Are Couples Who Moved In Together for Quarantine Okay?

A great many of us are living through what feels like a montage in a horror movie—sheltering inside from an invisible, deadly enemy, trying not to go insane, and waiting for danger to pass. But a select number of people are living out the plot of a romantic comedy—people who’d been dating are forced to either cease all physical contact or move in together, living and working and breathing on each other 24/7.

It sounds too absurd to even be a reality show: Two people, forced to cohabitate in a small space under extreme circumstances. They used to get together about once a week to eat tacos—now they are literally not allowed out of each others’ sight. Who will end up with a ring? And who will end up locked in a house with their ex? How will they emerge on the other side?

If you have a safe home to quarantine in, you’re lucky, no question about it. But some people are luckier than others. Super-wealthy people moved into their second homes. I moved in with my parents. And these couples moved in with each other. Glamour got in touch with them to them to ask…are you guys doing okay?

Will and Erin

“I had to have a conversation with him and be like, ‘I have to poop.’”

Erin, 26, and Will, 27, Brooklyn, small studio apartment, together almost six months

Erin: We met over Hinge, and from the beginning our connection was just super strong. I think we both made an effort to try to pump the breaks where we could. But I don’t know how successful we were at that—we would spend, like, three or four nights a week together. We live relatively far away from each other in Brooklyn, and as the numbers of cases were rising here, it felt irresponsible to get on public transportation.

Will: Quarantining together wasn’t something that either one of us pitched and had to sell the other one on—I just felt like I wanted her here.

Erin: In the first couple of weeks I would get all insecure, because I didn’t want to overstep my boundaries because it’s such a small space. I would be paranoid and be like, “Let me know if it’s okay for me to still be here.”

Will: I feel really lucky to have someone like Erin with me—so many of my friends are trapped alone right now. But yeah, there’s no privacy in this space. I’m pretty sure you can hear every second of every pee that I’ve taken. I don’t know how it has worked out as well as it has, just being trapped in a tiny box for a month.

Erin: I wasn’t letting myself go to the bathroom for a couple weeks, because I wasn’t comfortable! I mean, the bathroom is right there. I had to have a conversation with him and be like, “I have to poop!” Now it’s a joke and he’ll just be like, “Listen. Poop. Go poop.” In the first few weeks I would, like, do it before a shower, when the shower was on, but sometimes you don’t need to take a shower!

Will: Sometimes you don’t! And then what?

Erin: We’re pretty good with conflict resolution. Sometimes he’s working and I’ll be like “Pay attention to me.” And sometimes I’m on deadline he won’t stop coming over, and I’ll be like, “Get away.”

Will: We haven’t given each other a lot of space—things are going really well right now. I don’t want any space from you!

“If we decided to break up, I would have been stuck for weeks with his parents, whom I had never met before.”

Maya, 28, New Jersey, her partner’s parents’ house, together ten months

Right before the pandemic we were at that stage I think a lot of couples get to where we had been having some serious conversations, like, “Well, this is great, but are we longterm?” We’ve always had a semi-long-distance relationship since he’s finishing his Ph.D., but we try to see each other once a week. He has a little more space, so when things were shutting down, I went to his house and we were together 24/7 for weeks, and then in the middle of that we ended up going to his parents’ house. I had been stealthily waging a campaign to meet his parents for a long time. And then my parents got sick, so I couldn’t spend Passover with them. And we had been quarantining and his parents had been quarantining, so he was like, “Well, you could come to Passover with my parents…if you want.” And I was like, “Ha ha ha, I’ve won.” Like, if my dad’s gonna get coronavirus, it might as well result in this invitation I’m trying to wrangle out of him. His family is pretty religious, so they put us in separate bedrooms. And there was this polite fiction that I had never slept over at his house—the working assumption was that I was coming from my apartment, which of course stressed everyone out because then I would be bringing in another set of germs, even though I had actually been quarantining with him. It didn’t seem to make sense to have a serious conversation about our relationship because if we decided to break up, I would have been stuck for weeks with his parents, whom I had never met before.

