Throughout the tragic events of the past few months -- and despite the tragic events still to come -- love still perseveres and flourishes. From an unlikely pandemic wedding to the bond formed between researcher and patient, this episode will examine the powerful love that sustains us during this time.

Our first story is from Melanie Hamlett, a Moth-slam-winning storyteller and writer currently based in France. After a life of proud singlehood, Melanie considers settling down during the pandemic.

After Melanie’s story, our host speaks with Joanne Davila, professor of psychology at Stony Brook University, about how the pandemic is affecting relationships.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this episode on Monday!

Story Transcript

So I'm getting eaten out on a beach in France, on the French Riviera by a beautiful French model, and it's like a dream cause he's actually smart and funny and nice, and this is actually kind of a regular thing for me. Not models but having fun, sexy, hot hookups with beautiful dudes who want to pleasure me.

I've been on like a Tinder bender, more or less, for like four years. For me at that point in time, Tinder and hookups was about sexual empowerment, because four years earlier I had left an abusive, super traumatizing relationship, physically, sexually, in every way possible and this was my way of reclaiming my power as a woman and being able to trust my intuition. And it was working out well.

My first year in France, I was like… it was bingo all the time, man, because I was supposed to be like a dried up, 42-year-old hag, but apparently, in France, men thought I was beautiful. I was a cute girl, for lack of a better word. Hooking up with guys 10, 15 years younger than me, all of them loved eating me out, you know, and just treated me really well. Because I had a great vetting system so I was having fun.

Then I met Anthony and I knew immediately this guy was special. We talked on the phone for like hours our first night, second night, third night, then we finally went on a date. And actually, before I went on my first date, I fucked that model again because I just knew that my fun libertine lifestyle was over.

And then on the second date with Anthony, after dinner we watched Brené Brown's TED Talk on vulnerability, and he paused it every 10 minutes and wanted to discuss it. And he cried at the end and I'm like, “Oh, God, this guy is everything that I'm not.” Like in a yin-yang kind of way. He's super good at communication. He's emotionally intelligent. He's in touch with his feelings and he knows how to talk about them.

I knew I liked him when I didn't want to sleep with him the first night, second night, third night. I was in no hurry. I fuck guys I don't like on the first night, not guys I really like. There's no rush.

And so six months into our relationship, we go on like a vacation together. We get this free, tiny apartment in the south of France to stay, and on the third day of our vacation, President Macron announces that we are in lockdown, because this is the pandemic and now we're stuck inside.

Now, people in the USA don't understand… our lockdown looked a little bit different than yours. We could only leave the house and go to the pharmacy, the doctor, the grocery store. We had to have permission slips with a time stamp, the address where I was born, my birth date, like all this crap. And we could only go one kilometer from our house to exercise.

And they were strict about this. I got pulled over all the time. They're checking my little permission slip to make sure I wasn't more than a kilometer away. It was hardcore, but we flattened the curve.

So basically I was on house arrest, which is not the first time I've been on house arrest. I've actually been on house arrest, like real house arrest when I was 17 for shoplifting and weed, and I think this was actually worse because we couldn't leave the house.

Now, this is the first time I've also been in a healthy relationship with a dude, like a long-term committed relationship. I'd only dated seriously two other guys before. One was that guy who tried to murder me, the violent dude, and that was at the age of 35. That was the first guy I ever dated. And the next one was after that, like several years. It was like one year long. It was long distance. He was French. I was in Spain. I saw him once a month. So this was seriously the first real and awesome relationship I've been in.

But this is intense, right? Not only because it's my first time but I'm also a runner by nature. I'm a Sagittarius, like poster-child Sagittarius. I lived in my truck for five years for fun as a backpacking guide, ski guide, raft guide. And anytime I got bored, I just roll away to a new town.

I've lived in LA, New York, South America, Sweden, Spain, now France. Not committing to a place or a person is like my thing. Freedom, you know?

So now, I am stuck with this dude in a house, because the police literally won't let me leave. So what I learned right away, as all people do, is that relationships are a mirror of yourself, except now I'm in like a fucking funhouse of mirrors. I have a constant witness to my craziness. Apparently, I'm super fucking gross. Trash falls out of my pockets all the time. I don't know why I have wrappers all the time. I stir my coffee with my sunglasses. I leave crumbs everywhere. I'm a pretty thoughtless person, as I came to find out.

