Coromance is blossoming

It’s heartening to hear that while it’s curtains for the economy, our domestic lives are on the up. In Wuhan there was a spike in divorce rates, and in Japan, wives have been sending their husbands away to hostels. But here in Britain, there’s love in lockdown. Sales of engagement rings have risen significantly since we were all told to stay at home and couples have found creative ways to pop the question in their living rooms and local parks.

For those who have been married for longer, working, eating and sleeping at home together 24/7 for weeks on end has been a strange novelty — an odd throwback to a time when the relationship was new.

It has always struck me as a deep irony of modern parenthood that many of us spend years trying to crack the voodoo of getting pregnant before using the subsequent newborn months to work out how best to delegate the raising of our children to others as soon as we can. The same im-patience exists in our romantic relationships: all too often, the ideal life partner is seen as a travel companion with whom we can share Instagrammable experiences, not someone with whom we can imagine sharing a home.

For our ten-year anniversary I dug out my wedding dress from the loft and wore it for dinner in the garden

Modern marriage is meant to be a self-propagating force that simply ticks over by itself without any need for interference or guidance: if love doesn’t carry on organically, then you simply haven’t found the right person. But perhaps lockdown has forced us to unravel this myth and taught us something: that, like everything else in life, our relationships take perseverance.