Un-love in the Time of Coronavirus
The title ‘Love in the Time of Coronavirus’ seems to be everywhere at the moment: it seems to be the go-to pun for any and every article about relationships, saving frazzled editors’ brains from having to think up anything more original. Every time I see it, I think: what about un-love in the time of coronavirus? What about trying, desperately, not to love someone – to wholly forget them – at a time when distractions are limited and ‘skin hunger’ is rife? So I thought I’d try, somehow, to answer those questions. Principally as a means of making sure I don’t text my ex for the next hour or two (writing is the best distraction I’ve found, thus far).
That phrase, ‘Love in the Time of Coronavirus’ is a play, I guess, on Gabriel García Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera. I confess that I’ve never actually read the book (it’s on my list! My list is long!), but Wikipedia outlines one of the book’s principal themes: ‘García Márquez’s main notion is that lovesickness is literally an illness, a disease comparable to cholera. Florentino suffers from this just as he might suffer from any malady’.
And why not? The thing I’ve learnt about heartbreak, and which really took me by surprise, is just how bodily, how visceral, the experience is. The emotional consequences of being dumped by someone you were in love with were to be expected – but the fact that it would linger in my chest for months on end; that it would stop me eating or make me want to consume my own weight in chocolate, variously; that it would keep me awake for endless heart- hammering hours; that it would engender nausea and lethargy and freaky hyperactivity; that it would make tears spring from my eyes in the most embarrassing, and unexpected, of places, for reasons I could not have put into any kind of coherent sentence: all this I did not foresee.
We do know now that the physical effects of heartbreak and loss are real, just like any other kind of emotional stress. They put strain upon the body. It’s odd to imagine though – how does that work? I know it’s not as if, were they carrying out a post-mortem on me now, they would find the face of a lost love imprinted upon my organs, but it does sometimes feel like that.
García Márquez’ magical realism is the perfect style with which to try and express the strange bodily rebellion that lovesickness causes. Magical realism adds unobtrusively fantastical elements to a world that is mostly realistic, so that while you read, the imagined things come to seem entirely plausible, and the naturalistic aspects take on the dazzling patina of poetry and fantasy. The boundaries between illusion and reality slip, and you lose your footing. This is what it is like when your body feels out of your control; when memories and dreams suddenly seem more real than anything material or present; when you can no longer express sentiments in language that doesn’t sound either embarrassingly hackneyed, or entirely incomprehensible. There’s a comfort in magical realism, since it seems to solidify the things that you can’t quite put a finger on, to reify those frustratingly inexpressible feelings. In Love in the Time of Cholera, Dr Juvenal Urbino, a distinguished physician, tells a younger medical student to take care when dissecting the cadaver of the next inevitable suicide of someone ‘driven mad by love’, since ‘they almost always have crystals in their heart’.
If you’re reading this, chances are that you too are struggling with heartbreak under lockdown (I’m reminded – dammit – of Kanye West). It’s not easy being lovesick with no access to the usual medications: friends – lots of them, and all the time; big nights out, surrounded by that aura of possibility and abandonment that being suddenly untethered can sometimes provoke; spontaneous trips, or being in deepest nature by yourself, or working-working- working-working (perhaps some of you are lucky enough to be able to work from home). Still – in some ways, this could be a good thing. For one, enforced celibacy after a break-up is probably pretty healthy. Although the temptation is to go and fuck your sorrows away, to lose yourself in your body and someone else’s, it often doesn’t live up to its promise, and can easily descend into a situation where you only feel okay, feel whole, when wanted by someone else. Right now, that’s not an option. You’ve probably only got yourself, and perhaps a few friends or some family, to make you feel good about yourself. You’ve got no choice but to work it out on your own: how can you claw back some small sense of what is actually great about you? I’m not here to give prescriptions – this is not a ‘just light a candle and take some deep breaths and sprinkle some lavender oil in your bath and everything will be better!’ kind-of piece. The only thing I can say is that you have to constantly remind yourself that – especially if you have endless time right now – it is your job to make yourself feel loved and worth something. It’s not selfish, it’s necessary: your mopey, heartbreak-y self won’t be doing anyone any favours (but remember too: there’s NO PRESSURE and NO RUSH). Also – forgive me for sounding grossly clichéd – you can help yourself by helping others! Doing something nice for someone else is a super-effective way of making yourself feel useful and necessary and good again (just watch this Friends clip!).
A heartbroken friend of mine said the other day, ‘wouldn’t it be nice to be isolating with the love of your life right now?’, and maybe it would be, but it’s also nice to have the glorious freedom of only having to deal with one person’s emotional turmoil during this tumultuous period. The idea of getting to spend all day every day with someone you’re in love with can sound dreamy, but only when you momentarily forget that we’re all (or most of us, anyway) little tightly-wound balls of anxiety right now, ready to ping out of control at any moment, ready to fully break-down over the latest headline, or a TV show, or some random Twitter-trigger. Maybe it’s nice, or at least some consolation, not to be in the firing line when someone else’s brain explodes, and not to feel self-conscious when yours does too.
There’s been much discussion of the way that this pandemic has brought us together, fostering greater community spirit and collective action and mutual support. There’s a note on my phone that I wrote soon after a break-up, which reads, ‘Getting over a break up by realising that they were one person in a complex network of billions of people; that we are all still interdependent no matter if someone has ‘broken up’ with you; that there is no ‘breaking up’ really, ever’. I know this sounds somewhat deluded, perhaps a little dangerous, even, but I also think there’s something in it. As this pandemic has shown, we’re all tied together by our common, human vulnerabilities – by our susceptibility to maladies like Coronavirus, or lovesickness. They affect people in different ways, and hit some much harder than others; we don’t live in an equal world, by any measure. But still, we are all connected – not only in social and communitarian ways, but in bodily ways too. At this moment, we’re acutely aware of the way that breath can flow from your lungs into mine, of how your body leaves traces upon surfaces it touches, how my body might pick up these traces, might absorb them, ingest them. In the midst of a pandemic, this can be dangerous, but in less fraught times, it might be thought of as beautiful. It’s impossible to extricate yourself from this web of physical connection in which we are all mired – and so, you’re never truly disconnected from anyone, no matter how ‘broken up’ you might feel from someone else. Perhaps I’m overly sentimental – perhaps it’s only something I tell myself as a comfort. But then, perhaps it can comfort you too.
In some way, I suppose a break-up can be thought of as less about a person, and more about time. Heartbreak is about wanting things to go back to how they were before – perhaps to the time when you were, or you felt, loved. I guess many of us are struggling with a variation on heartbreak at the moment: wanting things to return to how they were; wanting normality, as we thought of it then, to resume; wanting to travel back in time or wishing this whole virus thing had never happened, just as you might wish someone had never said to you, ‘I just don’t want to spend the rest of my life with you’.
I suppose we can think about the lockdown in the same way as we can think about heartbreak, or life after love (to quote Cher!): it’s a ‘new normal’, one that’s different to before; it’s worse in some ways – I won’t sugar-coat – but it might come with its plus-points too. In any case, as we know, there’s no going back, no not-letting-the-virus-out-of-the-wet-market, and no not-letting-the- words-out-of-his/her-mouth. We can only go forward, try to figure out new ways of being, new ways of loving, and of un-loving, too.