It was a really nice visit, but there’s part of me that wishes it were a fairytale. I spent his time at his parents house reading Love in the Time of Cholera—it’s one of those epic Spanish love stories that’s like “From the minute he laid eyes on her, he knew his life would never be the same.” I think that’s one version of romance that’s very appealing if you were a reader while growing up. Like, love might be difficult or be dangerous, but it’s always so clear. I don’t think the pandemic brought us there, but it brought us away from doubts—like, we could build a life together and be happy. But just because you can be with someone without any friction for weeks, does that mean you bring each other the utmost joy?

Dylan and Morgan

“We were like, ‘We’re not going to do that thing that queer women in relationships do where we just live together. We’re not gonna U-Haul.’”

Dylan, 25, and Morgan, 23, Richmond, Virginia, three-bedroom apartment with a roommate, together for almost a year

Morgan: We’ll have been in a romantic relationship for a year on Juneteenth. The blackest anniversary ever!

Dylan: So as we began our relationship, we were like, “We’re not going to do that thing that queer women in relationships do where we just live together. We’re not gonna U-Haul.” But then we were about to be isolated, so we had to kind of decide if we were going to not see each other for the foreseeable future or if we were going to go ahead and cohabitate for the foreseeable future.

Morgan: I moved in to Dylan’s house, which is a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath—honestly we’re really, really lucky because there’s a lot of space. It would be harder, I think, if we were more confined. Blessed!

Dylan: Blessed and highly favored! It’s been amazing because all of us have calls, so we can work in separate rooms. I also am the more particular human in the couple, and Morgan is so gracious with me about my idiosyncrasies. Actually, the most surprising thing has been not seeing each other in the house as much as I thought we would.

Morgan: We all need to breathe our own air sometimes. We try to take breaks from, like, the heaviness of what the global situation is. We’ve been gardening. And cooking.

Dylan: I have never liked cooking. I still don’t love it. But I am surprisingly competent.

Morgan: You are amazing. Ma’am, you are amazing. She made these quiches last night that literally, literally, lit my whole world up.

Dylan: I sent a picture to my grandma. She was very happy.

Morgan: We also acknowledged at some point that sometimes sleeping by yourself is nice. It’s not frequent that we do it, but occasionally one of us will sleep downstairs—it’s nice to be by yourself sometimes.

“I’ve never spent this much time with another human being in my life.”

Moriah, 31, New York State, apartment in her boyfriend’s parents’ house, together five months

We met on Tinder, and it was very clear kind of quickly that this was a really healthy, nice relationship. It just kind of worked out that we started spending pretty much every day together from the time we met—it’s been not long at all, but it’s been really lovely. I live with my parents who are in their 60s, so we decided that it was probably best for my parents’ health if I did not stay at the house. I’m lucky that his parents were thrilled to have me here! We’re staying in the downstairs apartment that is connected to his parents’ house. We spend a lot of time with his parents—cooking, eating dinner together, watching TV, playing with their dog. I get along really well with them. I social-distance met his grandma the other day, and we started talking about drag queens.

I’ve never had this in a relationship before—it’s like everything everyone says you’re supposed to have with someone. You can walk in a room and sit down next to them and not have to talk or do anything with them, and their presence is enough. I’ve never spent this much time with another human being in my life. Now that he’s learned about self-care from me, it’s a whole other ball game. I’m a bath person; now he’s a bath person. He’s got a skin-care routine now. This relationship has allowed him to find his love for 90 Day Fiancé! We’re planning to move in together after quarantine—every day that we spend together is more of validation of the fact, “I should be living with him; he should be living with me.”

“I got down on my knees and got out the ring.”

Eric, 34, and Alix, 41, Brooklyn, one-bedroom apartment, together just over a year

Alix: Right away, I knew that this was the real thing. But my grandmother always said, “Go through four seasons with a man,” so I made him promise not to propose before we’d been together a year. Before the pandemic we had talked about moving in together and looked at a place. But I wanted to wait until we could afford to live somewhere with more space—I didn’t want to cohabit in a way that we were setting each other up to hate each other. And then Eric started getting increasingly anxious about the coronavirus.

