Pushed Together for 48 Days, Then Pulled Apart for 49 - The New York Times

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My boyfriend recently stopped talking to me for seven weeks. Forty-nine consecutive days of no calls, texts or face-to-face conversations. In the age of Instagram stories and instant communication, it’s strange to be completely out of touch with someone you love.

Even stranger: Before those 49 days of radio silence, he and I had shared 48 straight days of constant conversation, having spent nearly every waking and sleeping moment within a few feet of each other in quarantine. By the end of that, we still craved each other’s company.

So no, it wasn’t claustrophobia or clashes that pushed us apart. It was military duty. He had to attend Marine Corps Officer Candidates School in Virginia, while I had to stay behind in Oklahoma.

The second he arrived at Quantico, drill instructors confiscated his phone and dumped his belongings into the pooled rain while shouting insults and orders, pausing only to kick aside his Ziploc bag full of our anniversary cards and photographs together.

Or so I imagined. I actually didn’t know because he couldn’t tell me.

Months earlier, when we were still full-time college students, I realized how little I knew about the military, much less being a military girlfriend. On the night of our fifth date, he told me he had signed a contract earlier that day with the Marines, committing his last two summers before graduation to training and his first four years after graduation to serving as an officer.

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My first thought: “Will we still be fighting wars four years from now?” My next: “Will he and I still be together?”

As our relationship deepened, I eased into the idea of military lingo and lifestyle. I did barre exercises while watching him run laps in lace-up boots. I read poetry while he studied the Marines’ core values. I listened, aghast, as he described the Quigley, a test of resilience that required candidates to swim submerged and gun-first, through pipes and barbed wire, clearing snakes and mud along the way.

I also had nightmares where he would go off to battle and a flag would return. He hadn’t even started boot camp yet. We were college students, sheltered and privileged in many ways. Yet I would wake up in tears. I couldn’t even fathom losing him for seven weeks to officer candidate school — a little over-the-top, I admit, when people all over this country are already dealing with lengthy separations, deployments or worse.

We hesitated to tell friends how committed we were, lest they write us off as falling too hard and too fast. Given what came next, they might have been right.

After just three months of dating, we moved in together, though not for the reasons young couples normally do. As the pandemic spread across America, students were told to leave campus and not come back. He and I decided to quarantine together at my childhood home in Oklahoma — with both our families’ go-ahead — and I was secretly glad the pandemic had allowed it to happen.

For the looming weeks of separation, we prepared a plan. We wouldn’t be able to visit; the coronavirus made that impossible. Any electronic communication was out; he wouldn’t have his phone or laptop.

That left regular mail. I resolved to write him letters, one for every day we would be apart, 49 in total.

The day of his departing flight, I drove us to the airport pre-sunrise, all the shops closed and the roads empty. In the terminal, we kissed, pulling down our masks for just a moment. Then he made his way through the security lines, pausing at the TSA body scanner for one last wave. Before it was even daybreak, he was gone.

That night I wrote him my first letter. It had been years since I had written the kind of letter you sealed in an envelope and sent with a stamp. But there’s one thing I now know: If you want to fall in love with someone all over again, try writing him letters about how you fell in love in the first place.

I wrote about our first kiss in the New England fall, abundant with leaf piles we scoured through, picking our favorites and giving each other the most vibrant.

I wrote about the time he scaled a seven-foot wall to break us into our school’s observatory during the first snowfall of the season, how down below the campus bustled in its miniature, snow-covered state.

I wrote about the time we saw my roommate in a black box theater play, how we walked and talked for hours after the curtain call. Over the course of the conversation, I somehow confused a trombone for a triangle and learned that even though he joked about most things, he was dead serious about joining the Marines.

During week three of our separation, which included the day of our six-month anniversary, a vase of delphiniums — my favorite flower — appeared on my doorstep. It arrived with a pre-written love letter from him. Even though I knew someone else had made the delivery, the flowers felt like a physical presence of him in my room.

The Coronavirus Outbreak ›

Frequently Asked Questions

Updated August 17, 2020

• Why does standing six feet away from others help?

  • The coronavirus spreads primarily through droplets from your mouth and nose, especially when you cough or sneeze. The C.D.C., one of the organizations using that measure, bases its recommendation of six feet on the idea that most large droplets that people expel when they cough or sneeze will fall to the ground within six feet. But six feet has never been a magic number that guarantees complete protection. Sneezes, for instance, can launch droplets a lot farther than six feet, according to a recent study. It's a rule of thumb: You should be safest standing six feet apart outside, especially when it's windy. But keep a mask on at all times, even when you think you’re far enough apart.

