How I am surviving a long distance marriage during Covid-19

Nathalye Harry
4 min readFeb 1, 2021

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My story of being separated by travel bans during the Covid-19 pandemic.

My husband and I got married in July 2019, he’s Mauritian and I’m British and Mauritian. In November 2019 I came back to the UK for work and family commitments but intended to go back to Mauritius in early 2020. The UK has strict immigration requirements which means he cannot come to the UK and stay for long periods of time.

Then in February 2020 news of the Covid-19 virus started circulating and Mauritius closed its borders for 3 months. At this point the UK was into its first wave of the virus and entered lockdown for 3 months, leaving me stuck in the UK unable to go back to Mauritius.

In June 2020 after eradicating the virus on the island by bringing their cases down from 300 to 0, Mauritius decided to impose for the foreseeable future strict quarantine measures for all travellers at their personal expense costing up to £2000 per person confining them to a hotel room for a minimum period of 14 days. Another stipulation is that travellers cannot leave their quarantine room until they test negative twice. Some people had continued to test negative for up to 3 months and the authorities did not let them leave.

With this news and the growing cases in the UK, I decided to hold out for a little bit longer to see how the next few weeks would pan out and my other concern was that I wanted to avoid catching the virus whilst travelling on a plane. I discovered the situation getting worse by the day in the UK and we entered a second national lockdown, now currently in its third national lockdown.

We are now in February 2021, little over a year since we last saw each other and in the month of love with Valentines day around the corner. Christmas, New Year, birthdays and anniversaries have gone by and we are not anywhere closer to being reunited.

With the UK imposing a travel ban and quarantine requirements at the traveller’s expense at least until March, we have the prospect of yet another 6 to 12 months of being apart.

The prospect of spending two years apart from my husband, missing out on birthdays and anniversaries, not being able to eat breakfast together or watch TV together or simply enjoying each others company really pains me.

The worst part of all of this is that there are reports of people having secret illegal parties where they are spreading the virus and slowing down our chances of bringing the cases down and lifting the restrictions. The more people break the rules the further I am and other people are to being with their loved ones, the more people are going to die and the less likely we are to returning to any sort of normality.

This is how I am dealing with my long distance marriage.

Speak on the phone

We speak everyday on the phone at the same time so that it becomes a habit. There might not be much we have to talk about as we are house bound but even sitting in silence can make it feel like we are in each others presence.

Send each other gifts

Amazon has been a lifesaver when it comes to buying gifts and means that we can’t still find a way to remember each other on special occasions

Talk about everything

Talking about all the little things that go on paints the picture for each other so we know what we’re up to and still feel connected.

Let go of things you can’t control

Accept not knowing when this will be over but remain hopeful that it will at some point. Telling yourself that there is nothing you can do and that this is out of your control really helped me to deal with the uncertainty that we are facing.

Make plans

Make plans for the future so that you have something to look forward to. That keeps me motivated and I take pleasure in looking at my long list of things that we can do to make up for lost time together.

Finding ways of doing things together

We love exercising together and on Strava you can keep track of each other running or walking. We challenge each other and that makes us feel like we are doing something together even when we are apart.

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