How Not to Kill Your Beloved During a Pandemic

The First Rule of Fight Club…

I live with my husband, who is also my business partner. Most of the time, I really like him.

There are huge stressors sitting on our shoulders right now, worrying about whether our events business will survive months — or even a year — of not being able to have people gather there. Worrying about our staff, worrying about our clients, and our community, all above and beyond worrying about people we love getting sick.

We all have our own layers of these worries, I know. With no clear sense of when this is all going to feel anything like normal (a word I’m beginning to hate), we’re stuck, stressed about all of the things we’re normally stressed about, and a whole lot of things we aren’t normally stressed about, and a bizarre sense of taking our lives into our own hands when we leave the house. (Is that bag of Funyuns I’m jonesing for worth risking my life over? Not a question I’d ever thought I’d have to ask myself.)

When we get stressed, our flight-or-fight responses kick into high gear. And when you’re stuck in your house with your husband and business partner in the middle of a pandemic, there isn’t anywhere to flight to — so every day can become a kind of fight club.

It is REALLY easy for us to get snappy with each other. And it’s awful.

Talk About Fight Club

So, we’ve made a deal. We’re gonna talk about our fight club.

We’re trying hard to say out loud when we’re irritable, notice and mark it, and remind ourselves and each other just to breathe through it. That the irritation isn’t about each other. And we’re trying very hard not to point it at one another.

And we’re also taking a lot of time outs. Giving ourselves permission to be in a semi-vegetative state when we can’t cope. And on my end, at least, a lot of deep breathing, and checking out from the news cycle when I’m overwhelmed.

This is all helping. And we’ve got a secret weapon for when we’ve spun out so far that it gets really hard to stand enough outside of ourselves to recognize how crabby we’re really being.

The Pinky Swear Rule

When we opened the business, an uphill climb with a lot of sleepless nights and a lot of flight or fight moments, we instituted the Pinky Swear Rule.

If one of us was going over the edge into being a bundle of purely obnoxious stress, the other one would hold up a pinky, curled for a pinky swear. This was our version of a safe word: in that moment, we’d both stop talking, back off, and cool off. And remember that we did, in fact, actually like each other.

We’ve re-instituted the Pinky Swear Rule. It’s just stupid enough that it can break us out of that hyper-adrenalized need to whack at each other, and it makes us snicker.

The stressors that are getting us to crazy aren’t going to disappear for a while. And while we can — and should — do all of that self-care (another word I’m learning to hate) stuff that can help like meditation and yoga and eating the Funyuns we’ve risked our lives to get at the store, we’re still going to get up each others’ noses.

We’re all there. There is no magic way to remove our irritability. Surviving it is mostly about just remembering as well as we can to be kind to ourselves and each other even if we’re off balance.

And talk about fight club.

And maybe try a pinky swear.

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