Eric: Right before the pandemic, I was seeing her maybe three times a week, and that was great. But I was afraid the city was going to shut down and we were going to be separated, maybe for months. I needed you 24/7. I wanted you to be okay, I wanted you to make sure I was okay. It just comforts me to be around you.

Alix: I just wanted him to feel okay. And I knew he would feel okay if I came over. That was one of those moments where I was like, Oh, this is a very different relationship than I’ve had before. So I just put the cat in a bag, and packed up some clothes, and I came over that night at about midnight and that was it.

Eric: It turns out that three cats in a one-bedroom apartment is, in fact, doable.

Alix: It seems like a lot of cats, but we like cats! I do a little metal work in my spare time for fun, so I had started work on a ring for him and I finished it like a week or so before lockdown. I was like carrying it around with me, just in case it was the perfect moment. I had this whole thing figured out where I was going to kneel and people were going to cheer. I was going to do it big, because he deserves it. Then it became clear you could not wait this out. So one day, we went on a walk and there’s this little community garden down the block.

Eric: We got there and it was closed. I could tell there was something weird going on, because when the community garden was closed you were like, “Oh shit.”

Alix: We tried another community garden, also closed. There was a playground nearby—it was locked. At this point I was just looking for a place to sit him down. So finally we were on our way home and we passed our neighborhood bodega and they have a bench. And I was like, “Can we just sit on this bench for a minute?” And then I kind of said, “Fuck it,” and I got down on my knee and got the ring out and asked him and he said yes.

Eric: I just burst into tears instantaneously.

Alix: It’s weird to have this piece of joy in the middle of worldwide catastrophe—it’s been a lot of emotions at once. I got the news that someone I loved had died the same day I proposed to him. It’s kind of like this Irish coffee feeling, like you’re on uppers and downers at the same time, like this dread and joy in the same day, or even at the same moment. It’s very weird. But I’m really grateful that if this has to happen, I get to go through it with you.

Laura and her partner

“We’ve never lived in the same place for more than six weeks.”

Laura, 27, Los Angeles, her partner’s one-bedroom apartment, together two years

We’ve been together for about two years now, but we’ve never lived in the same place for more than six weeks. I’m a manager for touring Broadway shows. It’s pretty much constant travel—and it can be something like a week in Durham and then a week in Charlotte, or six weeks in Chicago and four in D.C. Long-distance was our norm, so leading up to quarantine, we didn’t know what was going to happen. We probably see each other every four to six weeks for a weekend at a time. The tour provides my housing, so when it shut down I wrapped everything up, sent everyone home, and came straight here. It was a bit of a no-brainer. It wasn’t like, “Oh, my gosh, we have to take this big step in our relationship.” It’s going great! We have a good routine set up so that we’re not in each other’s face all the time in a small one-bedroom. I’ll do the dishes, but I won’t touch the Roomba! Down the road, when there’s a dog in the picture, i know he won’t be touching dog poop. We did have to talk about money a bit—I was fully willing to pay rent, but he doesn’t let me, which is fine. I do the groceries and the coffee. I, by nature, am a planner, but have had to reckon with the fact that it’s impossible to plan under these conditions. We’ve talked about moving into a bigger place or getting a house, but none of that is concrete right now. Right now we can’t plan, but we plan to plan again when we can plan!

Sarah and her partner

“I cannot imagine going through this stressful and uncertain time without his support.”

Sarah, 25, New York City, apartment, together almost a year and a half

Around mid-March I moved into my partner’s apartment with all of the wine I could carry. He is the primary caretaker for his 88-year-old grandmother, so in addition to trying to work our full-time jobs remotely, we’re also trying to keep her healthy and happy. Moving in together is something we’ve been talking about for a while, but I’ve been a little nervous about it—it’s a big step! This time together has convinced me that I’m ready (and really, really excited) to live with him in a non-quarantine world. It’s been a difficult time—my partner’s dog died very suddenly, and my parents both came down with COVID-19 one after the other. His grandmother needs a home-care aide, but because of quarantine, it’s just not possible. We’re cooking a lot, and we watched five seasons of Degrassi in a disturbingly short period of time. Quarantine has brought us so much closer. I cannot imagine going through this stressful and uncertain time without his support.

Some names have been changed to protect subjects' privacy.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.

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