I’ve been thinking about making a marriage work during this seemingly endless pandemic.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
We are among the fortunate and privileged as we face this awful plague.
Fortunate, because we’ve been spared the dreadful and too-often deadly virus. We shelter in place, wash our hands, wear our masks when we leave the house and, so far, these prophylactics have spared us the ravages so many have experienced.
Privileged, because we have enough money to live comfortably despite the limits placed on our work and our social and religious lives. Privileged too because we’ve always had excellent health care, gym memberships and professional counsel about developing habits that are good for us.
We worry for the poor and marginalized who don’t have these resources and therefore, as with most disasters, suffer disproportionately.
Still, despite our good fortune and our privilege, we’ve had to adjust our lives to cope with this deadly threat that lurks outside our door. It’s been a daunting experience and we’ve learned a great deal as we’ve tried to make our marriage work within these confining limits.
For months now we’ve walled ourselves off for our own and our neighbors’ sake. We limit ourselves to a weekly family gathering in our daughter’s back yard: masks as we arrive; separate family tables in the yard, fifteen feet apart, for us, for our daughter’s family and our son’s; food prepared separately for each person and untouched by anyone else; no hugs or kisses, just an occasional fist-bump in passing.
In ten months we’ve had perhaps six meals, with these same precautions, on a friend’s patio or on ours with another couple or a single friend. But we spend most of our time in our townhouse, together, figuring out how to make it work with one another.
We’ve discovered more clearly something we’ve learned over the years, one step – or one stumble – at a time: marriage is a work in progress.
Whatever we envision during our courtship and seal with our vows, life surprises every couple with moments that toss our expectations into the air; usually, they land in random disorder and we have to figure out anew how to put the pieces together in a workable pattern. What impact does a serious illness have on a couple? Or a financial reversal, or a windfall? Or a disabled or oppositional child, or a job offer that requires a move to another city? Should we try to weather an affair or cut our losses?
Marriage is a work in progress.
So along comes COVID-19, life’s latest disruption, to send us tumbling once again. In ten months of this, here are a few things we’ve learned.
Since we’ve always enjoyed one another’s company, at first it was a delight to have all our meals together and to interrupt one another any time we wanted someone to talk with.
But after a few months, each of us recognized that we wanted and needed uninterrupted time. If Becky was at her desk reading briefs for a Zoom court appearance or balancing our finances, the last thing she wanted was for me to burst in reading aloud an astonishing paragraph from some novel I was lost in. If I was reading or writing, I needed the quiet concentration it takes to do either successfully. Neither of us ever said out loud, Leave me alone! but we soon learned to read this unspoken message in the other’s glance.
Before long, we settled in to a rhythm of time alone and time together. Meals worked as opportunities to catch up; then she’d go back to her work and I’d go back to mine with the unspoken agreement that, unless a call came from one of the kids, we’d be back together at our next meal.
Frequently we’d decide at breakfast that we would walk together before lunch, a mutual commitment to fend off the loss of our gym workouts and the weight gain, for me, that our daughter unhelpfully describes as my own personal COVID-19. (Don’t you just hate it when your kids feel free to bust you with some bit of truth you hoped would go unnoticed?)
Weekends are weird. For years, we had Friday night dinners with our family, spent Saturdays grocery shopping, going to the gym together and maybe to an afternoon movie, then off to bars and restaurants with our friends on Saturday nights. We laugh now that the one great COVID windfall for us is that our monthly tab for entertainment is a fraction of what it used to be. Instead of celebrating with our friends, we’re usually at home eating leftovers from our Friday family dinners.
We’ve always been in church on Sundays, so we tried, with limited success, to adjust to Zoom worship. Now we take extended walks on Sundays and long for the opportunity to sing and pray and hang out on the church lawn again when the virus abates and church can be church once again.
Now that vaccines are available, we’ve joined the legions that scan the internet every day looking for available injections and alerting our friends when we find them. We continue to wear our masks and wash our hands and keep our distance in eager anticipation of these shots that will relieve us of what has finally become the worrisome routine of quarantine.
Like the rest of you, we can hardly wait for this terrible plague to be over and done with. Yet even as we continue to make our way, these necessary COVID adjustments remind us every day that our marriage, like every marriage, is a work in progress.
That's just what I've been thinking - how have your relationships adjusted?
Blessings,
– Rick