Pandemic Dating Diaries
The Pandemic Dating Diaries is a TBI series that features moments in love, dating, and sex during Covid-19 directly from our readers. Have a story you’d like to submit? Email us or DM us on Twitter or Instagram.
On March 16, my partner of eight years, Josh, and I were walking friends’ dogs by the Cliff House overlooking Ocean Beach when I pulled out my phone to take a picture of the vast ocean dotted with surfers. That’s when I noticed a text from AlertSF, which had recently taken a dark turn from telling me about minor traffic incidents to encouraging me to wash my hands and avoid large groups.
I read aloud to Josh: “Urgent Official Health Order: Slow Covid-19 spread. Residents to stay home except for essential activities.”
Josh and I looked at each other, wide-eyed and silent. Honestly, despite our fear, we breathed a sigh of relief. We were crawling out of our skins with unclear news reports and predictions and felt more curmudgeonly than we cared to feel at age 38. I’d already been working at home for a week, and we’d stocked the pantry with five-pound bags of rice and beans and, yes, toilet paper.
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Little did we know, that walk was the first of many that would serve as a lifeline during the pandemic and connect us in a shared experience.
Instead of taking summer adventures to Mexico and Hawaii or visiting family and friends across the country, we were now stuck in a city we’d both lived in for nearly 10 years.
We were also stuck in a pattern revolving around my growing malaise at work, rejections from agents, and my new reality of taking antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications. Not to mention Josh’s languishing job search, which I had a way of making all about me and my problems.
Even though I loved working from home, I wasn’t used to all the days seeming the same, where I was home all the time to fester in my own anxiety and observe (and judge) Josh’s habits. We spent dinners ranting about the world and forgetting about the person with feelings sitting across the table.
We didn’t miraculously come up with walking as the cure to our discontent. It was actually thanks to a friend of ours who decided to ride out the initial wave in Hawaii — and left us with his dog for three months.
We’d take our stressed selves out the front door and across the Outer Sunset. It didn’t take long for us to assume our standard relationship roles: me packing snacks and hand sanitizer, planning for our departure a full day beforehand; Josh taking us down alleyways that connect Ortega and Moraga streets and scrambling up the cliffs at the end of Mile Rock Beach rather than turn around and deal with the possibly coronavirus-infected Saturday crowds.
He has made me more comfortable with spontaneity, and he needs a dose of my pragmatism now and then.
One day, we were scrambling across rocks between Baker Beach and the Golden Gate Bridge. Josh went up ahead to see if there was a way out, leaving me and the dog stranded on a particularly precarious boulder. It was a two-person job to get the dog out of there, so I perched, seething, one bad pull on the leash away from sliding 10 feet down to the water, indignant that I’d been right all along to not want to go out this far.
After what felt like forever, Josh returned and helped me down. I swallowed the lump in my throat that normally tells me a particular fight isn’t worth picking and told Josh that the whole thing had felt shitty.
But not as shitty as I felt about the state of the world.
It was relieving, in a way, to have a relatively minor spat with Josh: Here was a problem that felt manageable. Something that we could, together, overcome. Only in a pandemic could I feel grateful for conflict with my person.
Our walks, which had grown to well over 10 miles every Saturday, gave us plentiful opportunities to share experiences and observations. New ones! Not rants from Twitter or the news! We could step away and realize that we could still care, very deeply, about the election and about racism, but we could also care about finding new staircases we couldn’t see the top of as they ascended into the eucalyptus below Mount Sutro, noticing which restaurants were opening with outdoor seating, which houses had Black Lives Matter signs in their windows, and which Slow Streets allowed chalk-drawing contests and bike races for neighborhood kids. Even after the dog returned home, we kept walking.
One day in August, Josh told an acquaintance that he was happy to be stuck with his best friend, and my heart surged: I don’t remember him ever calling me his best friend to someone else in all our years together.
For the first time since the pandemic started, I don’t feel stuck. I feel happy to be walking with my best friend.
Oh, and we ended up adopting our own dog, so the walks continue.