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  • As of right now, that seems likely, for at least several months. There have been frightening accounts of people suffering what seems to be a second bout of Covid-19. But experts say these patients may have a drawn-out course of infection, with the virus taking a slow toll weeks to months after initial exposure. People infected with the coronavirus typically produce immune molecules called antibodies, which are protective proteins made in response to an infection. These antibodies may last in the body only two to three months, which may seem worrisome, but that’s perfectly normal after an acute infection subsides, said Dr. Michael Mina, an immunologist at Harvard University. It may be possible to get the coronavirus again, but it’s highly unlikely that it would be possible in a short window of time from initial infection or make people sicker the second time.

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  • The stimulus bills enacted in March offer help for the millions of American small businesses. Those eligible for aid are businesses and nonprofit organizations with fewer than 500 workers, including sole proprietorships, independent contractors and freelancers. Some larger companies in some industries are also eligible. The help being offered, which is being managed by the Small Business Administration, includes the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. But lots of folks have not yet seen payouts. Even those who have received help are confused: The rules are draconian, and some are stuck sitting on money they don’t know how to use. Many small-business owners are getting less than they expected or not hearing anything at all.

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  • Employers have to provide a safe workplace with policies that protect everyone equally. And if one of your co-workers tests positive for the coronavirus, the C.D.C. has said that employers should tell their employees -- without giving you the sick employee’s name -- that they may have been exposed to the virus.

• What is school going to look like in September?

  • It is unlikely that many schools will return to a normal schedule this fall, requiring the grind of online learning, makeshift child care and stunted workdays to continue. California’s two largest public school districts — Los Angeles and San Diego — said on July 13, that instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for students and teachers. Together, the two districts enroll some 825,000 students. They are the largest in the country so far to abandon plans for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in August. For other districts, the solution won’t be an all-or-nothing approach. Many systems, including the nation’s largest, New York City, are devising hybrid plans that involve spending some days in classrooms and other days online. There’s no national policy on this yet, so check with your municipal school system regularly to see what is happening in your community.

A few days later, a box of books arrived — including David Brooks’s “The Road to Character,” Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows,” and Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild,” among others. An accompanying note explained that these books had shaped him into the person he is today and I should read them if I want to feel closer to him. His family had mailed them at his request, which he made before leaving.

The same day the package came, an email from him appeared, also pre-scheduled, with explanations of why each book was meaningful to him: “Read this if you want to read about someone who, in a strange way, found everything he was looking for in life. I think of it a little differently now, having met you.”

I picked one up and started reading. Five pages in, a scrap of paper fell out. “Patty, I love you,” it said. As I read each book, I found hidden love notes throughout, every page-turn holding the possibility for warmth and surprise.

More pre-written emails from him would come once a week, every Wednesday. Although I cherished and reread his words, loneliness and insecurity crept in. Five weeks had passed without any real-time communication. As I poured my heart out every night, I became increasingly aware that his words had been scheduled in advance. Had his feelings changed? Had he changed? I had no idea.

All I could do was keep writing letters every night, so I did. I dug into the history of our relationship, from the early days to our quarantine, from our young, nervous love to the fights we seemed to start and resolve in the span of a Sunday. When I couldn’t think of a memory, I started writing about the future: the puppy we would adopt, the children we would have, the four years we would most likely spend apart and the promisingly long after-period when we would be together.

I worried I would run out of things to say. We were young and in love, but what if that wasn’t enough? We had only been dating six months.

While my biggest struggle was overcoming my worry, he was doing pull-ups until he passed out, threw up or broke something. He was taking the first step in the long journey of understanding how to be responsible for other service members’ lives — and if it came to it, how to tell a loved one about a fellow soldier’s ultimate sacrifice. He was learning to understand the gravity of what it would mean to make that sacrifice himself.

Still, I couldn’t stop my mind from occasionally translating his silence into anger, or worse, apathy. Despite his love notes, emails and surprises, I wanted to ask, “Do you still love me?”

I kept at it. By letter 35, I knew I could make it to 49.

Two weeks later, when he finally graduated and was able to call me for the first time — an hourslong conversation in which he recounted everything he had been through — I would learn that he hadn’t gotten most of my letters until the end, when it was over. But I didn’t care. For me, it was more about the discipline of writing despite my doubts.

Those seven weeks of separation became an exercise in laying it all on the line. I wrote 49 letters, spilling out my affection and insecurities and hopes, never expecting a single response. Love, for me, became an exercise in doing it anyway.

Patricia Liu is entering her senior year at Harvard College.

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

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