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How to Find Alone Time When You’re Together 24/7
Time apart can save your relationship during the pandemic
For the better part of 2019, my boyfriend of more than seven years and I shared roughly 60 square feet of space, nearly 24 hours a day. We were on a grand adventure, driving around the United States for months in the cargo van we converted into a camper. We discovered pretty quickly that when there’s nowhere to go cool off, and nobody can sleep on the couch for a night, you’ve got to get creative about dealing with tension. It’s a lesson we learned the hard way; there were some serious blowouts before we got good at close-quarters conflict resolution.
We had no idea we were training for a six-month quarantine.
Thanks to that time on the road last year, our relationship has weathered the pandemic’s stay-at-home order — and the intricacies of working simultaneously from home — really well. We still fight, but now we do it with radical efficiency: We get our grievances out quickly and honestly, and keep it moving. We’ve also become experts at finding time to ourselves without being, well, by ourselves, and that’s kept things relatively cool in our three-bedroom house in rural Pennsylvania — which may as well be a palatial estate compared to our Ford Transit.
“Now all we have is time…
