How to Keep the Flame Alive in Quarantine

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Hello, hello and welcome back to the Love Life podcast with your host, Stephen Hussey. And that man is I or that man is me. I'm not, not sure of the exact grammar there. Hello one and all. So, on this most splendid of days, we are talking about what it takes to keep romance with the person you live with. That is of course, assuming that the person you live with is someone you are romancing, you are actually in a relationship with or courting perhaps, or perhaps in some various in between stage. It's no secret that we are living in strange times in 2020 with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Lots of people are spending a lot of time at home and in different stages of their romantic life. Of course, we've talked in previous episodes about being single and trying all the various ways to still put yourself out there and date, whether it's through Skype, whether it's through meeting someone on Zoom and watching a mov movie, or if it's Tinder and swiping on dating apps and all that stuff. But there's also a whole bunch of people who were or have already been in relationships or that were dating someone right when this all started. And for those people, there's kind of a, you know, situation where maybe you, it moved things much quicker than they were before and maybe you decided to quit quarantine with someone and spend that time in lockdown together. I think the New Yorker, or was it the New York Times, one of those ran a piece about this, about how certain people were, you know, it was a thing to say, do you want to, do you want to quarantine together? Like, do you want to come and move some of your stuff in, bring a bag over and stay here for quite a while and isolate with me. Now, for some people, of course, they've been in a couple for a year, two years longer, and they've got this other thing where they've already been with someone a while, but now you're finding you're together like 24 hours of the day and whereas before you might have had all this time to go off and have your own little adventures at work and go do stuff with your friends on the weekend and go explore things and come back together with your partner and share these stories and hey, all these exciting things have happened to me this week. What's been going on with you that's so interesting? Honey, sit down. Let's talk about it. It all that stuff that makes something exciting, interesting, you now might not have any more. So now there's that. That comfort sets in where maybe you're walking around the house a lot. Someone's walking around in their pants or, I guess, underwear, if you're American. Listen to this. You're slobbing around the house in your underwear. Your biggest adventure is going from the lounge up to your bedroom, then back to the fridge again and maybe for a little run or something. And that's about it. And you know, that familiarity can breed a kind of, well, a kind of repetitiveness, a kind of Groundhog Day scenario. And we think, you know, all the thing we think of when we think of romance, we think it's novel, it's exciting. There's adventure, it's new, it's passionate, there's mystery, there's things I don't know, there's things I'm learning, there's things that are surprising. And all those things are a little bit harder to get in this scenario. But do they have to be? That's the question we're looking at today. And I want to jump into a clip of my dear, wonderful brother Matthew talking about what it takes to keep that sense of novelty and adventure and romance during this tricky time. Check it out.

Matthew, did you ever think you would be giving relationship advice during a global pandemic? As a number of coronavirus cases soars above 3,000 elected officials taking unprecedented measures to keep people safe.

Cafes, pubs, bars and restaurants to close. We direct a state park order for people to stay at home.

I'm in a couple in the quarantine, but I have to tell you, I've been a little bit surprised by how this has tested us.

So if someone is in a relationship and decided to quarantine together, what advice would you give to them to maintaining the relationship? I would love if you could share, like, some of your thoughts and like, how to get through this time if you are in a relationship.

We have people who are in relationships who, some of whom are being driven crazy right now. Being in the house all the time with someone, normally we'd go apart and have all these different, different activities apart. Now they're together. If you're stuck under the same roof with someone right now, there are going to be times in the middle of the day where you're going to get sick of them or you're going to be like, oh, my God, I need my space now. In order to create desire, you need to create space. And if you live under the same roof as someone 24 7, you're going to have to find ways to engineer space in the middle of the day you can have your day to go and focus on the projects that are important to you and they can go and focus on the projects that are important to them. Your space could be you putting in your headphones and going into your own world. Now the flip side to that is you also have to go to your partner and arrange mindful time together. Dating shouldn't go out of the window just because you're in the same house the whole time. Be really intentional about saying to your partner, hey, what about, why don't we do like a proper movie night tonight? I'm going to cook you dinner tonight. Make it a beautiful themed movie night. Turn the living room into a theater. Go get groomed. Go like, put on your nice clothes. Like, do get dolled up. Like, feel good for that date and make an effort. Go hard on the detail. Detail is romantic. Detail shows you care. Detail shows that you have an imagination. When you could take your partner into a world that's magic, you're creating magic that's really important. You can't allow working and doing chores and cleaning out cupboards and whatever the hell else you're passing your time with. You can't allow that to essentially blind you to the fact that you're living under the same roof but not actually having mindful, conscious climb together.

That is it for today listeners. Thank you very much for joining us as always, and you can get in touch with us. Hey, if you're in quarantine right now, in a couple, or, you know, trying to somehow keep some kind of situation or intimate relationship going on with someone you live with, love to hear about it. Message me. Send me an email@podcastathewhussey.com let me know what's going on with you in quarantine, in your relationship. I'd love to hear it. I'd love to hear the challenges you faced, how you've kept your relationship good in this time if it's been struggled to keep it good in this time, if there's been new struggles you haven't dealt with before or you found out things about your partner that you didn't know earlier, let me know. Podcastathuhassey.com I'd love to hear from you there. And just a quick note. If you really feel this is the time right now, whether you're in a relationship or not, but you really, really want to transform your confidence. You want to rewrite the script for your life. You want to start figuring out a new direction to head in, actually move forward, change how you feel on a day to day basis, rewire your emotions or all that. Go to getcoreconfidence.com check out the free training we have there and follow through on that video. That's going to get you started and actually let you take steps from right now. So instead of sitting in your hands and waiting for, you know, for all this stuff to be over and thinking, well, I'm going to work on myself when Covid's finally over because who knows when that's going to be. If you want to say, I want to get started right now and not waste any time, go to that page, getcoreconfidence.com check out the video training there. All right, that is it from me. I am going to pop out now and head to bed because it's actually quite late where I am. I'm recording this in a little late night session. So in a perfect world there'd be some smooth jazz behind me just softly playing like a little, little late night radio station. But hey, maybe we'll get there in time with this podcast. All right, thanks so much everyone. You enjoy your week. I will be back very soon. Take care.