Dating : On Being Dumped During Corona Times

How it feels to lose the only person you’ve been able to see since lockdown.

This morning begins the same as every other, I reluctantly pull back the curtains to blinding sunlight, decide on whether this is a day I’ll shower, then half dress myself, and slip into my seat hastily to get to my first meeting of the day — coffee glued to hand.

It’s not glamorous, not something to model one’s mornings on, but it’s mine, my quarantine days, and as I observe the round of ‘good mornings’ from my teammates on Slack I am filled with a bleakness that freezes me, I barely muster a ‘morning’, and decide I won’t have my camera on today.

Yesterday I broke up with my ‘boyfriend’ of roughly 5 months. It wasn’t a whirlwind relationship, and he wasn’t the love of my life, but we did meet in a grocery store, and spend the weekend lazily doing ‘couple things’ so it was rather charming, and the organic element of it all promised hope and some longevity.

This is a gray area of sickness, I know my full focus is needed to keep up with the requirements of my intense job working in a Berlin startup, but as the day goes on, and I entertain texts and voice notes from my friends offering recaps of the final scenes between us, I notice that my heart refuses to slow.

A loss as close as yesterday

I can’t breathe. It started last night, when he decided to go full-throttle with his brutally-honest (some could say German) assessment of our relationship’s impending doom.

This is not something I want … I don’t think we are made for each other … I don’t see a future with us … This is a burden for me … (and my personal favourite) Not that you would do this, but can I ask that you don’t try to entangle me back in this situation, because it is not what I want.

As a fully-bloomed Brit, I am quietly admirous of his ability to be so straight, utterly flabbergasted by his harshness, whilst wondering whether he thinks I’m going to turn up to his place drunk or almost naked to try to fold him back into my life. I might have done that before, but come on, I am a grown up now.

I am 28, and this is really my first adult break up, there was no screaming, no unnecessary meanness. Just the quietness of a church, intense stares and statements that end with large suffocating full stops.

You know it’s bad when you start Googling symptoms

So I can move on, and I try that. I dive into projects and answer people’s questions, but all the while I am deep breathing to keep myself running smoothly, just like my laptop. Until a break to the bathroom, where I find myself making ‘oooh’ sounds like I am giving birth or something, holding onto the sides of the bath and the room is spinning. I lie down and try to pacify myself and Google my symptoms along with the words ‘break up’.

Apparently, these are the physical manifestations of a broken heart, and I must have one of those, though my denial of it is rather impressive, but I also have deadlines and a presentation at 5pm. Flashbacks after a break up are fierce like paper cuts, they leave you squirming with fresh blood that you have to press away. I remember scenes of snuggles, head tilted back laughter, and getting pissed on canned Gin and Tonics in the various parks of Berlin.

A new category of loneliness

In so many ways this day is more profoundly empty than I’ve felt in a long time, but my desktop notification keeps it full of corporate bullshit, and sweet texts that say I am here if you want to talk, but I don’t want to talk anymore, I don’t want to write any messages either. That’s a lie, I want to send one single message to his phone in all caps that reads:

‘BUT I MISS YOU’

I will never send it though, so it remains in me, stifling my breathing and loosening my tears.

As a usually eternally single person, this shouldn’t be so world shaking for me, but I note with regret, that there is a difference: before boy enters and after. New holes have opened up — filling with loneliness. My tears now are angry ones. My golden alone time also vandalized with post-it notes of ‘loneliness’.

And what a time, in these Corona times, when I know there is no remedy, nor healthy nor destructive way to fill that void. Everything is miles away, him, bodies, friends, my mum, reason — and just like that I am a child again, not eating, frustrated and crying myself to sleep.