Lockdown logistics: who has it worse?
Is it easier to be single, or coupled up, in social isolation? Liadan Hynes takes a look at relationships in the pandemic, and the pros and cons of living on your own, or with a partner
Two of my best friends and I have a running debate. They are both mothers of three. I have one child. Both are married, I am separated. Both have lost one parent. I have two, fully functioning. Who has it better, or harder, we like to jokingly moan at each other? Partly, it’s a reference to the fact that at some point, each of us manages to convince ourselves, if only for a moment of secret self-pity, that things are hardest for us. At another level, we’re making the point that actually, life is challenging for all of us in different ways.
Right now, as the claustrophobia and the fear reach peak (several times a day, or just me?), it’s easier than ever to convince yourself that you have it hardest.
I’m single. My daughter hasn’t been able to see her father since this began. Sometimes as I face into another twohour wrangle to get her dressed while also trying to meet a deadline, or stare down another entire-evening-long bedtime, I want to bury my head in a pillow and scream. But we’re staying with family, so I have four other adults on tap to help me during the day whenever I need it, where all my married friends have lost their childcare. So, swings and roundabouts.
Obviously, none of us who are healthy, self-isolating in the comfort of our own homes and able to sustain our careers (and therefore pay our bills) by working from home have it the worst right now. Not by a long shot. But after yet another conversation with a friend in which we discussed our situations, and the sexual politics and gender imbalances within a pandemic, I did wonder, if it is easier to be single or coupled up during social isolation?
‘AS A STAY-AT-HOME PARENT, THIS HAS BEEN VERY EXPOSING’
Jennifer O’Dwyer is a mother of two, and co-host of several podcasts including The Creep Dive, Mother of Pod and The Vulture Club.
“We’re kind of a traditional family, in the 1950s sense. My responsibilities are all children and household, and he goes to work.” Her husband Dan is now working from the couple’s home. “I think if you’re a stay-at-home parent at the moment, your life is not that different to what it was pre-pandemic. I’m really satisfied by everyone complaining, and vocalising how difficult it is,” she laughs. “Personally, it’s very validating.”
Her husband being home is messing with her routine, she reveals.
“The children get very excited that he is around all the time. And he will just come down, make himself a lunch, eat it alone in the kitchen, ignore the pandemonium around him, and then retire back upstairs. And I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to stop them getting into his office. It’s like if you were sort of in a pen with tigers, and their dinner is in an invisible cage in the middle. It’s your job to keep them away from that cage. It tips everything off kilter.”
It’s also unsettling having another adult around in what is essentially her workspace. “It’s very exposing. Because if you’re the stay-at-home parent, you have a routine, in which are carved out bits where you are able to sit on your arse for five or 10 minutes at different intervals of the day. So when there’s a threat to that being exposed, when I hear him on the stairs, my inclination is to get up and pretend I’m doing stuff which is strange.”
Both adults being in the house is crossing previously clearly delineated lines, Jennifer explains. “Your survival as a family, in my opinion, is based on clear roles. You know what you’re responsible for, and you stick to it, and you don’t overstep.
Unless there’s been a conversation beforehand. So this has muddied the waters. It has probably taken the last three weeks to settle into this weird new routine. But we’re getting through.”
‘THE GENDER BALANCE HAS ALL GONE A BIT BLURRY’
Katie Ingle is a childminder who works from home, and lives with her husband, their three children and her mother, Ann. Katie’s work stopped as soon as the Covid-19 crisis began, and her husband now works from home.
“We had to take a bit of space where he could work out of our play area. That was a bit stressful at the start, negotiating, ‘Well, how do we do this?’ The kids seeing him and wanting him, and me not asking every two seconds, ‘Will you bring the baby up to bed?’
“At the start I was like, ‘Oh that meeting will be over at four, so I’ll be able to do X, Y and Z then’. Then 10 past four when his meeting hadn’t finished, I’d be getting snippy.”
She does wonder about the unsettling of the gender balance.
“You think ‘it can’t just be me, doing all the stuff now; cleaning up after two meals, minding the children, home-schooling, where his get-outof-jail-free card is just doing his work, because he’s getting the money coming in. And the thing is he is great. We’re very equal in what we do when it’s the normal run of things. But now it’s all a bit blurry.”
‘AFTER FOUR WEEKS OF ISOLATION, MY PARTNER MOVED IN’
Kate Gunn, author of Untying the
Knot: How to Consciously Uncouple in the Real World, has just moved her partner of four years into the home she shares with her three children.
“We had talked about it many times but made a conscious decision not to live together, because it’s been so good, neither of us was willing to put that at risk. Also he doesn’t have kids. It’s full-on living with three children, even when they’re your own. To have no way of escaping that is a big ask.”
For the first four weeks they were socially isolated from each other. “We had both reached the point where a couple of weeks was OK, but a couple of months isn’t,” she says, explaining that they got medical advice before making the move.
As it happens, social isolation proved the perfect time to broach this big move with her children. “They were really excited about it because it’s literally like, any break from the routine. So they’re very happy about it.”
At times when the cabin fever reaches its pitch, the prospect of absolute alone time feels tempting.
‘I CAN GO DAYS WITHOUT SEEING ANYBODY’
“I can go days without seeing anybody,” says Claire Seymour, who lives on her own. “I do try and go out for walks, but I find that stressful, because people aren’t social distancing properly all the time.”
Claire is working from home, leading a large, busy team. Her company was already using a programme that supports their employees’ physical as well as mental wellbeing before social isolation began.
