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, and 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.
Slowly, we came to an unspoken understanding that we were each other’s person, a kind of pandemic lifeline. In the summer, when lockdown briefly lifted, we went on a handful of day trips and long walks and set our bond in stone. It wasn’t just work we had in common, it turned out, but a shared obsession with Shirley Jackson, a willingness to talk endlessly about the Real Housewives, and a borderline misanthropic sense of humor. (If you didn’t laugh at the unrelenting bleakness of the past year, after all, you’d have to cry.)
When I think back to all the times I’ve fallen in love, I tended to gloss over the parts of myself that I didn’t like, to save those bits for later. But building this friendship, I realized the value of really being known. It set off a chain reaction: The more I shared, the easier the sharing became, and soon I’d found the confidence to discuss how I was truly feeling with other people too—including those smug, coupled-up friends I still check in on every now and then. Even with limited social contact, I was developing a more mature understanding of how I wanted to enter the next phase of my life, and what I wanted from my relationships. I don’t need a string of sweet nothings to feel or express intimacy, just a partnership that feels reassuring, reliable, and, most importantly, honest.
Who knows when I will actually be able to date again, or what new crisis will arise to throw that possibility back into jeopardy. But I’m ready to try—and grateful that until then, I can ring my friend any time of day or night and be met on the other end with a sympathetic ear. For now, that’s plenty.