A 2019 study found that 36.48 million people lived alone in the United States. This statistic means that there are a whole lot of people sorting out how to weather our current shelter-in-place circumstances without a partner physically in their home to help navigate the day-to-day tasks and stressors that go along with living alone right now. Living alone during normal times can feel like a calm from the storm of all the demands, noise, and busyness of your work and social life. However, when your home also becomes your office and your friends AND your partner are all on the outside, knowing how to survive lack of human contact becomes confusing. Some of us might be living alone but in a relationship that was just getting started, or we are geographically distanced so co-habitation doesn’t make sense or is not possible. The world feels different right now being alone. It’s like a light has been turned off, and learning how to go from being a “we” to a “me” can be an excruciatingly lonely time. It’s a crazy act of trying to figuring out what your new normal looks like when the world doesn’t feel normal at all. The thing to remind yourself is that even though you are social distancing physically, you are NOT required to socially distance yourself emotionally. This time apart doesn’t mean you as a couple has to stop growing or progressing the connection in your relationship. I think some couples might argue that they have chosen to view this time apart to work on parts of their relationship that will be enhanced because they might get to know their partner at a deeper level. I keep thinking of the show “Love is Blind.” We are living a life outside of TV where we are all in our virtual pods, and the challenge is to get to work learning more about a person we can’t touch but can certainly build a better friendship with. This friendship can be a support as we both go through this crazy time, and that person has the potential to be a best friend. This situation will come to an end, but will we have taken the opportunity to build something real and solid that will last beyond this virus and lay the groundwork for a solid future together? Here are some of the best ways to survive this potentially challenging time for those of us who live alone: Individual: Continue with your routines. If you wake up every morning to yoga, have a bowl of oatmeal, and take a walk with your dog, then keep doing it. Reminding yourself that some things in your life haven’t changed keeps your brain organized and soothed by the rituals of the day that you used in the past to anchor you. With your partner: Build routines as a couple. Find a show that you can binge-watch together, cook or eat dinner together virtually, and/or have a nightly ritual where you tell each other the five biggest blessings in your life from the day. What can you do to stay connected and create milestones as a couple that you can incorporate into your life that will last beyond the end of this quarantine? Schedule regular events with friends. Thursday nights at 5:00 have become a standing virtual happy hour for our friends. We get to look forward to seeing each other’s faces, sharing in our collective worries and collective hopes, and being reminded how funny our partners are. This is a real source of support and connection during these uncertain times. Date nights with friends don’t have to end because you are physically separated. One of the ways that couples get to appreciate each other is by seeing how they connect with the people in their lives. Hearing someone tell a story about your partner or seeing the way they make people laugh can be a way to feel more attracted and connected with the person who you get to be in a relationship with. Have a stress-reducing conversation for 20 minutes each day. Spend time checking in with your partner about some of the hardest parts of their day, or ask them what is most challenging for them being isolated from the world. Your job as the person who is checking in with your partner is to just deeply listen. If you are the listener, then find things you can validate for your partner even if you don’t feel the same way. Your job is not to correct them, tell them they should feel differently or solve their problems for them. Couples often feel uncomfortable talking about hard or heavy emotions because they feel like they have to fix their partners. The point of a stress-reducing conversation is to let the other person know they are not alone. You can give your partner a huge gift right now by letting them know you hear them, they are making sense, and it’s reasonable for them to feel the way they do. Let your partner have that space to feel scared, worried, or anxious without trying to get them to clean it up or take it away. We all need to have someone hold that space for us right now. If it starts to feel like your partner might keep going in circles or repeating the same worries over and over and you are feeling drained, then it is perfectly ok to ask them to help you understand what the biggest fear or catastrophe scenario is for them and then ask them to tell you what they see as their options. You can also tell them that you don’t know what to say, that you are there for them, and that they are not going through this alone. At the end of the day, that is all true, and you and your partner are both looking for support. Share what you have learned in life about handling uncertainty. You are in a relationship, and unfortunately, this may not be the only time in your life that you experience difficult situations or need to manage stress or worry. Learning how your partner processes stress and what they learned about how to manage it growing up in their family of origin can lead to deep conversations about how your partner manages life. Here are some sample fill-in-the-blank questions you can ask your partner to talk with you about: • My parents taught me stress was… • I saw my family deal with stress by… • My earliest memories of uncertainty or chaos were… • When I am stressed, worried, or anxious, the thing that I need to hear or the thing helps soothe me is… Taking the time to acknowledge your partner’s responses to stress and worry helps your partner take responsibility for those triggers, and it helps you know how to best support your partner when they are in a heightened state of distress. Have Fun! Can you as a couple virtually eat ice cream for breakfast, dance around the living room to your favorite 80’s dance tunes, or make funny videos of yourself to send to each other in Marco Polo? Now is the time to dig out comedies, memes, and gifs that make you laugh and to share them during the day. The more you laugh, the more of the feel-good chemicals such as oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine will be released that will give you daily doses of the kinds of coping skills you both need to get through this time in your life. Most IMPORTANTLY: Remember that this is temporary. This time will come to an end. Yes, it’s nerve-racking not knowing exactly when that will be. However, you have both previously gone through hard times in life. Remind yourselves of those times and how much stronger you each are than you probably give yourself credit for. What did you do during those times that you can call on now to get you through today? Just take this one day at a time. Dana McNeil is a licensed marriage and family therapist and is the founder of a group practice called The Relationship Place located in San Diego. McNeil’s practice specializes in couples’ therapy and utilizes an evidence-based type of couples’ therapy, which is known as the Gottman Method.