Some Marriages Are Buckling Under Coronavirus Lockdowns

editor at Washington I in joins us for more. Thanks for joining us, Marissa, thank you so much for having me. I wanted to talk about one of the by products I guess of being on lockdown and quarantine for so long. People get frustrated with each other. They get frustrated with their partners being in such close quarters for such long periods of times, and some marriages are buckling under these quarantines. Mersa,

you wrote a story. You spoke to a few people about how it's been a difficult go during the quarantine and their marriages have kind of ended during it, but they've had to stay in the same house because of lockdowns. It's been a lot of crazy different situations. Tell us a little bit about it that's correct and I think even for the happiest, healthiest marriages, quarantine is very trying.

I mean, all of a sudden, you're not just sharing a home with your spouse or your partner, you're sharing a workspace, or you're trying to balance homeschool and your children with keeping you on top of your full time job. So I think that's important. Distress is that this has been a tough time for even the healthiest, best marriages. So the partnerships that were already on the rocks, or maybe already had problems that were bubbling just beneath the surface,

have been particularly challenged during this time. I think a lot of these marriages may have ended at some point regardless of quarantine. It's just that all of this time stuck together in the same house has made problems that might have been somewhat tolerable really really impossible to ignore. These are just the times that we're living in right now, And as you said, the pandemic being on these lockdowns kind of exacerbates some of these underlying problems. And then

you're stuck with a person. You know, a lot of people just can't pick up and go in the same way during normal time. So this is kind of reflectives in some of the stories that you shared in your article. Share some of those stories that you had with some of the with some people. The most extreme cases are the marriages where at least one partner thought everything was fine before quarantine and some sort of earth shattering discovery has been made as a result of being stuck together.

So there's one woman in my story. I talked to her lawyer. I didn't speak with her directly, but her lawyer, her divorce lawyer, heard from this woman who taught that everything in her marriage, for the most part, was fine. Like a lot of people you know in Washington or in big cities, she has a very demanding career, as

does her husband. So when times were normal, they were often out of the house a lot, and they were traveling for work, and even when they were in town, they were working long hours and just not seeing that much of each other. So now all of a sudden, they're locked down during the pandemic, spending seven together, and it turns out it's a lot harder to keep a

secret when you're stuck in quarantine with your spouse. So this poor woman happened upon some direct messages in one of her husband's social media accounts from a longtime girlfriend that he'd had in another city, and in fact, he

had practically a double life. So that's a very extreme scenario, of course, but it's also the kind of thing that this weird sort of situation that we've been in with quarantine gives people the opportunity to discover and maybe otherwise this woman never would have discovered it, or it would have been you know, years before she figured out that something was really wrong in her marriage. And then if the suspicion arises, you know, what do you do to

kind of figure it out? You have to do some sleuthing. Sometimes people are paying private eyes to investigate their spouse, and they're paying a lot of money for that. You spoke to a few private eyes who are also kind of getting caught up in the mix of trying to figure these things out, and these guys have been in the private investigative business for decades and they were telling

me that they've never seen anything like this. A lot of the cases that they're investigating now started before the pandemic, so that's an important clarification. I think that these spouses already had some suspicion before quarantine. But perhaps you would assume that because we were in the middle of a public health crisis, people would at least put their philandering and they're cheating aside until the public health risk the sides a bit. But it turns out that's not true.

And that is what these private eyes found so shocking that even though we're all supposed to be social distancing, their catching husbands, meeting up with girlfriends or just random people they've met on Tinder or on other hookup sites at hotel rooms. This one p I told me that he followed a mom to park where she was meeting up with her boyfriends or her you know, on the side,

and she brought along her kids. So some of these stories are pretty sad, and and then in turn, you know, of course these people are out cheating on their spouses and then coming home, and not only are they coming home and having been unfaithful, but they're also now potentially exposing their partners and their families to coronavirus because they

haven't been careful. So it's like the sort of double threats like cheating and taking to a different level, and even the ultimate solution, the divorce and finalizing divorce is kind of elusive in all of this because the divorce cases have been delayed. You know, there's a lot of other things that have been put in the queue right now that need to be handled before that, and some people are saying that they can be delayed to as late as next year. So even that part of it

is a difficult thing to navigate. That's another stress or on top of all of this, because you know, in normal times, if I discovered that my partner was cheating on me and I decided to get a divorce, that would be traumatic enough. But compound that with the courts are closed for a lot of run of the mill business like that. So my options are very limited right now, which means that my stress level is going to be going through the room even more than it would in

normal times. And I think that that will be a reason that we see, you know, a sort of divorce boom, hopefully when things are turned to normal sooner rather than later.

It might not be that a ton of couples decided to get divorced during quarantine who wouldn't otherwise have made that decision at some point, But it's like, there's this going to be this backlog, this log jam of people who would have been gradually going through the motions, and all of a sudden, once the courts open up, they're all going to be pounding on the doors, you know, asking to hurry up the process because they've been stuck together for so long. It'll be like a damn has broken.

Marissa Casino, Senior editor at Washington I and thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much. I'm Oscar Ramirez, and this has been reopening America. Don't forget effort today's big news stories. You can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday. So follow us on iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcast. H