Of course, not every aspect of ending a relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic is beneficial—in fact, the scaling-down of the spaces we’ve occupied during the last year has forced many people who’ve ended relationships to suffer the heartbreak in the same place where they experienced the good times. “During the winter, since indoor dining wasn’t an option, so much of the relationship played out at my apartment, in view of my roommates—so I felt subjected to their judgement and scrutiny as well, which compounded the bad feelings,” notes Alex, a 33-year-old public defender.
For Amanda, 35, a writer and podcast host, experiencing the end of a relationship during the pandemic was a bit more of a mixed bag. “I’ve had relationships crumble in the past and the absolute most nauseating thing to consider when you’re entrenched in your own colossal emotional shitstorm is having to go to an office and be like, ‘Hi Margaret, here are the files’ or whatever. Getting dumped during quarantine meant I could dissociate on Zoom and maybe even turn my camera off and cry,” says Amanda. Still, privacy was no replacement for the comfort of the outside world: “All I wanted was to go out and do stuff, meet people, remember who the hell I was outside of the purview of someone who thought I was shitty enough to dump. Like, I really, really wanted to get back out into the world and let people remind me of my good qualities, and I couldn’t,” she adds.
Whether you found solace or mere solitude in your pandemic breakup, it can’t be said enough; you deserve as much time as you need to feel better. I’m not a big fan of hustle culture at the best of times, but there’s something distinctly wrong about the deeply internalized pressure to thrive that many of us place on ourselves—in a pandemic!—while we deal with the hard things in our lives, whether that’s something as relatively small as a breakup or as life-defining as the loss of a loved one.
In non-COVID times, I don’t think I would have given myself the time or space to mourn the end of a relationship that only lasted two months, but all the challenges of the past year—both small and large in scale—have taught me that it’s infinitely better to feel my feelings than to bottle them up. (After all, I refused to feel any hope about the pandemic’s end until I literally got a shot of the vaccine in my arm, and while that pessimism served its purpose in the moment, I want more for myself than a resigned embrace of the worst-case scenario.) Hopefully, the next relationship I embark on will cover more territory than just the distance between my apartment and hers; still, when and if it ends, I hope I give myself the room to deal in whatever way feels right, regardless of what the world expects from me.