was a lot.
I depended heavily on alcohol. Late summer, I was earnestly contemplating the least painful way to induce death. I gardened to busy my hands and quiet my mind, and idly wondered who would care for my over one-hundred plants if I was gone.
I should emphasise that my closest friends and my family have been a tremendous source of support as far as has been possible with coronavirus restrictions. But as anybody who has suffered mental ill health will know, it’s very easy to downplay or underestimate your own struggle when someone texts “how are you doing?”. Much less mental load to simply respond with “struggling but okay!”
In the midst of a global crisis in which every person I knew was suffering from, at minimum, the basic fact of existing under such circumstances, it felt trite to consider asking people to schedule a Zoom so I could cry so hard I couldn’t speak, and tell them I felt like dying. When my closest friends were experiencing bereavement, it felt silly to be so affected by a break up.
And as we are all keenly aware, all the Zoom calls in the world can’t make up for the feeling of missing someone and the comfort of a friend’s physical presence.
Onwards
So, what is it like to end a long-term relationship during a pandemic? The short answer is “pretty fucking horrendous”. But, ultimately, so much better than the alternative.
It just passed the one-year mark since I ended things. I don’t regret my decision in the slightest. As hard as it’s been, it was totally correct. I deserve so much better than staying in a relationship with a man who sexually abused me and emotionally stomped all over me time and time again.
Through the fog of grief and isolation there have been many bright moments. I’ve been unpicking the damage in therapy for a year now. In August I started dating someone new. In January I came off my antidepressants. In May I got a job promotion. I have regular, ridiculous D&D sessions with my best friends. I’m getting to know myself again and be comfortable in my own skin. I live in what is essentially now a jungle. Today, I caught my cats snoozing together. Yesterday, my sister told me I’m her inspiration. I’m moving forwards slowly but surely, but grief and trauma processing isn’t linear, and some days I feel like I backtrack significantly.
I wish I could say I have now neatly processed things and am on the other side, but truthfully every day is still difficult.
I can’t explain why I wish I was still friends with someone who did such hurtful things to me. My therapist asks me this question almost weekly, and I’m still none the wiser. But I suspect it’s something like this:
Everyone is thrilled that the world is going “back to normal”, but the life I knew before Covid-19 is gone.