Dear Carolyn: My boyfriend and I graduated from high school as the pandemic hit, and instead of going to university with all the uncertainty about classes, we moved in together and started working full time.
Everyone was working from home and it felt like a dream job, but now that everyone is back to their normal lives, I’ve been stuck at home and I feel isolated and lonely. We have drifted from our friend group and don’t see them on a regular basis. I feel out of touch and have started to feel depressed. I gained weight and became more solitary than I previously was.
Nowadays I work from home, watch TV, make dinner, wait for my boyfriend to come home, we watch TV together, and start the day over again. He works 10-hour days, after which he just wants to watch TV and rest. When we do go out it’s for grocery shopping and other errands and we argue all the time. I’ve been feeling neglected and it feels like I’m not a priority anymore despite multiple conversations.
So finally three weeks ago he brought me out to dinner at a nice place and we had a wonderful time! The weekend after that he bought me flowers and scones from a local bakery, and I started to feel like he was making me a priority again. I was so happy and feeling better about myself and our relationship, I had almost pushed all my doubts out of my mind. Then last weekend he proposed, and I said yes.
Now I’m worried I just said yes because there wasn’t a reason to say no, the relationship is “good” and “safe,” and breaking up and moving out would be messy and hard. I know he would be a great father and husband one day and he’s a very sweet and a genuinely caring person. He is the type of guy you would want to marry. Am I doing this for the wrong reasons?
— Worried
Worried: I think you know you are without my having to say it. “Good” and “safe” are neither if you are lonely, depressed, isolated, overeating, out of touch and deep in a repetitive domestic rut. He may be as great a person as you say, and even as good a match for you as you have told yourself he is. You trust him, you respect him, and when you voiced your ongoing concerns about feeling neglected, he listened to you and made “genuinely caring” changes. I receive distress calls every day from marriages built on less.
But that doesn’t mean you have enough to build on, or are anywhere near ready to build. That’s because you have not made yourself enough of a priority, lapsing into dependency on the quality of one person’s attention. No mate can be everything, for anyone. Your soul is screaming out for more: more purpose, more meaning, more challenges, more friends, more connections, more interesting things to see, learn, do. The post-pandemic realities have changed but your mid-pandemic choices have not. You’re a fly in 2020 amber.
Some of this you will need to say to your fiancé. That you appreciate how attentive he has been, for starters. That you realize now it was not all on him that you felt so neglected. That losing touch with friends and working from home and cycling from job to TV to sleep is not healthy for people who’ve barely cracked open their 20s. . .or for anyone, really. That it hasn’t been healthy for you. That you would like to start a running conversation on ways to pull yourself, and each other, out of this rut.
But some of this you will have to reckon with fully on your own. A daily commitment to building a fuller life. This will be hard and take time, but stay with it, and resist the lure of binary thinking. You’ve framed this as good/safe versus messy/hard without giving creative, scary, bold, new or different a chance. Call your old friends. Take a class or join a rec league and make new friends. Dance. Sing. Make art. Volunteer. See a doctor about your depression. Look for an in-person job. Research and visit colleges.
Ask yourself what roads lead out of your comfort zone. Ask yourself what you’d rather be doing tonight, tomorrow, next week. Ask yourself whom you admire. How did they get there? Think of when you last felt confident, happy and strong. Who was close to you then, and can you catch up with this person now?
If your response to all these prompts is to feel emotionally paralyzed, then you can cut your to-do list to these: 1. Primary care appointment for the depression. 2. One baby step, one micro-change, in defiance of your rut. A walk outside after work? One call to one friend? This path makes you stronger, too. Your relationship will either adapt and improve as you take better care of yourself, or you will grow strong enough to address the fact that it hasn’t kept up. Either one beats living your life by default.
