COVID-19 and Codependency

COVID-19’s unexpected impact on love and its languages

By Lisa Alexander

Going home on March 6th last year, I was on top of the world. I had just finished a hellish week at school, but the satisfaction of completing midterms and a final paper was unparalleled. That day was the start of spring break. Everything—it seemed—just kept getting better. My boyfriend and I had just celebrated his birthday by eating Thai food, watching the then-trending movie “Parasite,” and going out with his friends. The next week we spent together starting our first anime show and making both failed and successful replicas of the Pioneer dining hall's vegan stir-fry. It wasn't the cliché or crazy college spring break. But for me, it was perfect.

Right as I was on top of the world, the rest of the world started to fall apart. What I had first brushed off as a common cold, and something that only my paranoid mother continued to worry over, had taken the world by storm: the coronavirus.

At first, nothing changed. My boyfriend and I continued to get together almost every day, watch anime, and talk about how crazy COVID-19 was—which seemed to be the only thing anyone could talk about anymore. 

While the coronavirus hysteria continued to build, the toilet paper supply dwindled. As cases rose, both our families began to create tighter and tighter rules. My mother and his father both have pre-existing conditions that make them slightly more susceptible to COVID-19, and they are both doctors at the local hospital. The regulations around our houses were a little stricter than the rest. 

We began to see each other once a week. As the distanced weeks went by, I noticed myself getting crabbier and crabbier. For context, if you know anything about me, you know that I am quite bubbly most of the time. But with him, all of this pent-up frustration of a mysterious origin was turning me into a curmudgeon with the person I loved most in the world. I would get upset over my boyfriend finishing “Jurassic Park” without me, reading old text messages, and even by him suggesting that my dog, Sasha, wasn't the cutest in the world. For the record, he is still incredibly incorrect about Sasha. I took that frustration out on my boyfriend in the forms of little arguments. Admittedly, these arguments began to feel like the only time we spent talking, because it forced my boyfriend to focus his energy on me.

To distract me from any unexplainable frustration, I would scroll through TikTok for hours. I came across a video referring to love languages and realized that I had heard the phrase before but never really understood what the hell a love language actually was. As my curiosity sparked, I found myself searching through BuzzFeed and Cosmopolitan for answers. In essence, a love language is one of five ways humans express our love for one another. The five love languages are words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, receiving gifts, and physical touch. 

As I read, a lightbulb went off in my brain. Regardless of who was acknowledging my love languages, I value two: words of affirmation and quality time. This gave me some clarity into what the hell was going on in my brain. My boyfriend and I don't communicate the same at all, especially over text. Where I am dramatic and wordy, he is calm and conscious. However, this was something I already knew. It was something that we had worked through together. 

Gaining the self-awareness that I prioritize quality time is what I took away from that research. In college, I was always surrounded by friends—whether in my dorm, classes, study halls, or in the cafeteria. In this new COVID-19 conscious world, I only saw my family for six out of the seven days of the week. And while I was taking more accessible classes, my boyfriend was slaving away at the College of Science and Engineering homework, which left me feeling lonely and frustrated. In an attempt to get quality time from others, I found that I would consistently berate my friends—who were dealing with their own version of quarantine struggles—with unanswered texts. I had finally figured out why I was so frustrated all the time: It wasn't any underlying anger with my boyfriend. It was the harsher truth that I was unable to spend nor enjoy quality time with myself. I had lost my sense of independence. 

I wish I could say this newfound self-awareness was enough to release unwarranted anxiety, lose my codependent nature with my boyfriend, and fix all my pandemic problems. But it wasn't. 

I wish I could say that stumbling over that TikTok cured my prior and global pandemic related anxiety. But it didn't. 

In reality, I knew that I needed time alone to "find myself again." I spent months trying to regain the independence that I had lost. I began to read and paint, and I just became comfortable sitting with myself. I became passionate about activism, fundraising, researching miscellaneous things, and so much more that I had lost in my college’s stressful academic environment. 

It would be nice to say that the pandemic created all my issues and my relationship’s issues. It would be so convenient to absolve myself of all responsibility. But it would also be untrue. In reality, it took a pandemic to unearth that I was codependent on other people's love and had to learn to live by simply loving myself.