[title subtitle=”WORDS Dwain Hebda
IMAGES courtesy UAMS Psychiatric Research Institute”][/title]
To all of the ways Covid-19 has changed our lives – economic, academic, work habits, health care – add relationships. For every family that suffered extra stress for not being able to see their relatives during the 2020 pandemic, an equal number suffered from being in too close of contact with their family, specifically their significant other.
This, says one relationship expert, is likely to have far-reaching consequences as fallout from troubled marriages driven to the brink of fracture continues to play out, possibly for years to come.
“When we went into sheltering in place, people came home, and children came home,” says Chelsea Wakefield, associate professor at UAMS in the Psychiatric Research Institute in Little Rock. “So, what happened in the mix of that is roles got disrupted, and the balance and the rhythm of family life got disrupted. In couples that have difficulty in resolving things or were already in the midst of a high-conflict relationship, their conflict escalated their sense of unfairness, of resentment, both conflict and disconnection.”
“Some people were thrilled because they got to spend more time with their family. Some people really had a difficult time because being home and in the family environment was the least safe and least rewarding place in their lives.”
Chelsea’s analysis, codified in her book, The Labyrinth of Love: The Path to a Soulful Relationship, which came out July 1, sorts out the stressors that all relationships face. While the book’s strategies are meant to be applied in the routine of daily life, the nagging specter of Covid-19 makes its precepts particularly useful.
“The book has been in creation for about four years; 2020 and Covid really validated everything the book is about,” she says. “The book is about how in meaningful, enduring relationships, we move beyond need-meeting, which is why most people get into a relationship, and why most people get out of a relationship when they think the other person is no longer meeting their need.”
Chelsea says this fundamental disconnect was amplified by various elements of the pandemic, souring some good relationships and hastening the disintegration of marriages that were already in trouble. It’s a pattern that has been seen and reported the world over.
Impakter.com reported in March how many relationships the tide of Covid-19 washed up on the rocks worldwide. In Japan, marriages were down one hundred thirty-seven percent last year; Italy’s marriages were off twenty percent in 1Q-20 and eighty percent in 2Q-20 compared to the prior year. Russia and Turkey also showed substantial drops in the number of couples tying the knot.
Back here in the U.S., Bloomberg reported in January, the number of marriages and divorces were both down for the nation and plummeting in some states. Florida, Arizona, New Hampshire, Missouri, and Oregon all showed a significant deficit in the number of marital unions and dissolutions compared to 2019. As a nation, the U.S. was trending to nearly 340,000 fewer marriages and 191,000 fewer divorces.
Meanwhile, in December, the Institute for Family Studies noted the U.S. divorce rate was the lowest in fifty years and even predicted the trend would continue in 2021. However, other outlets braced for the worst when it came to the divorce rate.
While a lower divorce rate is an undeniably positive statistic, it is hardly an accurate barometer of the health of U.S. marriages across the board. Study after study cautions that a lower split-up rate does not automatically translate into happier couples. In fact, the American Family Survey, released in December 2020, found thirty-four percent of married men and women under age fifty-five reported increased stress on their marriage directly related to the pandemic.
This leads many experts to conclude couples likely stayed together for practical reasons (such as the cost of a divorce and job security issues) rather than romantic ones. Chelsea said this suffering-in-place scenario became a familiar one throughout 2020 and is likely continuing.
“In close proximity, when people feel like they don’t understand each other and the other person feels unsafe, they withdraw into their turtle shell. So, we had a lot more arguing and a lot more withdrawing depending on that person’s attachment style,” she says.
“Having children at home and all of this dis-regulation escalated the anxiety in the relationship, particularly affecting people who had mental health problems, to begin with. It was the intensity of everything in close proximity; it’s sort of like being in a pressure cooker.”
Covid-19 may have been a once-in-a-century health crisis, but the factors governing healthy relationships have grown steadily more numerous and complex over time. Which helps to explain why Chelsea’s marriage counseling clientele has steadily increased in older couples, those married long enough for most people to assume any fundamental issues had long been resolved.
“One of the things that’s happened, and my book talks about this a great deal, is that in the twentieth century and before, what was most important was stability and being good role mates,” she says. “In other words, we divide up the responsibilities. We fulfill our roles. We raise children. We’re stable in good parts of the community. We do what we’re supposed to, and that’s it.”
“Those couples will get along fine as long as they’re role mates or maybe when they play tennis together or take a cruise where they have lots of tours and activities that don’t require them to talk to each other. If we sleep in separate bedrooms, if we don’t speak except to argue a little bit here and there, that’s not relevant. What’s relevant is that we’ve fulfilled our roles and been good people. That’s the parallel track that we’ve seen so many of our parents on.”
“Well, in the twenty-first century, which we are now well into, people are saying, ‘You know what? There’s no meaning in this relationship.’ So, the question of meaning has come to the forefront.”
Chelsea’s book also reframes many of the easy culprits that tend to come into the discussion when marriages enter choppy waters.
“A perfect example is, ‘If we just had more sex, I’d be happy.'” she says. “But when they have more sex, one of them is not present. They’re just offering their body to the other, usually the female, but she’s totally checked out. She’s running her laundry list or her grocery list for the next day and saying, ‘OK, just get this over quickly.’ Well, that’s not satisfying. What people are longing for is presence. Sex is one form of that, and I am not negating the importance of a healthy sex life, but presence can be done through a variety of forms.”
“Sometimes I say a relationship is an anthropology study; you may be speaking the same words, but those words mean something different in that other person’s dictionary. You have to find out what they need and why they need that.”
Find The Labyrinth of Love on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and chironpublications.com.
What’s Your Relationship’s Love Capacity?
The core of The Labyrinth of Love is author Chelsea Wakefield’s examination of how couples move through various levels of love capacity. That includes:
Commitment – “It’s important to be committed to a person. But you also have to be committed to a process. And then committed to presence. Person, process, presence.”
Curiosity – “I often tell couples, ‘You need to move from furious to curious.’ When you get angry, start seeking to understand what is going on between the two of you. What’s going on in you? What’s going on in me? Move to curiosity, not to attack and defend.”
Courage – “It takes a lot of courage to stay on the path of a relationship. I believe courage is something that we develop out of a trust in the context of a relationship. It is something like a muscle; we grow it. We take a risk, we succeed, we gain more courage.”
Communication – “People always come in and say, ‘We’re having problems communicating.’ But they’re actually having bigger problems and their inability to communicate is the symptom of other problems. Communication raises other questions, such as, ‘Who in you is speaking?’ If you get two little kids arguing, they have a really difficult time resolving differences. As adults we often get into arguments that are really about our inner little kid.”
Compassion – “Compassion doesn’t mean being responsible for being who you need me to be but being compassionate both towards myself and about you. When compassion comes from understanding someone deeply, it’s an automatic thing. Knowing why the other person does the things they do, what’s their history, what it is that they need.”
Creativity – “Every couple has to co-create a world that they both want to live in. And it’s up to those two people to create that world and to update it over the course of their relationship.”
