When I first shacked up with my partner at the onset of the pandemic, it was an exhilarating moment of playing house. At the time our relationship felt reduced to Sundays spent busing from Boston to New York and vice versa; so March 13 meant we were finally able to work from the same city (he came to New York), with the only downside being the imminent pressure to stock up on dried goods. A week later, victims of the game of COVID telephone, we packed up our things to go to our shared hometown— Richmond, Virginia— convinced by our own naïve fears that the state borders would close. 

Six months later, and our separate city apartments had been at a standstill as outrageously expensive storage units while we came to define being adults living under his parents’ roof. Needless to say, our intimacy did not thrive in this environment. And while thin walls and family are certainly the antithesis of setting the mood, I don’t even exclusively mean sexual intimacy. As the work day blurred into evenings and our email addictions escalated, the mental space for dates or shared activities shrunk; compounded by limited physical space, we found ourselves on month four having not set aside a moment to ourselves. After years of long distance, planning dates was supposed to be our bread and butter. But when faced with the romantic impediment that was COVID, we weren’t trained to carve out intimate time after 24 hours next to one another. After all, how sexy is a candlelit dinner when you’ve been tag teaming Zoom calls in his childhood bedroom all day? 

As our world is slowly getting vaccinated and the weather warms, I find myself comparing notes with friends of mine in relationships, wondering how exactly they navigated the nuances of a romance with the undertones of a global crisis. “We were tired from everything going on in the world,” says one friend (29) of the weight COVID bore on her sex life. Similarly, Karyn Towey (25) shares that, “in some instances, [she] felt as if it wasn't right to enjoy any kind of sexual pleasure with so many people hurting in the world.” COVID determined our world— and it didn’t exclude intimacy in its path. 

With time, our lovemaking shifted from physical penetration to simple gestures. “Small moments of intimacy— like morning cuddles, a hug in the kitchen, holding hands while we watch TV—have brought me the most comfort, as cheesy as it sounds,” my aforementioned friend says of how she and her partner’s affection ultimately manifested. For Towey, it was her partner making coffee every morning for her, or “petting [her] head until [her] eyes would finally close, even if it meant staying up longer than he'd ever like to himself.” And for some, new environments supplemented gestures as the conduit for closeness. Elizabeth Siematkowski (34) sparked a relationship from a socially distanced kayak date that turned into fall hikes followed by polar plunges. “I fell in love with the outdoors,” she says in describing the beginning of her now ten month relationship, “then shared that sacred space with someone... and then fell in love with them.” 

The way those of us in relationships have navigated intimacy during the pandemic varies, and I’m consistently pleased by the relational anecdotes I hear as folks open up about this past year. What I know is that, while my sex life didn’t compare to Bridgerton, I’ve learned how to provide intimacy in a myriad of ways— and I’ve now got a fiancé as proof of concept.

Photos courtesy of Death to the Stock