COVID-19 and Your Marriage….So Many Questions.

Being totally transparent as marriage counselors, we want you to know we are just like you: we are in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and we have way more questions than answers. We find ourselves in our homes (which seem to get smaller by the day) with our families (whom we used to be much more fond of) spending a lot more time (24 hours seems often like 40) than we are used to spending all together. So we dusted off our laptops (that are now being used to communicate with our clients through video sessions), and put our brains and expertise together to come up with tools and strategies to help your marriage survive COVID-19. We will share these in future posts, so stay tuned.

Now back to the questions we have been pondering—most of which we truly do not have the answers to:

• What is the acceptable time to change from daytime to nighttime pajamas?
• What is the CDC recommendation for wine consumption while in quarantine?
• Do the effects of screen time on the gray matter in a child’s brain apply during quarantine?
• When does my spouse go back to work? Can it be any sooner? Is it okay to wish they would leave now? Why do we say “workaholic” is a negative term during this pandemic?
• How do you stop a group text with people sending memes that you have already seen in about 37 of your other group texts? And how do you politically bow out when everyone has to like, thumbs up, ha ha, or exclamation point every fricking one?
• Have you (for even one minute) fantasized about committing a non-violent crime because police are not doing anything about those in the moment? (Oh yeah, we haven’t either.)
• Is it okay to call a struggling restaurant to complain about a misorder in your delivery? What if they forgot your guacamole, then is it’s okay? 
• What is a list of acceptable ways to get off a phone call because everyone knows you have nothing to do and no reason to end the call?
• How do you say “No” to the Zoom invite from a friend? Again, they know we are not really doing anything at home except attempting to corral our children into some sort of routine and structure that they complain about endlessly.
• Is it okay to really enjoy being quarantined?
• How can you effectively sneak into your room and binge watch TV after having just complained to your children that you can literally smell their minds rotting from TV overconsumption?
• How truly unprofessional is it to wear pajama bottoms and a fancy shirt during video sessions with clients if they can only see the top part of you?
• What if you lose count in hand-washing seconds because every single member of your family is trying to talk to you at the same time?
• Is it selfish to hide the last roll of “good” toilet paper in your closet and let the others in your house use the sandpaper stuff that was the only kind left in the store? What if you shared a few squares with your spouse when they were being extra helpful?
• What were we thinking when we wished we weren’t so busy and that we just had some down time?
• How in the hell do teachers do it?

We have found great relief right now through laughter.  We know there are some tough, stressful and flat out scary situations out there.  We hope to provide quarantined couples with some tools and strategies in future posts and also some light-hearted laughs too!

Stay safe, stay sane, we are all in this together. 

Lori and Shanna