Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day until Valentine’s Day.
This time last year, I was pretty happy in my singledom. I’d decided that for 2020, I was going to prioritize work, partly due to the fact that I was still licking my wounds from a relationship that had ended the year before. I wasn’t talking about it very much, something I rationalized as a side-effect of being British; emotional communication is, well, not exactly our forte. My social life mostly revolved around seeing a handful of coupled-up friends for dinner and a movie every so often. There was something reassuring about it: feeling like I could slip into the orbit of a family unit for an evening and just as easily slip out again.
Then, at the end of March, London entered its first lockdown. Not long after, those same friends started booking their grocery deliveries a few weeks ahead and planning their Netflix itineraries each evening. It was every man for himself—understandably so—though all of a sudden, just as I was settling into the rhythm of my newfound single life, it began to lose its luster.
Instinctively, I began speaking more to my single friends, with one quickly emerging as an unlikely confidant. I’d first met her through work, chatting a few years earlier via the odd Instagram DM, sharing a bit of gossip here, a meme there. But during the early days of lockdown, our conversation moved to WhatsApp and started running a little deeper, especially as we revealed we were both trying to get through that nightmare of a year by ourselves. Within weeks, I’d told her things about myself I had felt too nervous to share with my exes until we’d been seeing each other for months. And it was a relief, not having to worry I was annoying her partner by idly texting her with my most deranged thoughts at any hour of the day, the notification dings disrupting their nightly movies. Maybe she would have the same thoughts too, and want to share them with me?
It turned out she did. For the past nine months, our conversations have snowballed into near-constant nattering. We update each other on how we’re feeling each morning; we share Spotify playlists; we dial in whenever one of us is having a particularly rough time. It’s a back-and-forth so easy I really can only compare it to the mindless, free-flowing exchanges I had with my previous partners.
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