My Covid love story

From prolonged platonic prologue to a world set on fire, and why I know, I know everything's gonna be all right.

On Valentine’s Day 2020, I was finally feeling better after days of illness. I’d been sick for the better part of a week; the sickest I had been in a long time.

I had chills, fever, a persistent cough. My skin hurt. My eyeballs hurt. My lungs hurt.

There was talk of “the coronavirus” in the news, but that was still on the other side of the world, and not top of mind. I figured I had the flu.

But by Friday, February 14, I was finally starting to feel better. That meant, I knew, I’d have to deal with the string of texts I’d been avoiding from the guy I had been dating for a few weeks…my most recent in a long string of poor romantic decisions.

“Do you want me to bring you some soup?” he’d asked one day, and then “Is there anything I can do to help?” the next. My response to both questions had been extreme irritation, which seemed…irrational, given their well-meaning intent.

Finally, that morning, a text came through that read “Will you be my Valentine? That was it. I knew with utmost certainty that I did not want to be this person’s Valentine- then, or ever. And soon he knew it, too.

With relief, I relished my freedom. For the first time in a while, I was in no hurry to embroil myself in any new potentially awkward romantic entanglements.

One week later, while out with a friend at happy hour, I had my first conversation with Eric - a conversation that led to a tentative and slowly-unfolding friendship.

One month later, we texted through the beginnings of the shutdown.

And over the following months, we spent hours together, cooked each other meals, grocery-shopped together, even road-tripped together.

It took six months of platonic pandemic prologue for us to officially couple up. In retrospect, didn’t feel like a very long time. We were in lockdown, after all; there wasn’t much else going on. The world had slowed to a crawl around us and we slowed our pace to match.

Eric was my constant; my pandemic pod pal, my Costco-card connection, my lifeline when things felt a little scary. He also moved slowwwwww. And, in a manner so unlike me I almost can’t believe it was me, I just followed along at his pace.

Historically, “moving slowly” has not been in my personal dictionary. I like resolution. I liked action. I like to know where something is headed. In dating, that led to a lot of anxiety when a relationship status seemed murky. So I had a tendency of pushing things along for the sake of clarity, which, it turns out, doesn’t typically lead to real clarity, just self-deception.

Not with Eric, though. I just sat back and let him set the pace, and was surprised by how relatively relaxed it all felt.

I’d sometimes feel frustrated when he didn’t make his hoped-for move, or when I wasn’t sure how to interpret a remark or a lingering hug.

But deep down, I think I always knew where the story was leading.