“There’s an app to go with it; I think that is helping me through this,” she says. “I have a routine. Monday to Friday, I get up, I have an exercise routine that’s on the app. I have a shower and then I get dressed as if I’m going to work. There’s a 10 o’clock virtual coffee with my team, and I’m making sure I take the breaks throughout the day.
“I was completely burnt out last year. My big thing is trying not to let that happen now. One of the things I’m doing is I’m making sure I cook a dinner, because that’s one of the things I didn’t do last year; it felt like there was no point in cooking massive dinners for just me.”
Leading a big team means she puts a lot of energy into lifting the spirits and maintaining the positivity of others. Like many single people, she has a network of friends who have become more like family.
“Friday, I spent the day on my couch, on migraine alert. The toll is sometimes hard. I’m very lucky, I’ve got two friends who are in similar leadership positions to me. When I bought my house one of the girls got me a picture of three little piggies, and she always says we’re the three little pigs in this together. We check in, and have virtual coffees with each other together, and go ‘are you doing okay?’”
‘ASKING PEOPLE TO GO ON A ZOOM DATE IS JUST SO SURREAL’
“I have been single for seven years,” says Andrea, a 30-year-old scientist who works in medical applications. “I had been dating, but then started a PhD, so had to reprioritise my life. I really started dating properly again last summer. I started seeing a couple of people, things were going well, and then lockdown happened. Because people had been using social media anyway to do this for a while, it wasn’t such a big deal in the initial phase, but asking people to go on a Zoom date is just so surreal.”
Now that so much of our interactions take place online, the thought of further screen time, after catching up with friends and family, can be off-putting.
“Switching up between seeing your friends, working and then going on dates, it’s kind of like there is no differentiation now that it’s all done on screen. When you were going for a drink and a date, it was like oh, you got ready, you enjoyed that part. Now it’s all blending into one. I’ve had two video calls with people, I am texting a couple of people.
“Usually on dating apps, maybe 70-80pc of conversations die off before they go anywhere. You match, you have a bit of a back and forth, but then it tapers out. But it’s so much more common now. I think part of it is because people don’t know what they’re doing. I would say 90pc of conversations now just die in the water before they go anywhere.
“It’s too hard at times. Meeting people in person is important for me.”
The tone of online dating has changed somewhat, Andrea says, in reflection of the universality of our current experience. “Very quickly people are sharing things they might not have shared before. You might be talking to someone for an hour or two and they say, ‘I had to go on two walks today because I’m just not in a good headspace’. They’re being so open about it.”
‘MOVING IN WITH MY BEST FRIEND HAS REALLY WORKED OUT’
Journalist and marketing professional Aisling O’Toole lives on her own, but has moved in with her best friend to see out social isolation.
The pair have been friends since school, renting together for eight years in their twenties, before both buying their own houses. “So we’re able to be very upfront around ‘don’t do this, because it bugs me’. We thought we would have killed each other by now, but we’ve been fine.”
One of the trickiest things about being single is that when anxiety does strike, there is no one there to help talk you down. A calm face looking back at you to assuage your own fears.
“We kind of look at each other every couple of days, and think ‘oh we’re so lucky, that we have each other’,” Aisling says. “If one of us is freaking out, the other is like ‘look it’s fine, it’s fine’.”
‘LOCKDOWN COULD BE THE SAVING OF OUR MARRIAGE’
Kate, married for nearly 10 years, with two young children, believes social isolation may have rescued her marriage.
“I think lockdown is the shot in the arm we needed — it might in fact be the saving of us. It has been such a wake-up call for how poorly we had been living, in terms of co-parenting and running a household. There have been several years of me relentlessly working. To compensate for barely seeing each other, and to make up for feeling like the kids might have missed out on things during the week because I’m never home, I torture my family with weekends packed with jobs, visits and activities.”
She describes how days off were spent meeting people, catching up, going on playdates, stuck in traffic. “It turns out we are 300pc happier when I’m not an exhausted workaholic and we are home together. Maybe it’s the absence of choice — we are simply here. I’m actually having flashes of anxiety about going back to the way we were.”
‘THE PARTNER WHO ‘ESCAPES’ EVERY DAY CAN FEEL GUILTY’
“Humans are social creatures by nature, so being confined to one place either alone or with the same group of people has its challenges,” says clinical psychologist Dr Nicola McGlade. “The single person living alone has the challenge of no physical contact with others. Who helps distract them when they get anxious? Who normalises the situation for them?”
For a person in a relationship, the disparity between working situations can be challenging, she explains.
“For the partner of someone providing an essential service left working from home and solo parenting, doing it all, while their partner gets to ‘escape’ every day, that can evoke frustration and envy. The partner who gets to ‘escape’ every day can feel guilty. I think the important thing to recognise is that this is a challenging time for all of us, and while our specific challenges may differ depending on our circumstances, all are challenges nonetheless.
“Uncertainty and challenges like Covid-19 can give rise to the experience of difficult or unpleasant and sometimes overwhelming emotions. This is normal but nonetheless can be difficult to cope with.”
For my part, I swing between considering whether we could build a Shomera in my parents’ back garden and just stay here for ever — lots of adult company, constant childcare on tap, and daydreaming about returning to our lovely, quiet home and my own bed rather than sleeping on the floor. Mostly though, I just feel lucky to be single but surrounded.
Pre-order Liadán Hynes’ first book, ‘How to Fall Apart, Things I’ve Learned about Finding and Losing Love’, from easons.com now.