Art Heals: Love

I was prompted to think about love in the age of Covid (with apologies to Gabriel Garcia Marquez) by a post from one of my artist friends, on the 36th anniversary of being together with her” best mate ever.”  What struck me was her term “the investment in being the best mates ever.” 
With many more weeks to go in the quarantines we are all enduring, tensions are building, anxieties are high, and often patience is wearing thin.  For those of us confined with other people, be they partners, family, roommates, or just the odd delivery guy who never left ( kidding!), our physical spaces, be they 1-bedroom apartments, live/work studios, or 5-bedroom houses, seem to be shrinking by the day. 
Small annoyances ("please stop rubbing everything in sight with that disposable wipe", oops, that's me) become big deals; an eye roll can spark the moral equivalent of WWIII.  And that’s natural, we are only human, and most of us have been lucky enough not to have experienced long-term confinement in close proximity to others. 
You don’t have to look far for examples—prisoners, dwellers in overcrowded mass housing projects, anyone involuntarily confined, for whatever reason, suffers stress that can become cruel and unusual.  During the Blitz in WWII, Londoners crowded into the Underground tunnels, sheltering from bombing raids without a defined end.  For all the stories of banding together in song, and there are many, there are also stories of one remark setting off its own firestorm among the frightened strangers.  And on a macro level, hoarding, racism and just plain meanness are inescapable features in our daily news feeds.
Which is why investments in being best mates resonates so with me.  It’s not too late to start making those investments and reaping the benefits.   When I married (yes, I had that write your own vows, daisy bouquet kind of wedding, but you already guessed that) one of the readings was from Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
We can all do that, whether in reference to those we are confined with now, or, for those of us living alone at the moment, to our friends in their own states of confinement.   Let’s not gaze at each to find fault (or at least try; we are only human.  OK, I’ll go first, darling.)  Let’s look outward in the same direction—the direction of coming out of this crisis with our lives and loves intact.
Here is a beautiful image of love, by artist Mona El-Bayoumi.  Art Heals.