Long Distance in the Time of Corona

I feel like adding “during a global pandemic” to the end of a lot of thoughts.

Rachel Megan Barker, our highly caffeinated itinerant feminist and political organizer, checks in from quarantine with how her long-distance relationship is going.

By Rachel Megan Barker

This is hardly a unique story right now. 

I was in a long distance relationship before the outbreak of covid. I am still in (the same) long distance relationship.

On one hand, when the outbreak first started, it was like nothing had changed about our relationship. We still communicated the same way we had always done; still wrestled with timezones the same way we had always done.

We didn’t have to make the kind of choices that couples living in the same place, but not in the same household, did at the start of all this. There weren’t choices to make. Our relationship just stayed the same.

But as this keeps going - and oh boy, it really does seem like it’s keeping going - there has been this shift. I am very lucky in just how easy my relationship with my partner is. And day to day, it really still is just as easy and as light as it ever was.

But not knowing when we will even be able to actually see each other again; that is really hard. And, also, it’s just really quite bizarre. 

I feel like there is a need, if only for my own mental health, for me to add “during a global pandemic” to the end of a lot of thoughts. I am holding down a job during a global pandemic. I am trying to stay in touch with friends during a global pandemic. I am taking on new projects during a global pandemic. I am maintaining a relationship during a global pandemic.

I feel like there is a need, if only for my own mental health, for me to add “during a global pandemic” to the end of a lot of thoughts.

In the first few months of this thing, everything was about Covid. I couldn’t have forgotten things were happening during a global pandemic if I had tried. But the most recent few months have been different. Nothing is normal and the absolute reality of what we are living through is still there. But somehow it is easy to forget it and fail to contextualise other things that are happening.

But they are happening within that context. Everything is.

Before covid, even during times when me and my partner didn’t have upcoming plans for when we could next see each other, we could make them. Plans both immediate and long term now just feel like an exercise in imagination. And in hope. But there’s no…it’s not even that there is just no guarantee of them being able to happen, there isn’t even really a likelihood they will be at all possible; that any plan for us to even just see each other will be possible for who knows how long.

It does not help that I am in the UK and he is in the US; my country is hardly doing well in terms of our Covid response, and his is doing absolutely catastrophically. It does not help that I have a pre-existing condition. It doesn’t help that we have no legal rights to see each other to speak of. 

I feel very lucky not to be worried about my relationship lasting through this. But I am just scared of the prospect of potentially years where we can’t see each other at all. I am scared of not being able to make any real decisions for the future in a world being ever shaped and moulded by a pandemic. 

And of course I am just scared of the impact of this pandemic in general.

It’s hardly a unique story right now.

It’s hardly a unique story ever, really, although this story gets to have “during a global pandemic” added to the end of the sentence.

Couples separated by distance is, if anything, a time honoured romantic tradition, I suppose.