HV Relationships and Quarantine: A Post-Mortem Analysis

I know the pandemic is still going on, but my husband has gone back to work in the office, and I've gone back to school, so our quarantine is more or less over. At the very least, we leave the house on a regular basis again. So, this is a post-mortem analysis of how a high-value relationship handled quarantine.

I'm sure you all saw it, too: Endless complaining from female friends and relatives that quarantine was sooo hard on their relationship, and they love their husband/boyfriend but he's really on her nerves, and she just needs some space, and they're fighting all the time, and she's just so frustrated!

...Can't relate, sis.

I'm married to a HVM. We live in a small apartment. He worked from home, and I lost my job, so we were in each other's faces 24/7 from March until August. And we were absolutely fine the whole time.

Honestly, we both really enjoyed it. Like everybody else, we were bored and stressed out, we missed our friends and family, we missed going out... but we enjoyed being able to spend that much time together.

What did we do?

Well, he was still working. So he got up in the morning and worked. I got up and enjoyed some funemployment - hobbies, leveling up. Sometimes we were in separate rooms. Sometimes we were in the same room. We talked about our anxieties. We commiserated about the politicians' responses. After the BLM protests started, we stayed up at night to watch the livestreams. If I really needed some alone time, I went for a walk.

What about our relationship?

Our "date nights" were mostly cooking elaborate dinners together, eating by candlelight, dancing to a Spotify playlist, and... well, you know. We also enjoyed lots of movie nights. We had less sex than normal during quarantine, because we were both just so stressed out and didn't have the emotional energy for making love. But it was mutual - neither of us was attempting to initiate sex very often. We discussed it regularly to make sure neither of us felt unsatisfied or unfulfilled. Because we were spending so much time together, the intimacy was there in other ways.

Did we fight? Was there any tension?

Not really, no. We had one... "argument," I guess? As the end of quarantine loomed, and our anxiety hit a boiling point, I started cleaning like a madwoman. I clean when I'm anxious. I got frustrated because I wanted him to participate in this deep-cleaning, and he was only doing the usual housework he always does. I confronted him about it. He pointed out that he was still working and didn't have the free time I had, and that he thought I didn't want his help. (In his defense, this was an entirely reasonable assumption to make. I was re-organizing in addition to cleaning, and when I organize, I like doing that alone. Organizing is like a meditative thing for me, and other people interrupt my flow.) I told him it would help if he would take on some cleaning tasks so I could focus more on the organizing tasks, and then he did.

And... that was it. It wasn't even really an argument. It was just a moment where he thought he was doing what I wanted (staying out of my way so as not to interrupt my flow), and I hadn't actually communicated that I wanted something different from what I usually want. It was solved in one conversation. In six months, that's the closest we got to arguing.

Transitioning out of quarantine

Honestly, we'd both rather go back. We're still too cautious to go out for social reasons, but now he has to work at the office and I have to go to class. We get all the crappy parts of pre-quarantine life, with none of the fun parts. Since we don't have the time to make elaborate dinners anymore, and most of our favorite restaurants have opened back up, we do "takeout dates." Lately, we've been on a bit of a brewery kick. There are a lot of little breweries in town that have opened back up to sell six-packs. So we go get a six-pack of something we haven't tried before, get some takeout from one of our favorite restaurants, and enjoy that at home.

But why did it work?

We're both high-value. Neither of us spent quarantine becoming one with the couch. (Well, maybe a little.) He continued to work. Instead of assuming that, since I'm not working, obviously I'd just handle all the housework, he continued to do all the housework he usually does. I enjoyed my hobbies. Because we're both independent people with lives outside of each other, neither of us was constantly begging for the other's attention or getting frustrated with that neediness. We handled our shit and took care of ourselves and each other.

We also actually love each other and enjoy each other's company. So with the extra time from not having to commute and the lack of other social obligations, we spent time together and found creative ways to have fun. This is something I see a lot with Pick-Mes - they marry or move in with men they don't have anything in common with, or even seem to like? And we all know LVM see their partners as this annoying thing they have to put up with to get clean clothes and sex.

And that's another thing. We supported each other. We helped each other cope with the stress and anxiety. If I was pacing around the house in an anxiety spiral, he would move from the desk to the couch, set my journal and my Switch on the desk, and tell me to journal it out and then play some Animal Crossing. If he was frozen in a terror-scroll (you know what I mean - scrolling through the headlines, reading article after article about the rising death toll and the PPE shortages and the police brutality at the protests), I would put on some music, pull him up, and demand that he dance with me. When my brother tested positive, he held me while I cried.

So what's the point?

The point is, a high-value man adds value to your life. So his constant presence was not an annoyance or a frustration or a problem I had to work around. He made quarantine easier, more pleasant. I think I would have had a much harder time with quarantine if I didn't have him in my life. I was, and still am, so glad I was lucky enough to have him to lean on through this.

I worry that this is going to come off humble-braggy, like "oh, look at this amazing man I was lucky enough to catch!" (And I do feel that way about him, ngl.) But that's not my point in writing this. My point is to show what high-value relationship dynamics look like, even in stressful times. More than that, my point is to show that all that "Oh, this quarantine is so hard on my relationship!" stuff isn't normal. Pick-mes and LVM like to set the standard low and make you think, "well, that's just how relationships are." But it's not. It doesn't have to be. Refuse to settle for that kind of misery.