This article is extracted from “This is NOT a Second Honeymoon: Helping Couples Survive Spending A Lot of Time Together”, a book that was written by Christopher L. Smith to help couples during the COVID-19 pandemic. In his clinical work, he realized that couples being quarantined together have particular challenges. The book goes into a lot of these challenges along with strategies to survive these types of times and even to have their relationship thrive. We will be sharing a series of these extracts over several weeks to help you. If you would like to look at all of them together and get the book right away, it can be found on Amazon (Book).

Just because you are confined to your home together does not mean that you are trapped in the space with no chance to be separate. You can separate from each other within the space for periods of time, or you can even have portions of the space that is your own.

If your space is large enough, there is nothing wrong with spending time in different rooms. Even in a smaller space, you can get creative and separate yourself from your partner by going to different corners of the same room or even using non-traditional spaces (like a bathroom or a more spacious closet) as a distinct space to be apart for a while.

Some space division can be done on a more permanent basis. Perhaps you have enough rooms that each of you can have their own room in addition to the areas that you will share. Perhaps you will get these individual spaces as portions of the limited rooms that you have. Earlier in my career as a marriage and family therapist, I had a couple that before they came to see me had used masking tape to divide up their home into three types of spaces

– one type for each of them as their space and the third type as space that they had particular times to be able to use (or hopefully in your case as shared time). I don’t think you need to go as far as laying down tape to divide up your home, but the idea is something that you can adopt.