A Valentine's Day with Nowhere to Go

How "No Exits" became a valuable lesson in relationship building.

Photo: Getty Images

One night last week, my partner Darien and I were watching The Fifth Element. While I should have been immersed in Milla Jovovich’s beauty or Bruce Willis’ very distracting tank top, I simply couldn’t focus. Darien was eating grapes, and it was as though the sound of his chewing was amplified. I could hear every chomp in grotesque detail: the saliva in his mouth, the opening and closing of his jaw, the flesh of the fruit popping in between his teeth. My skin started to itch. The chewing got louder, like there was a gigantic microphone in front of his mouth. I couldn’t even hear the film anymore, just the sloshing of fruit inside his mouth. Even as my inner monologue said he’s just eating, what is your problem? I wanted to pounce, enraged.

This degree of irritation is somewhat of a new development in our relationship. Darien and I have lived together for the better part of six years, surprisingly not annoying each other for the vast majority of that time. But this past year in quarantine has given couples like us a lot to think about. No matter where we turn, what we do, or even what we order online, we’re suddenly doing everything together. The other day, I had a particularly bad reaction to some takeout. When I emerged from the bathroom, Darien was waiting right outside the door. “Hey, are you ok? You’ve been in there a while,” he said. I frantically closed the door, trying to mask the odor, but it was too late. “Oh, God damn!” he said. “That’s not normal!” 

At a time when a person can’t even have a bout of IBS in peace, it’s no wonder that many couples are calling it quits. “China’s divorce spike is a warning to the rest of the locked-down world,” Bloomberg declared in March of last year, when Wuhan re-opened and couples immediately headed for their attorneys’ offices. Last week, The New York Times unveiled its “Primal Scream” project, where moms all over the country anonymously vented (among other things) about the lack of support they receive from their male partners. And of course, sexual health experts warned that staying at home could be drastically impacting our libidos for the worse—meaning that all this extra time together isn’t exactly being spent in the bedroom. 

When I vented to a friend about the constant challenge of close quarters, she responded with a torrent of text messages about her own husband. “I actually think divorce would be the more peaceful alternative to the scenarios playing out in my head,” she said. And even though I was vaguely alarmed, I totally understood where she was coming from. 

In what I now see as an exercise in irony, I recently read a book called Getting the Love You Want for a work assignment. It’s basically a how-to manual for fixing your relationship issues, crafted by relational therapists Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt. It is the kind of self-help book that has a Times New Roman font on the cover and countless allusions to Sigmund Freud. Despite my reservations, my colleagues promised me that the authors have helped countless couples through the techniques outlined in the book, often bringing many back from the brink of divorce. 

When working with a couple, Hendrix and Hunt ask each partner to make a list of their “exits,” defined as the ways in which a partner avoids intimacy. Examples of exits can range from the seemingly benign (spending hours reading The New York Times, playing too much tennis, constantly monitoring social media) to the more precarious (having an affair, not wanting to be touched, picking fights). 

Exits, they insist, are a way of “acting out our feelings rather than putting them into words.” This isn’t to say that every exit is necessarily a bad thing—time alone, friendships, relationships with family, and hobbies are all things that can also help one become a better or more fulfilled partner. Nonetheless, Hendrix and Hunt work to help couples “narrow their exits” so they can spend more quality time interacting with one another. And, by examining and listing their own exits, each partner comes to a better understanding of what the other needs to feel fulfilled.

“The fact that so many couples perforate their relationships with exits raises an obvious question: Why do [people] spend so much time avoiding intimacy?” Hendrix and Hunt write.

It’s a fair question—one that I am finally confronting. What I realized about the pandemic was that it closed off all of my exits without warning. I could no longer use “work events” as a reason to avoid being home for dinner, nor could I hole up in the office for 14-hour days like I used to. I also couldn’t engage in my favorite weekend pastime of watching a television show for hours on end, because our apartment only has one TV, and that would be incredibly rude. So if I wanted to watch the entirety of Gilmore Girls, I had to do that on my own time, since Darien refused to watch “that show with all the white women.” 

In close quarters, when my partner is the only other person I may see for days at a time, there is simply no such thing as conflict avoidance. There is a mandate for resolution, and also an urgency to be more gentle with one another. Every potential fight or argument that arises is placed within a much bigger context: Is arguing over every little thing worth jeopardizing the stability of our living situation? Is “winning” this argument worth more to me than feeling like we’re in this together? The pandemic has completely changed our perspective. We’re not on opposite sides of any argument or fight; we’re on the same team. 

Rather than tiptoe around one another, the two of us have found ways to accommodate the other’s exits when they are necessary. If he’s had a long stretch of working hours at the hospital, I try to plan a day where I can be outside with my work, so he can spend some time in solitude. If I am writing at my desk, he occupies himself with quiet work in another room so that I can meet my deadlines. When he’s home, we try to always come together in the evenings, making whatever ceremony we can out of cooking or ordering dinner. Without even acknowledging it out loud, we (mostly) stopped the endless nighttime scrolling on our iPhones, too. 

By no means has any of this been an ideal situation. But, in thinking about all of my exits, I realize that their forced closure has been somewhat of a blessing. I’m not sure what it reveals about my character that it took a global pandemic for me to finally confront my intimacy issues (I’ll take that up in therapy!) but I also find it a blessing that all this time together has brought us closer than ever. 

In another version of this timeline, the grape-chewing could have easily become a saga. Maybe I would have immediately snapped at Darien for chewing too loudly. He would have moved away from me, utterly confused by my outrageous reaction to a minor annoyance. My little outburst could have become the bedrock of a much bigger fight at a later date, and I never would have been able to connect the dots. It’s the small things that have a way of turning into big issues, you know?

So instead, when the grape chewing became an ASMR video from hell, I merely excused myself and went to the bathroom. I used the break as an excuse to brush my teeth—an easy three minutes of silence and alone time to regain some perspective. By the time I re-emerged, I felt so much better. And, to my pleasant surprise, the grapes had been finished, and The Fifth Element was paused at the exact moment I’d left the room. We finished the movie together in peaceful, pleasant silence.