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COVID-19 has made bad situations worse. People with relationship problems became estranged. Beer drinkers graduated to gin. It’s the result of more stress, and fewer outlets for stress. And that’s not all. Just as society (gingerly) reopens, and we expect things to improve (more or less), it’s stressful just to realize that things aren’t all that better. We’re still wearing masks. The economy is still shaky. Nobody’s rejoicing. “Wasn’t the curve supposed to have an ‘upswing?’” one of my patients asked. Dismay feeds on itself, and our feelings—about ourselves, about our world—keep spiraling downwards.
Such was the case with my patient Brett, a film producer I’ve worked with for years. He’s married to a partner at a law firm, Karen, who works 80-hour weeks. One of their two boys is moderately autistic, and may never live independently. But when Brett worked on-site and the kids were in school, the family bumped along. He resented Karen’s frequent nights at the office (“She actually has a convertible sofa!”), and her travel to client meetings (“Why can’t lawyers just Zoom?”), but there was always help in the evenings. Always “was.” The situation was just waiting for COVID to disrupt it.
In fact, since the lockdown, Brett has been stuck at home; the kids have no summer activities; and Karen is afraid to admit outside help. Brett’s domestic duties have doubled. He refers to himself as a child custodian who happens to produce movies from home. Or tries to.
It’s not that Karen is still at her office. It’s just that when the family moved to their country home in April, she took the office with her. She now spends 12-hour days on the computer, and starts calling China at 6 a.m. Shortly after the move, Brett thought things would improve (“Well, at least she can’t travel”), but they didn’t. “If anything, they’re worse,” he said. “She’s here but she isn’t.” He feels like she’s snubbing him. The resentment has grown.
When Brett came to see me recently (on Zoom), he’d ramped up his drinking. He said he’d always enjoyed a drink, like when he huddled with the writers on a script. So what? But now, without the usual professional constraints, it had become a problem. At first it was just a beer when the kids went to bed; then he added one while they were having supper; then when they were having lunch and supper; then there was the night-cap—a few shots of scotch. Karen was incensed. She warned that she’d throw him out of the house and divorce him if the drinking didn’t stop. He really tried to stop. But when Karen was away on travel a couple of weeks ago (yes, during the pandemic), he relapsed. When she called one night, he was passed out on the couch. The younger boy, around 10 years old, answered and described the situation. When she returned, she insisted that he leave. He returned to their apartment in the city.
Now they’ve been separated for a couple weeks. He speaks on FaceTime with the boys every day, and he visited them one of the weekends. He’s sobered up and joined AA (virtually). But AA was not a great fit for his binge drinking and, even though he’s committed to sobriety, he envisions the inevitable relapse. “Look,” he said, “I had too much of the kids, and now I don’t have enough. Either way, it’s stress.”
Worse still, when he’d visited over the weekend, his wife rejected his affection. Sex with Karen had been lackluster for several years, but Brett had tried to tell himself that was because of her punishing schedule. But now, she made clear that they’d drifted apart for good. “She said, ‘Maybe it’s my fault. But I don’t have the time or the interest to work on it.’” When he got back to Manhattan that evening, predictably he drank three scotches in an hour.
When we next spoke, I asked about what he hoped might happen. He said that he loves his kids, which he clearly does, and thought it was better that they all be together. He even reaffirmed his commitment not to drink. But then he paused, and said, “You know, it’s hard when your wife doesn’t want you. I’m actually sort of stuck.”
Indeed, he was. Marriage is hard enough when you’re raising ordinary children. Disabled kids add a whole new dimension of responsibility and commitment. So, we spoke about whether Karen’s obsession with work might have been her response to (retreat from) the stress of her son’s disability. We spoke about whether her rejection of Brett was a type of displaced guilt, since Brett had accepted the responsibility of raising their son, however imperfectly. I said that since the pandemic, with the usual buffers now removed, all of this is out in the open. “The stress and the guilt have been there for a while, but now they’re greater. They’re out in the open when, before, they were kind of repressed.”
That made sense to him. He asked, with a hint of absurdity, “So, you think a vaccine will get us back to where our pathologies are just simmering?”
No, actually. What wasn’t said, now has been.
So, Brett is living apart from his wife and kids. He spoke with his wife a couple of times, but she was indifferent to patching things up. “She doesn’t want me back,” he acknowledged. He said that even though they loved each other, it was—at least for her—an “abstraction,” a memory of how they once were. “That was before the kids and the partnership.” He said that had the virus not hit, they might have continued a while longer. “But I guess this has crystallized everything. She basically wants a lover, not a family with responsibility.”
So, at least in Brett’s mind, the virus accelerated what would have happened anyway. He said he’d probably known about Karen’s feelings for years, but hadn’t wanted to face it. “Maybe that’s another reason I started to drink—the kids, of course, but also that growing sense that we were finally breaking up.”
“Did Karen know too?” I asked. “Maybe,” he said, “but she was too busy to care, and I made it easy for her.” The problem, I thought, was that Karen never knew how to set boundaries. She was all-in or absent. She chose absence, if just to protect herself.
Over the years, I’d met with them a few times as a couple, and it helped—for a while. But Brett was now pretty sure that nothing would help, and that it was probably just as well. I asked if he thought this was okay for kids. “No, but what’s the choice? Kids pick up on a bad marriage, and I can’t put them through that.” He thought maybe she’d find someone else once the pandemic was over.
In this time of COVID, a lot of relationships are experiencing external stresses that exacerbate the stress that already exists. You could say that people are finding themselves in the process. But they are also losing what has mattered to them for a long time. There will never be a vaccine against that.
