When people ask her if the pandemic caused her divorce, Kristin gets frustrated. “I would never ask someone if it was the pandemic. If someone tells you their story, their story is their story…. The pandemic didn’t cause my ex to pick up the golf club. Right?” she said over the phone as she walked her dog. “Did the pandemic help? No. But it also helped me get out quicker.”
She’s one of several people who got divorced during the pandemic who have repeated the same thing: The pandemic merely made the fractures in their relationships known. As Christina*, a Canadian divorcée living in London, told me, “I had this whole system of so many fun distractions that I couldn’t even notice my relationship was actually horrible for me. And then when all those distractions were gone, it was like, Oh, wait. The thing that you’re supposed to lean on when nothing else is happening is actually just draining you completely.” (Names marked with an asterisk have been changed.)
With the promise of a “Hot Vax Summer” upon us, divorcées are finding themselves ready to let out much more than 15 months of pent-up emotion and desire. “I want all the serotonins,” Christina said when asked about her plans for the summer. “My motto for 2021 is tits out.”
Like anyone who spent the last year with a whole lot of extra time to focus on themselves, the recent divorcées I spoke to came away from the pandemic with revelations they might not have had otherwise.
“[My husband] was basically like my third child, so I couldn’t have any sexual feelings for him because, again, he was like a child for me,” Nina* told me over speakerphone as she organized her kitchen in the Brooklyn apartment she used to share with her ex. It’s an apartment she struggled for in her divorce, as her ex-husband insisted on coming over to watch the kids, essentially kicking her out of her own home during the pandemic, until she finally bought him out. “I had really bad boundaries in that relationship and it meant a lot to notice that, and work on that in therapy,” she said. “And being in a relationship with a woman is completely different anyway.”
Nina was one of three women I spoke to who divorced a man and discovered a new queer identity. For Luna*, it was a long time coming; she had thought of herself as bisexual, but roughly 10 years into her relationship with her husband, she found that her feelings for men had dissipated, and the pandemic put a kibosh on the open marriage they’d hoped might salvage the relationship. Becca came out about a month prepandemic, after her therapist asked her, “Would it be so bad if you were a lesbian?” At the same time, her theater friends—and would-be queer community—became scattered across the country after performances were put on hold indefinitely. Instead, Becca found a community on TikTok, where she connects with other queer people over everything from being late bloomers to mental health.
“It’s weird because I almost don’t know who I am yet, so I’m trying to figure that out,” Becca said. The broad community on TikTok helps. “There’s none of that pressure to make yourself seem normal.”
Therapy played a major role in many stories, for bad—Jon’s ex said she wanted to end the marriage during a virtual couples therapy session with a bad connection—and good. Brooke and her ex decided on a divorce weeks into the pandemic, on Easter—“The relationship had been over for years, but neither of us knew what a happy, functional, relationship was supposed to look like so we thought things were good.” A lifelong California resident, Brooke wound up connecting with an old friend and moving to the Midwest to be with him.
“I still am sad sometimes about how the divorce happened, mainly because I know there was a lot of hurt on both sides,” Jon says, from the house he’s in the process of selling in Maryland, in order to live closer to his new girlfriend. “It’s weird to feel regret for something you know was right.”
But there didn’t have to be major geographic changes or new partners for people coming out of divorces to feel the massive shift in their lives, and find a way to celebrate it. Laurenne, in Sacramento, is planning a divorce party after her friends get fully vaccinated. Maria* described moving to her own place as a “breath of fresh air,” and has opened up to friends and family about her struggles in a way she never had before.
Even though she had moved to Texas from the East Coast, and away from her family, before the pandemic and their divorce, Kristin decided to stay because of the community she’d found there.
“I had a lot of anxiety attacks in 2020, and days when I didn’t want to get out of bed. But for some reason, eventually it would fade, and I would be able to just…do the next thing,” she says. “I wish my parents were here, I wish none of this happened, but truly I feel like I’m a different Kristin. And in some ways, I’m better than I’ve ever been.”
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