well that was cishet as heck
posted by smammy at 2:04 PM on April 9, 2020 [14 favorites]

I went on an awesome date with an ER doctor a week before this. He's been incredibly good about keeping in touch and tells me that our conversations are a bright spot in his wicked and scary days. I'm doing the best I can to remain cautious and not blubber on about how much I am starting to like him, but it seems stupid to not hope a little.
posted by lextex at 2:26 PM on April 9, 2020 [19 favorites]

Young ones think they invented co-habitation due to circumstances with bonus SEX yet again.
posted by zengargoyle at 2:33 PM on April 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

I'm in an unexpected family situation in which, after thirty-two years of solo living, I've been easing into the idea of moving in with my gentleman caller and his 7.75-year-old little girl...except that now I'm suddenly fully immersed in a home environment where I'm trying to work remotely at my university job with a kid underfoot 50% of our days and participating in unexpected homeschooling and while we were out bicycling a week ago, my gentleman caller his a curb and broke his arm, increasing the number of my duties and the young lady is tugging at my sleeve and I'm trying to figure out where to get brie without dying of coronavirus and when people ask how I'm doing, I invariably as "Did you ever see The Shining?"

I'd started a little blog about my adventures with unexpectedly co-parenting in my fifties as a disaffected gay loner with a long history of comfortable solitude in a tiny space in which everything is more or less exactly as I want it, but lately, I can barely keep up with making notes of the day's atrocities, indignities, and glories, largely because OH MY GOD LITTLE MISS CAN YOU PLEASE JUST READ A BOOK FOR TWENTY MINUTES?

It's definitely like one of those tests where NASA puts satellites into torture chambers and shakes them and screams at them and freezes them and broils them and if something breaks, they fix it. If I survive, I'll be a hell of a family man.
posted by sonascope at 3:20 PM on April 9, 2020 [43 favorites]

What’s it like living and working in self-isolation with someone you’ve only just started dating?

My wife just got off a zoom social chat with a colleague of hers where her friend said that her and her husband had NEVER spent this much time together despite being married for a long time because they were both professionals (a professor and a lawyer) who worked long hours. The colleague said "It turns out we like each other!" which I think is a funny thing to realize after probably a decade of marriage.
posted by srboisvert at 3:22 PM on April 9, 2020 [11 favorites]

What, they didn't cover the guy who fell in love with his husband after they were in lockdown? (Story has a happy ending but I can't find links right now.)
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 3:28 PM on April 9, 2020 [3 favorites]

sonascope, I am loving your blog.
posted by Margalo Epps at 3:46 PM on April 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

Sonascope, can you add a subscribe for updates to your blog so we can keep up with Little Miss and you?
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 5:22 PM on April 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

sonascope, you got this. what a set of challenges.

My wife and I are by no means accidental and new to each other cohabitants but this is very definitely the most time we have ever continuously spent around one another. Lucky for us, we more or less have found it awesome. At other points in our relationship, this would not have been the case.
posted by mwhybark at 8:42 PM on April 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

I am happily quarantined with someone I recently started dating, though we do have some history.

Last November I contacted a man I dated for a couple of years beginning in 2002, but I hadn't seen or heard from since that relationship ended in 2004, asking if he was interested in seeing a mutual friend perform at a storytelling event in Chicago (I live downstate). I was aware he married a couple of years after we split and mentioned this in the first email, assuring him that "I'm not trying to start something here". In fact, I figured his wife would also attend the event. Turned out that marriage ended some time ago and he said he had been thinking of me for years, but was under the impression that I had married someone with 2 children who were younger than my own kids. (Not remotely true—he has no memory re where he got this idea.)

After a month of email exchanges, we began a ritual of almost nightly phone calls and finally got together on December 30th, beginning what we expected to be a maybe 1 week/month LDR for the foreseeable future (although we quickly determined that wasn't enough and I made a few extra trips to the city).

We are loving this time together. We have a very long list of movies and television series we want to watch together—so far, we have managed to see exactly one episode of Ozark, yet our days (and nights) are very full.

One last detail, which I'm sure crosses into TMI territory, so sensitive readers should stop right now—it's absolutely true that sex gets better with age. (I'm 65, he's 70.)
posted by she's not there at 10:26 PM on April 9, 2020 [7 favorites]

Instead of "corona cuffing" I would have gone with "coughing season."
posted by evidenceofabsence at 7:46 AM on April 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm at the other end of cuffing - my newish relationship with a wonderful guy and I are actively social distancing. We text/call every day, and he does pop into the supermarket I work in; the closest we've come in a month is bumping elbows. But it's actually kinda been fun, because the conversations really rock.

And on the other hand, it sucks big time, because we'd only just begun the most intimate part of our relationship a month before all this happened..and we were having fun, dammit.
posted by annieb at 3:32 PM on April 10, 2020 [1 favorite]