Mononormativity affects how we view relationships and even mental health. For example, many therapists consider the ability to maintain a long-term, monogamous relationship as a sign of emotional health. But that is not true for everyone. Some people choose not to be in exclusive relationships—not because they fear intimacy, but because they do not feel that monogamy fits their values or desires. They may believe that monogamy is a rule created by evolution, government, or religion, rather than a personal truth.

People who prefer open relationships, polyamory (having multiple loving partners), asexuality (not experiencing sexual attraction), or casual sex are often unfairly seen as immature or emotionally unhealthy. But instead of judging these people, we should be asking a different question: Are their relationships working for them?

A 2015 study* found that people in nontraditional relationships were just as healthy, happy, and sexually satisfied as those in monogamous ones. The study used the term (non)monogamy to include all the different ways people manage emotional and sexual connections—whether with one person or many. This idea encourages us to see relationships as existing on a spectrum, rather than fitting into neat categories. It allows for a more human and flexible understanding of how people connect.

People in non-monogamous relationships often face judgment from others, including family, friends, and society. They also must deal with their own internalized beliefs about what relationships “should” look like—which might induce feelings of jealousy or ownership. That is why it is important for people to be honest with themselves about what they truly want and need, and to clearly communicate and agree on relationship rules with their partners. These agreements should be flexible and open to change as needed.

In therapy, when clients feel unsure or conflicted about monogamy, a helpful approach is to separate their sexual needs from their emotional needs. Sexual needs come from physical desire and hormones, while emotional needs come from the desire to feel connected, loved, and secure. Sometimes, these needs can overlap, as in romantic relationships. Where they do not overlap, however, is where we need to look.

The goal in therapy is not to push someone toward monogamy or any one lifestyle. It is to help them understand their own desires and figure out how to meet those needs in a healthy, honest way. By doing this, people can accept themselves as they are, rather than trying to fit into narrow societal standards that may not bring them true happiness.

*Van Eeden-Moorefield, B., Malloy, K., & Benson, K. (2015, Dec. 14). Gay Men’s (Non)Monogamy Ideals and Lived Experience. Sex Roles, 75, 43-55.

Photo by Mario Häfliger on Unsplash

Part 1: The Singles

Among approximately 30 of my single friends and clients, one-third are currently off the dating market completely. Half of those had just gotten out of bad relationships, avoid relationships, hate online dating, and so on. But the other half of this “off the singles market” group has reacted to Coronavirus lockdown by burrowing deep into isolation in a search for safety and an effort to keep out the virus-filled world. They are continually taking their “risk temperatures” and deciding against taking a risk. The results of this reaction, the physical, emotional, and cognitive effects of isolation, are well known, with depression and anxiety just the tip of the iceberg. Working with these clients means helping them counter the isolationist urge as much as possible under the circumstances.

Of the other 20 singles, fully eight of them have fallen head-over-heels in love during Coronavirus time. They are currently waltzing absent-mindedly in a fog, magically bewitched by a stranger’s spell, lost in a “love-trance,” as Sappho called it some 2,500 years ago. And the remaining twelve singles are just itching to follow them. Their yearning for infatuation has been magnified by the pandemic.

Love in the time of Coronavirus, like “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Gabriel García Márquez’s 1985 novel, asks us to question passion, especially unbalancing, obsessional, sexualized passion, and its role in our wants and needs. Freud supposedly refused to work with infatuated people (probably apocryphal), and literature is full of besotted lovers who throw reason—and possibly pandemic safety?—out the door. I don’t blame these folks, except for the safety issues. Indeed, they—like all single people under lockdown and fearful of health issues—are sitting ducks, plumped and ripened emotionally and physiologically for Cupid’s diverting arrow.

What makes current infatuations suspicious are the extreme effects of the pandemic on loneliness and alienation. Preexisting psychological issues can be exacerbated by enforced solitude and make us long for and susceptible to magic fixes. Even in the best of times, codependency, lack of purpose, bad relationship role models, etc., can produce proclivities that propel us into infatuation. In Coronavirusville, loneliness, isolation, and death stalk each of us. No wonder the attraction of “love!” As Erich Fromm advises us in “The Art of Loving,” when two strangers suddenly drop their defenses and see each other, feel close, and combine that with sex, it is “one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life…. [Lovers] take the intensity of the infatuation, this being “crazy” about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.”

Another way to look at infatuation is through physiology. Everyone needs hugs, singles maybe more so. The oxytocin released in a 30-second hug comforts us and reminds us that we are not alone in the universe and we are lovable. Where do singles get their hugs nowadays, with lockdown? As if dating wasn’t hard enough anyway, now singles are faced with enforced social, sexual, and emotional starvation.

