As March approaches, the world is marking one year of being in a pandemic, and I am marking one year of marriage. My partner and I became husband and wife on February 29, 2020; a gorgeous, sunny day on which we were able to gather under the sky with our friends and family to celebrate. While we’ve been together for 8 years now, this last year – our first married, spent almost entirely in a pandemic, has been both one of the most challenging and the most enriching.

To be completely honest, there were times when I wondered if we would make it. Yes, I loved this man enough to want to spend my life with him, but did I love him enough to spend all day, every day, confined to our house together, for an indefinite amount of time? I wasn’t sure. Pandemic life isn’t the life that any of us signed up for. And living together, when you each have your own work schedules and routines and lives that take place away from home, is much different from living together when you both work and sleep and eat and recreate in the same 1000 or so square feet. When, if you leave the house and spend time around other people, you’re risking your life and/or the lives of the people around you.

We have made it, so far. I know this pandemic life isn’t nearly over, but I’m pretty proud of how we have grown in love and in life through this past year. I know that it’s an unpopular opinion for me, as a millennial cis-woman, to be happily married, to a millennial cis-man. So many articles and even recent Twitter threads have shown that married cis-women in heterosexual relationships are having a horrible time right now. Cis-men have been happy to sit back and allow their cis-women partners to take on the majority of the cleaning, cooking, child-rearing responsibilities, even when they don’t work as much, or at all.

While my husband isn’t perfect (nobody is, perfection is a myth rooted in white supremacy), he at least understands the importance of cleaning up after yourself and sharing the responsibilities of nourishing and maintaining a household. Pre-pandemic, my husband would wake up every weekday, get ready for work, make coffee, sometimes a smoothie, occasionally boil a few eggs, and grab the dinner leftovers that he had packed for lunch before leaving to work for the day. I would eat whatever I wanted for breakfast as I started my work day at home (I’ve worked from home for nearly 4 years now), heat up leftovers, or make a salad or a sandwich for lunch, and cook dinner throughout the week. I washed whatever dishes I used during the day, and my partner usually cleaned up after dinner. It felt easy, fair, and I love to cook, so being mainly responsible for the main meal of the day was no problem.

When the pandemic began, and my husband started working from home as well, things changed. He struggled with work-life balance before, and when the line between work and home became completely blurred, that balance was non-existent. His morning routine changed from getting up, getting ready, and helping with breakfast, to getting up, walking to his desk in our second bedroom, and starting his work day. At first he marveled at the fact that not needing to commute meant he could spend more time working. He is a mortgage loan originator, and with record low interest rates on mortgages, he has had plenty of work to do and could easily work 60+ hours per week. I, in our honeymoon phase in the first several weeks of the pandemic, was okay with making breakfast and lunch and taking it to him at his desk – for a time. Fairly quickly, though, I realized that if I didn’t have time to make coffee, or breakfast, or lunch – he wouldn’t. There were multiple days where I would just grab something quick and eat at my desk, and he wouldn’t eat anything at all until 1:00 or 2:00 pm.

What had felt like an evenly shared responsibility before, had become entirely my responsibility – to figure out what the heck to eat 3 times a day, 7 days a week. Every week. I found myself doing 100% of the cooking, but also washing about 50% of the dishes. By mid-summer we came up with a solution. My husband found an affordable, local, meal prep service, and suggested we order meals to make this task a little easier. I was reluctant at first, but the meals were decent and I relented to the fact that it is okay to accept help, especially in the middle of a pandemic. We began ordering 8 meals per week from them, taking the place of 4 lunches and/or dinners. When I say affordable, I mean affordable, like $50 – $60 per week for the meals, which cut our grocery bill in half to $45 – $50 per week. My husband makes coffee and a smoothie, boiled eggs, or toast for breakfast, we take turns making/heating up lunch throughout the week, and I cook dinner two to three days during the week. We support local restaurants on the weekends, and spend some time meal prepping together on Sundays. I take care of the breakfast and lunch dishes, and he takes care of the dinner dishes. All of this has helped this task return to being a shared responsibility. It’s also helped us eat healthier meals, makes keeping the kitchen clean relatively painless, and prevents arguments rooted in unspoken resentment about who’s not carrying their weight.

