Yes, you really need to start seeing other people.
You’ve been vaccinated. You’ve joyfully ripped off your mask when outdoors. Now it’s time to pop your quarantine bubble, right?
But finding a good moment to break up the pandemic pod can be tricky. Do you call a meeting? Send a group text to the “quaranteam”? Ceremoniously rip up a contract? Is it possible to ghost someone when they’re practically living in your house?
It may get intense. The quarantine, said Margaret Clark, a psychology professor and director of the Clark Relationship Science Laboratory at Yale University, seemed to have served as a relationship magnifier. “If your relationships were already fraught, the quarantine made them more fraught.”
That might be doubly true for one’s podmates, who have had to become surrogates for all other relationships. “We all have a variety of relationships that serve different purposes,” said Dr. Clark. “Without them, more responsibilities fell on those you were with.”
The emotions that swirl around pod breakups will vary, said Schekeva Hall, a Brooklyn-based clinical psychologist. “They’ll include guilt, despair, regret, scorn and even glee. I’ve heard it all.”
As painful as it can be when quaranteams dissolve, said Dr. Hall, “it’s important to recognize that although you had a shared experience, this does not necessarily always translate to being or feeling the same.” Give yourself and your podmates some space post-breakup, she advised, in order to get some perspective, and to clarify if and how you want the relationship to continue.
But that’s not always how it goes. Here, five tales of how quarantine bubbles popped, imploded or refused to burst.
Are you … cheating on me?
The bubble that Melissa Petro, a New York City freelance writer, formed with four mom friends and their families in upstate New York was, at first, a Shangri-La of invite-only play dates — a utopian commune without the patchouli.
“We had the community we had always longed for, we were sharing resources, and our children were frolicking in the backyard garden together and living their best communal life.” They started calling each other “sister wives.” They baked cakes for each other’s birthdays.
Then, despite having agreed as a group to a set of strict safety standards, the podmates began to stray. Confessions were made of a clandestine massage, a trip to the hairdresser, a covert train journey to the city.
As more infidelities surfaced, arguments broke out. “Why did we have this pod when we were all seeing other people?” said Ms. Petro. “It’s like saying you’re married and you’re sleeping with everybody. Nobody wanted to commit. I was like, ‘I promise to stop getting my daily latte at the cafe if you stop letting your family visit.’”
A tense meeting was called, and they all agreed to disband before Thanksgiving. “For a minute there, before it exploded, it was really hot and heavy,” said Ms. Petro, wistfully. “We were all in love.” They’ve seen each other post-breakup, she said, “and we’re kind of there again, but not completely. Because you can’t go back to that naïveté.”
It’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday.
After spending the first third of 2020 in pandemic solitary, Joe Silva, host of Georgia Public Broadcasting’s “Athens 441” radio show, decided to “bubble it up” with four friends. All hard-core movie buffs, they liked convening to complain about matters of weight, such as the death of cinema, and “reclining theater seats, which are so noisy.”
Most of their pod-time was spent “test driving ‘brunch beers’ and debating the grim rise of Disney+,” Mr. Silva said. The pod’s eventual breakup, decided during a film confab after their second vaccines kicked in, was a civilized affair. (The only moment it got heated, Silva said, was when one member suggested they watch Zach Snyder’s director’s cut of “Justice League.”)
They promised each other that, once vaccinated, they’d rent out a screening room “and bathe in butter flavoring once again.” But when they finally ventured out to the screening room, despite it being private, they felt vulnerable. They felt cranky. They weren’t ready.
“It wasn’t until we got in the theater that we realized how damn conditioned we’d become in the pod,” Mr. Silva said. “No one enjoyed those post-quarantine Milk Duds as much as we thought we would.” Mr. Silva, who admitted to some “phantom limb” sensations without his podmates, remained hopeful that his Milk Duds will someday “taste more like freedom” as he gets more comfortable in theaters.
I can’t quit you.
Anika Jackson, an entrepreneur in Redondo Beach, Calif., formed a pod with 13 family members but can’t yet face the idea of a breakup.
“I’m tearing up just thinking about it,” she said. “I feel like, during the pandemic, we had to live in our authentic selves all the time.” Gone, she noted, were “preconceived notions of each other, or what our lives are like, that we would normally get only from seeing each other at one or two holidays a year or on social media.”
So she and her siblings are taking baby steps. Now that the adults are fully vaccinated, they are cautiously moving from a committed relationship to a more open one. “We’ve all started socializing more with other people,” Ms. Jackson said, “but when I think about breaking up, I’m still very emotional.”
Do you like me? Check yes or no.
Lucia O’Sullivan, a psychology professor in Fredericton, New Brunswick, admits that she felt like a nervous teenager when she invited another family of four to pair up.
When they accepted, she rejoiced, “because they’re our favorite family, and our kids grew up together.” But it was awkward, she said, “to have to draw a line in the sand, and say, ‘This group is in, and this group is out.’”
Ms. O’Sullivan has yet to shake those teenage feelings of social hierarchy. “You’re so aware that your primary source of all socialization has to be this other family,” she said. “And I spend a lot of time having these strange insecurities, and thinking, ‘Oh, they’re sick of us, they’re rolling their eyes and they don’t want to hang out.’”
In New Brunswick, indoor personal gatherings remain limited to 15 people, so many families are still podding — but Ms. O’Sullivan is anticipating more teenage feelings when they split. “I definitely feel like a nerd with the cool kids,” she said. “I think our pod family is not going to want to see our mugs for a while.”
We are never, ever getting back together.
Maya from Brooklyn, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she is still enmeshed in her pod, joined forces last August with five families, all of whom had children in kindergarten.
The ensuing inter-pod drama, she said, was exhausting and stressful. “It was very intense having kids while some of us were working at home, and half the people in the pod were unemployed,” she said. Suddenly, she had the codependent dysfunctional family she never asked for, “with all the drama that goes with it.”
In a terse recent meeting, they decided to stick it out until the kids’ school year ends in June, and then scatter.
“We are so ready to leave,” she said. “I’ve never lived communally since college. I want a social life beyond these folks. I am never, ever going to do this again.”
Jancee Dunn is the author of “How Not To Hate Your Husband After Kids.”
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