Pandemic and Between-Season Relationships

I am thrilled to have Dr. Ashley Duggan as a guest contributor (see bio below). In this blog post, Dr. Duggan provides advice about how to better get along during the COVID-19 pandemic:

The COVID-19/coronavirus lockdown began between seasons, winter not yet gone but spring not here yet either. As I have been inside the same four walls with my family, I watch the spring buds on trees and shrubs outside my window. The greener, lighter, stronger shade of spring yellow-green lasts only a few weeks, still frail to the possibility of frost.

As a researcher who studies human relationships in health and illness, I have spent the last 20 years listening to patients, their families and close friends, relationship researchers across disciplines, and family medicine doctors talking about illness-induced changes in our lives and in our close relationships that unfold differently than we anticipated.

What I know for sure is that health, illness, relationships, and communication are best understood in the same way they exist in people’s lives amalgamated. Serious illness brings physical, mental, emotional, and philosophical challenges, ultimately changing relationships for good and/or for bad depending on a complex combination of variables.

This COVID-19/coronavirus pandemic is a between season for our close relationships. Even when the pandemic passes, close relationships will be forever altered. While many health professionals have recognized the body, mind and soul connection for health and illness, this between season lets us see differently how close relationships and communication influence, and are influenced by, health and illness.

This spring-green relationship phase brings vulnerabilities that require us to reconsider assumptions and expectations. I offer the following practical possibilities for embracing the blossoming state, informed by the science of close relationships.

Source: Duggan, used with permission

We enter a new season of our relationship in which I do not try to control the other person, and that person does not try to control me. We try to remember that our attempt to control things around us can be a way of managing uncertainty when we don’t have the right evidence or answers and when everything about our normative lives feels uncertain and turned upside down.

We enter a new season of our relationship in which we each recognize the “holes” within, and do not look to any one person to fill them. We can coordinate goals, but that does not mean we necessarily get what we want. At least not now.

We enter a new season of our relationship in which we use “I” language. What we can offer is mindful and empathic listening; we might each have a different experience from the same stimulus.

We enter a new season of our relationship in which we speak more frequently from feelings. What we can offer is not a cognitive evaluation of feelings, but a narrative description of our emotions, affect, and experience. The rewards and risks of relating are more fluid with the current pressures.

We enter a new season of our relationship in which blaming and accusations all but disappear. We avoid the “four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse.” We avoid criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling.

We enter a new season of our relationship in which we call “time out” when we begin to feel defensive. Our usual systems of suppressing or inhibiting the overt expression of emotions can have negative consequences including lower personal well-being, decreased closeness with others, and lower responsiveness to partners' needs, but close relationships also bring out our most profound experiences of rage, anger, and despair. We sometimes need to step away but to let the other person know when we will re-engage.

We enter a new season of our relationship in which we are able to catch ourselves when we operate from a place of assumptions, judgments, and interpretations and operate from a stance of curiosity.

We enter a new season of our relationship in which we seek to grow in our capacity to live with tension and ambiguity and not knowing an answer. We don’t know how long this will last; all we know is that normal is off the table for now.

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We enter a new season of our relationship in which we seek to have a “short memory” and to respond to what we see right in front of us. Short memory means letting go of what happened in the past, of choosing to see today over the accumulations of conflict that affect our health. Like a wide receiver who drops an easy pass, we go to the next play.

We enter a new season of our relationship in which we seek the best possible interpretation of what the other says or does. If our partner usually gives us lots of space but now is following behind our every step with a bleach cloth, the best possible interpretation is that they care about us and want to keep us safe.

We enter a new season of our relationship in which we recognize that letting go is frequently the necessary precondition to receiving or becoming something new. It’s okay for relationships to be in flux right now. It’s okay not to be okay.

Instead of resolving our relationship problems, or preparing for quarantine-prompted divorce, we just resolve to get through the day. We find a new normal… and then another new normal. Never was there a placeholder for illness in our close relationships, nor was there a placeholder for this pandemic.

The spring buds cannot survive too much displacement. In time, the roots can deepen and grow to the maturity of summer. In this between-season phase, I watch the buds from my window.

Ashley P. Duggan, Ph.D., is the author of “Health and Illness in Close Relationships” (2019 Cambridge University Press). She is Associate Professor of Health Communication at Boston College and Vice Chair for Research in Family Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. Her work connects the science of relationships with evidence-informed healthcare conversations.