Love in a time of crisis

Blood on her clothes and covered in fine dust, Rose was walking home through a city of rubble after the Christchurch quakes when she met James. As waves of aftershocks struck, bonded by their shared experience of terror, the strangers had sex in a park surrounded by destruction.

Rose, who only wants to be known by her first name, says it happened because she felt ‘‘as if it was the end of the world’’ and that ‘‘nothing really mattered, so I might as well go out with a smile on my face...

‘‘I was terrified. I was sure I was going to die,’’ she says, her voice slightly muffled by a face mask bearing a picture of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust.

‘‘He was right there in it with me, going through the same thing. I literally clung to him. The weird thing is that was nearly 10 years ago and lockdown was the first time since then I have found myself feeling the same way.’’

Rose wouldn’t normally have ‘‘sex with a random’’, but such behaviour can occur when we are in a state of fear, experts say.

Decades of researchers have documented this effect during wars and other times of mass fear.

The phrase ‘‘terror sex’’ was coined after

9/11 in New York. Some prefer to call it ‘‘disaster sex’’.

In the last hours before the nation went into level 4 lockdown on Wednesday, March

25, Christchurch sex store Peaches & Cream held a sale.

Its aisles were filled with people perusing sex toys or staggering to the counter with arm-loads of devices and lotions. While some were at the supermarket, queueing for bread, others were fervently stocking up on sex toys.

At Peaches & Cream, when it came to lockdown sex, with bars and pubs shut and Tinder dating happening remotely, self pleasure was promoted as the ‘‘safest sex option’’.

Loved-up lockdown lovers have been Netflix and chilling for months. And while the weeks of level 2 put a strain on a lot of relationships, others may have seen it as an opportunity to get closer. Can we expect to see a spike in the number of births nine months after the Covid-19 lockdown?

Auckland-based ‘‘sex, love and life coach’’ Elizabeth Grace, director of a counselling outfit called the Intimacy Institute, doesn’t think so.

‘‘People need a stable environment to procreate. If that stable environment is not there, it takes intimacy and sexuality out of the mix,’’ she says.

‘‘For me, there is no way I would want to bring a child into the world right now in this economic climate... Yes, I want to have sex, I want the pleasure, the intimacy and to nourish that. But to bring a child into a world when you don’t know what the future is going to be like? No thanks.’’

Leading American sociologist and sexologist, Pepper Schwartz, agrees.

She says the short answer is: who wants to bring a baby into this dystopian landscape? But she adds that the true answer is a more complicated ‘‘maybe there could be a baby boom’’.

‘‘There was a birth spike after World War II in the United States but there was also a divorce spike,’’ she says on the phone from Seattle, Washington.

‘‘You wouldn’t think there would be a collision, but they are diverse people, right?

Baby boom predictions were a popular lockdown joke – but were they accurate? Or are we more likely to see a surge in divorce? From sex work to single life,

talks to a range of experts about how the pandemic affected human connection.