If they can manage to dance around the safety rules and finally, really date, singles, as always, run the (hoped-for) risk of flooding their systems with dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. Lust and sex release testosterone and estrogen. Emotional closeness calls forth more oxytocin and vasopressin. This hormonal soup called “infatuation” adds up to a love potion that takes these isolated, quarantined people out of themselves and assures them they will never again be lonely, bored, frustrated, or without purpose. Thus, the brain, playing along, quickly becomes addicted to a physiological and emotional fix.

My advice to single friends and clients, both those who date and those who avoid others: You are bearing the emotional and sexual brunt of the pandemic, so it’s even more important—crucial—to keep up your independent self-care practices: a healthy work/life balance, meditation, exercise, Zoom calls with friends, regular doses of humor, walks on the beach, spiritual practices, deep breathing, creative pursuits, new learning, reading, hiking, in short, making every effort to keep your life as busy and enjoyable and self-nurturing as possible. Don’t rely on others to provide that.

And if you do become infatuated, enjoy the sense of aliveness it brings, since it doesn’t happen all that often. Just don’t forget you’re under the influence of some powerful chemicals and reacting to some very trying and lonely-making times. But who can blame you? We are all looking for comfort these days, just in different ways.

Read Part Two

David Bowman LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist based in Los Angeles, California.

Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash

Part 2: The Couples

As the quarantine continues, friends, colleagues, and clients I know who are coupled up have had to adapt and face issues that singles haven’t. For one thing, the constant presence of another person in their space—and under duress of infecting each other with a deadly virus—can be too much to bear. Coping strategies seem to have coalesced around basic relationship skills and self-care.

Even under prime conditions, all members of couples need time alone—as every human does—especially if living together or in a small space. Before COVID, many normal relationship problems were avoided and even prevented as long as there were outside work and friends and social activities. But now, under lockdown, those solutions no longer exist, and the problems can no longer be avoided.

Coping with COVID has proven to be a much more difficult task for those in newer relationships, those who had been dating less than a year or are still dancing around the infatuation tree. For many of these couples, quarantine was seen at first as a lark, an excuse to move in together, solidify the relationship, help each other weather the lockdown, and cocoon. What seemed like a good idea was not: like jumping into a pressure cooker. Love in the time of Coronavirus, for these folks, was a difficult lesson in the need to refrain from giving up personal space and autonomy too quickly in exchange for regular sex and a temporary cure for loneliness.

In couples who have been together a longer time (measured in years), daily life and the passage from the infatuation phase into a balanced, long-term emotional and sexual relationship have taught good lessons about how to coexist in stressful times with a partner under pressure. And if they haven’t, the time of Coronavirus is teaching them now. The nature of these times is putting more burdens on the relationship, and these couples continue to learn how to support each other and keep themselves whole besides.

These couples have learned how and when to talk to each other, avoid each other, negotiate with each other, comfort each other, and so on. Many couples have had to renegotiate living together, redefining chores, joint hobbies, responsibilities, time together versus apart, sex, care of other family members, etc. Renegotiation requires patience, forbearance, love, and imagination. In almost every case of renegotiation, I have seen couples grow stronger, more capable, and more loving.

One issue of contention in both long- and short-term relationships can be the disparity between the partners’ individual comfort levels with differing degrees of COVID safety measures. As public health guidelines are relaxed and tightened, and as people grow tired and numb, this disparity can cause friction and even mistrust between partners. One partner’s relaxed COVID rules can be another’s proof of not caring. Is compromise possible if one partner’s peace of mind and sense of safety is at stake? So far, according to the couples I see, it seems not. Most couples I know have adopted the wishes of the partner with the most stringent safety needs, sometimes causing resentment in the other partner.

Pandemic paranoia can be as much a problem for couples as it can be for singles. Couples can withdraw into their own isolated universe, reinforcing each other’s fears in a kind of intellectual incest. We see this often with families, where there are more people to reinforce the paranoia. They end up feeling unsafe anywhere else or with anyone else.

My advice to friends and clients currently in relationships: You are bearing the standard for what love in the time of Coronavirus can do. Take care of each other. With death and infection stalking the country, your ability to provide love, comfort, and safety to another, and to receive it from another, is what gets us through these dark days. The temptation in a relationship, however, is to give all your time and attention to the other. Just remember that if you do, and if you don’t keep up your independent self-care practices, you’ll soon have nothing left to give. Remember that in order to increase your patience with your partner and to be ready for the needs of the relationship, you must first take care of yourself.

Read Part One here

David Bowman LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist based in Los Angeles, California.

Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash