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Was Marriage Built To Withstand Quarantine?
4 years ago
The standard wedding vows are so often repeated in popular culture - TV shows, commercials, Tyler Perry movies - that it's easy to disregard the meaning behind the recitation. It wasn't until I was actually standing at the altar, in front of my soon-to-be wife, that it dawned on me just how morbid and absolute those words are.
In sickness and health.
Till death do you part.
Sickness.
Death.
The words are so heavy that it's amazing they reach our ears instead of tumbling directly to the floor. Their weight only gets more daunting with the final affirmation: "I do." After I got married, I found myself thinking about my mortality; other than student loans, it was the first decision I'd ever made that I knew I'd live with for the rest of my life.
Like so many other people, mortality has been on my mind a lot over the past couple months. Certainly more than any time since my wedding day almost a decade ago. In the midst of a pandemic, life feels more like a death lottery than an actual existence.
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Everything seems fragile.
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Before I go on: My marriage has been fine during this quarantine. My wife and I have been in the house with each other and our kids pretty much 24/7 since March 12. That's 35 days. Three million seconds and change. Not that I'm counting. But we haven't had any arguments, big disagreements, or nights where I've been relegated to the couch.
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Maybe my anxiety over my own marriage is just another thing I'm convincing myself to worry about in a time of constant instability. But I'm taking solace in the idea that even if things feel dire by June, it will be a passing storm.
With that said, I don't know what our marriage will look like after 30, or 60, or 100 more days of this. It's quite possible that by day 50 we won't be able to stand to look at each other. The more I hear from friends who have had blowups with their partners, rifts and scars forming between them, the more I wonder what it would mean for us to come out of this with our relationship irrevocably changed. Add that to the fact that China has reportedly seen a post-quarantine divorce boom, and it's clear that this is uncharted territory for all of us.
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In theory, I have all the confidence that my wife and I would be fine if we had to stay away from work and spend time together for a few weeks. In fact, that sounds like paradise. Even with the kids bouncing around the house. But that's not what this is.
Before I got married, I thought about all the various trajectories my life could follow, about how my future wife and I could handle each path. Do we like each other enough to spend time together? Would she be able to take care of me if I'm sick? How would I take care of her if she's ill? How can we help each other reach our goals? Can we get along as parents? Sickness. Health. Death do us part.
But I never considered that we would be in this. Surviving together, keeping at bay the omnipresent fear that we are carrying highly contagious, possibly fatal pathogens that could rob us of the ones we love most.
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This isn't how marriage is supposed to look. And it damn sure isn't how marriages were made to work.
Shelter-in-place orders have only started rolling out nationwide in the past few weeks, so many couples are in the early stages of the marathon. Counselors I spoke to say they're just now getting the first taste of quarantine-themed therapy sessions - sessions that are mostly focused on general fears and anxieties about the virus itself. Over time, though, they'll start to see relationship struggles, and we'll find out how close we are to China.
But for now, the counselors have reassuring words about staying the course and persevering through this storm. "Everybody deals with this differently," says Jacqueline Del Rosario, PhD, who runs BestMarriageKeys.com, a website for interactive marriage preparation and training.
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Maybe my anxiety over my own marriage is just another thing I'm convincing myself to worry about in a time of constant instability. But I'm taking solace in the idea that even if things feel dire by June, it will be a passing storm.
"If you do the things necessary to keep a strong relationship, your marriage can be made to endure whatever is happening, through good times or these trying times," says Nicole Daniels, a licensed clinical marriage and family therapist based in White Plains, Maryland. "Some people may actually find that there are things they can work on in their marriage during this time to really strengthen their unions."
There's just so much stress that it feels like a strained marriage after quarantine shouldn't be a referendum on the nature of the relationship as much as a sign of the strain this time has placed on it.
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"I'm hearing that people are worried more than anything," Daniels says. "Having coping tools is so important. If they were already struggling in their marriage, and they're continuing to have difficulties, I would just say they would need to keep up the work they used to get to that good place and remember this will pass."
These next few weeks of isolation, as well as any others that roll through our lives between now and a widespread vaccine, are going to be painful for myriad reasons. We're going to come out of this thing altered in ways that will challenge and terrify us. Our marriages won't be spared from this. But it's crucial to remember that your response to a once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe shouldn't be a reflection of your marriage; instead, your marriage is a reflection of the crisis and the toll it's taking on all of us.
It's not only people who experience sickness and health, after all - it's relationships, too.
Read More at https://medium.com
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