How The Coronavirus Gave Me My Husband Back
When you’re married to the love of your life and then have your dreams of your life together dashed because he works all the time, a new kind of loneliness becomes your new reality.
If your spouse isn’t ever around, you feel like you’re single even though you’re not.
When you feel single even though you aren’t, you begin to resent your new identity because it isn’t ‘right’.
The loneliness begins to creep on you and you feel simultaneously numb and full of rage at your circumstances.
They say that loneliness is the most damaging emotion and that loneliness can literally kill.
With the loneliness comes the thoughts about all the things that you 'should' be doing with your partner that you have to do by yourself. And that’s the worst feeling of all, knowing that you have a partner out there who could help you but he isn’t there.
Whenever you go out anywhere, even if it's just to the grocery store, all you see are happy couples rubbing it in your face how they get time together to do mundane things like run errands and then can go home to spend even more time together.
When you hear someone complain about their spouse all you can think is wow, you're the luckiest person on this planet to have your spouse around for long enough to aggravate you.
You stop wanting a vacation with your husband and wish simply for one whole uninterrupted day together.
You wonder sometimes if the pain of his absence will ever go away and then you realize the only thing that will fix it is if he somehow changes his work situation to be able to be around you again.
And then you remember that because of the city you live in, you and your husband both must work full time to afford to keep a roof over your heads, and that even though you pitch in your share of the expenses your husband is still the one who supports you.
You become so hateful of the fact that it costs money to live, and you rationalize the fact that if it didn’t cost money to live your spouse wouldn’t have to work an opposite schedule from yours and therefore could be around long enough to simply have dinner together more than once a week.
And then a crisis hits the whole world, and by a government issued order your husband’s work closes for awhile and suddenly, just like magic, he’s back home with you.
You come home from work and he’s there on the couch with your dog, both of them waiting for the moment you walk through the door.
You wake up and he’s sleeping beside you, and you know he won’t have to rush off anywhere in the morning.
You blissfully eat meals together, walk the dog together and have conversations about just about anything that comes to your minds.
You peek into the living room when you’re in the kitchen simply to drink in the exquisite sight of him sitting in his chair flipping through a novel.
And even though you know you should be a bit more scared about the state of the world and a bit more sympathetic to the people out there who are sick and dying, you just can’t help but want to stay in this bubble of marital bliss for awhile longer.
Simply because you feel you deserve some happiness with your husband, no matter how temporary your circumstances are.