Cooking and dishes aren’t the only things that became challenging, of course. Having no alone time has been difficult for me, a super introvert who needs to spend a lot of time just doing my own thing. Not being able to hang out with friends (without risking our lives or the lives of those around us) has been difficult for my husband, a super social ambivert who has a very close group of friends, who are like family. So I manufacture alone time while he manufactures connection. Specifically, he got a PlayStation and started playing Call of Duty online with his friends on the TV in our second bedroom. He works way more hours than I do, so I get enough time to myself throughout the week, and on weekends I am perfectly happy with him playing video games for a few hours while I watch my shows or listen to podcasts or write or read or do a home organizing project.

Making intentional time to be present together has been essential as well. From taking our fur-child Bernie on walks together every afternoon during the week, without phones, to finding ways to spend time together beyond watching TV or cleaning. We’ve worked on puzzles together, played a conversation card game, or two-person board games like Scrabble and Rummikub. On the weekends, our pandemic-friendly outings consist of picking a park to drive to for a walk or a hike, occasionally picking up takeout to eat at the park. Even making the bed together in the morning, or playing with Bernie before we go to bed at night, have been opportunities for us to have quality time even when we are around each other all of the time. We still watch TV together, of course, we are millennials and I truly enjoy film and television as art forms, but making time to spend engaging with just each other has helped us continue to communicate, get to know each other, and deepen our bond.

It was also important for us to have some conversations we hadn’t had before, even in 7+ years of being in relationship with one another. Binding ourselves together legally and financially required us to have frank conversations about how we manage our income, how much debt we had, our expenses, what our financial goals are. Early in April we sat down and talked through what we wanted to accomplish in the next few years, ensuring we were clear on how we wanted to be in partnership with each other, and what it would take from both of us to get there. And we’ve continued to have those conversations, as the need to make financial decisions and choices has come up. Knowing that we’re aligned here has helped to alleviate stress when the possibility of layoffs came up at work, and as we’ve dreamed together about where we want our careers to go in the next few years.

Then there were the conversations about racism and white supremacy that happened in many households beginning last summer. I have been thinking and talking about dismantling white supremacy for several years, and dragging my husband along the way. But the movement for Black lives and against police brutality, and the campaign of the former president of the U.S., provided so many more opportunities for both of us to confront the ways in which we’ve benefited from white privilege, and how we were operating in ways that were “not racist”, and not antiracist. These have been some of the most tense moments, when I realized that, while we had been having conversations here and there, it was as though we had been speaking different languages.

While I had been listening to podcasts, reading, and learning through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness work at my job over the last 3+ years, he was mostly living life in the oblivious way that many not-racist white men do. This movement for racial equity forced us to get on the same page about needing to be actively antiracist, about how we must dismantle the beliefs rooted in white supremacy culture within ourselves, how to support each other in doing so in productive ways, and provided the opportunity for us to get clear on how, if we have them, we intend to raise our children. It was difficult at first, heartbreaking at moments, but eventually we arrived at a place where we recognized how much there remains for each of us to learn, and concluded that we must do it together. When he started questioning why I was watching The Crown (“isn’t this white supremacy?”), I realized this is both a blessing and a curse.

And through it all, therapy. Phone appointments with my therapist help me get out of my head for a bit, and learning how to manage my anxiety in healthier ways has helped me improve immensely at communicating my needs, understanding what is at the root of my reactions, and inviting my partner in on my healing. It has even helped him understand more about the ways in which he needs to heal as well.

Of course, I must recognize how much privilege is present here. We are both employed, in jobs that pay a comfortable living wage and allow us to work from the safety of our home. We do not have children, and I firmly believe that having access to contraception and reproductive healthcare, in a country without universal healthcare, is a privilege. Having access to therapy is also a privilege. Not having any underlying conditions, and not being within a demographic that puts us at greater risk in this pandemic, are privileges. Even living near enough to relatives to have been able to see family a handful of times over the course of the year feels like a privilege right now. While several people close to us have gotten sick with COVID-19, some of them incredibly so, not one of the over 500,000 individuals who have lost their lives to this virus in the U.S. has been someone who we have had to mourn.

It certainly hasn’t been easy, but having a caring and loving partner who is ready and willing to grow with me has kept me going over this last year. As we approach our wedding anniversary, I am filled with joy and gratitude at having chosen this incredible person to spend my life with, and filled with excitement for the dreams that we’ve been dreaming together. While I look forward to the days when we can enjoy fulfilling social lives once again, I have truly cherished this opportunity to spend time learning how to love one another even more fully.