Falling in Love Prepared Me for the Pandemic
I was quarantined before quarantining was cool
I fell in love with a girl named Jenny during the summer of 2014. By “in love” I mean the kind of giddy, head-over-heels, earth-shattering love I spent the prior forty-seven years of my life thinking existed only in fiction. Not all fiction comes in the form of books and movies, and I knew people who claimed they experienced that kind of love. I chalked that up to the kind of fictions we all use to get through life, the fictions we tell ourselves.
The summer of 2014 was also about the worst time possible for me to fall in love. I was in the middle of an ugly divorce and nasty custody fight that was the final act in a twenty-year marriage that required all kinds of fictions of my own to survive. Our marriage counselor foreshadowed the scorched earth level of conflict our divorce would bring when he said he couldn’t try to work on issues in our marriage in good conscience unless my wife first got treatment for her anger and control issues.
I’m familiar with divorce, having practiced law for twenty years prior to my own. One of the most common pieces of advice lawyers give their clients at the beginning of the process is, “As soon as there’s a judgment you can do whatever you want. Until then, there isn’t even such a thing as a friend of the opposite sex.” Falling in love while in the middle a divorce from a woman who was already irate I was leaving her was like throwing a barrel of gasoline into a dumpster fire.
And, just to make sure things were as complicated as possible, the woman I was in love with — a Scottish-born, American-educated writer and teacher — happened to live in West Africa, a little less than eight thousand miles from my home in Idaho, U.S.A.
Neither Jenny nor I was looking for love. In fact, we were both looking for exactly the same thing — another experienced writer who could be a second pair of eyes on our respective writing projects. Ironically, I sent her my first draft project on February 13, 2014, the day before Valentine’s Day. Well, it was the day before in Idaho, but she was eight hours ahead in Abuja, Nigeria, and the calendar had already turned. Thinking absolutely nothing about Valentine’s Day beyond the project I was doing in my youngest daughter’s classroom in my role as the school’s only male “art mom,” I sent an email and attachment to the other side of the planet having no idea the tempest I was unleashing on both of our lives.
Like most storms, it took time to build up. It was immediately clear that we shared a mutual love of no-nonsense critiques without the candy coating so many egos can’t hear criticism without. That lead to some joking and teasing in our revisions and comments that became an oddly shaped friendship that existed exclusively in the confines of the drafts we exchanged. Then the emails that accompanied those drafts slowly grew from “please see attached” to side mentions of work or kids or whatever may have delayed our work. Within a few months, we were emailing each other daily, whether we were exchanging work that day or not. It was great having a friend on the other side of the planet I could talk to about anything, knowing none of it would ever come back to Idaho.
And so my writing partner became my friend, who became my closest friend and confidante. I didn’t know it, but I had already fallen in love with her. That realization hit well after I’m sure it had happened, though it was before I even bothered looking her up on the internet to see what she looked like beyond the one tiny profile picture of her face I saw daily.
Summer had arrived at this point. So had Jenny, who was visiting the States for a few months before returning to Nigeria. It also soon became clear that the unrequited romantic feelings both of us were hiding weren’t quite as unrequited as we’d thought.
Before long, I was on an airplane to attend a writing conference in New York, by which I mean to see Jenny in person for a few days just before she returned to the opposite side of the planet. I didn’t care what I was throwing into any dumpster fires or really care about anything beyond actually seeing and touching Jenny within the incredibly brief window when it was possible.
The few days we spent together that summer were some of the happiest of my life to that point. Then the summer was gone and so was Jenny and my practice run for surviving a pandemic began.
I still went to work and the gym in person, but that was about it. Aside from my youngest daughter, who was living with me half-time by then, the part of my life that mattered was almost entirely virtual. Jenny and I would Skype from the moment she woke up until she had to go to work, which was about the time I had to go to bed. Sometimes I’d set an alarm in the middle of the night so we could talk when she had a break. We’d talk for another hour most days before I went to work and used chat far more than my boss would have approved of to talk throughout the rest of my workday. We each wrote emails while the other slept.
And then the weekend would roll around and the Skype conversations continued through the day as we made dinner or breakfast with the computer open on the counter and our daughters tried to monopolize the conversation. I didn’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed at the end of the day, when Skype would tell me I’d spent twelve or thirteen or sixteen hours talking to Jenny.
I’ve heard more than one person say that long distance relationships aren’t “real relationships.” It’s also funny that the same people would say that if we’d met drunkenly at a bar (not an option now), went out to dinner a couple of times (also not an option), and maybe sat silently through a movie or two (strike three, thanks COVID) we would be in a “real relationship.”
As painful and difficult as that one-year long distance relationship was, it taught me that, if you can talk to someone almost every waking minute for a year without running out of things to talk about or getting bored, you’re in a real relationship.
I’ll be on Zoom this COVID Valentine’s Day, playing board games with Jenny’s friends. Her daughter — who I think of as our daughter, since I’ve been raising her as my own for the past six-plus years — will probably try to monopolize the conversation and my youngest will probably try to distract her unless she has too much homework. At some point we’ll cuddle on the couch and I’ll stroke her hair and kiss her and do all the things we couldn’t when we were separated by three continents and we will add hours to the thousands we’ve spent in a conversation that always seems to grow instead of ending.
And if I had spend it with her through the computer or could spend it with anyone else in the world in person, she’s the only one I could even imagine spending it with.