And he had his stuff too, right? So we had difficult conversations about this stuff because we're in like the pressure cooker of our relationship, much like the pandemic itself which is a pressure cooker for everything in the world.

And so this was hard shit, but it was also pretty cool at the same time. He taught himself how to cook. He made me quiche and he made me dinner all the time. He offered to cut my hair after month two of looking ridiculous, but he didn't just do that. He spent days watching YouTube tutorials on how to cut and layer women's hair. And he put me in a chair with a towel around me and he was so gentle. It took him like an hour to do it. He treated me like this precious pearl.

In that chair I'm like, “This guy adores me.” I have no doubt about it. And I would trust him with anything. So after 82 days of being in this flat together, I realized that I'm still not sick of this person. In fact, I actually look forward to seeing him every morning when I wake up, which is weird. I've never spent this much time with anyone in my life.

So at the end of the confinement I realized that my visa renewal date had been switched to July. Now, Anthony and I have been talking way before confinement about, ah, maybe we'll like move in together. Maybe we'll get married and just change the visa to make our life easier. But we weren't serious about it. We practically lived together, but I have my bachelor pad where I could write and go do my Melanie stuff.

But with this pandemic, everything becomes more serious. So the borders are closed. There's travel bans. And we realize we don't want them to ever send me away or for him to not be able to come to the US with me for any reason, so we just… and we didn't want to wait a whole ’nother year. A lot can happen in a year, so we just said, “You know what? Fuck it! Let's just get married. Why not? We survived a pandemic, you know. A lockdown.”

So when we got back to Lyon within a matter of weeks we found a new apartment, moved into it together. I finally got rid of my bachelor pad and then we started planning this wedding, which we had to do soon because the visa appointment was soon.

And I'm just thinking, well, we're just signing papers really at the mayor's office. We'll have like a big party with the emotional bullshit later on, like a year later when the pandemic's over. But the thing is, I've always hated weddings. I hate the idea of marriage. I'm a child of divorce.

I'm a journalist and a writer. I actually wrote an article for Glamour magazine on all the reasons why getting married is a bad idea for women. I'm firmly against this shit. And here I am planning a wedding.

So we invited like 25 people because we didn't want to kill anybody. Even though we had crushed the curve… the US in July had like 70,000 cases a day and we had like a few hundred in a country of 65 million, so we could have had a big wedding. But his family had 11 people who'd had the virus back in the spring. Two of them had been in the ICU, so we wanted to be responsible. Plus, none of my family could come because Americans are banned from Europe. We didn't even invite his extended family. It was super small. Not a big deal.

But as the days got closer, I mean he's a super romantic, sentimental guy, so everything started to become more and more wedding-y. You know what I mean?

My mom convinced me to wear a dress, and like a white one, so I went looking for one. I actually stumbled across a white gown that was used and super fucking cheap but beautiful. And in the dressing room, I got period blood all over it because my diva cup runneth over, so I actually had no choice but buy this fucking thing. But it's okay. I put flowers on top of the blood so it ended up working out.

I picked out a pretty but super cheap bouquet. I bought some fucking white lights and shit for the ceremony afterwards, and plants instead of flowers, blah, blah, blah. And we had masks made for everybody.

Of course Anthony, being really caring about all of this so much, spent two days stenciling our initials and the date of our wedding onto every fucking mask.

So during all of this, even before the actual wedding planning started, even when we were talking about marriage, I was crying every day. Like every day I went on a bike ride and I would bawl, and I didn't know why. Just every day. Now, I didn't have any doubts at all about what we were doing. I knew that this was the right decision and yet I'm crying. And it's starting to worry me because he's doing fine. He's so excited. He's so confident about all this.

Then a week before the wedding, my friends held a… in France, the bachelorette party is actually called Bury-the-Young-Girl party. Traditionally, you're supposed to bury the boy and bury the girl, and you bury wine and a boxful of memorabilia from your childhood. You're literally like putting that to rest or whatever. That's when it occurred to me why I'm fucking crying.

This is grief. Like I am literally burying the old Melanie. I've been single for 42 years, right? So this is like it's my identity I'm burying. I'm so good at being single. I'm so fucking good. I finally got good at something and now it's over.

Now, I have to compromise. If I want to move, I can't just roll out of town. I got to ask if he wants to do it too. But I was finally okay with it because men get to grieve this stuff, right? For men, it's a huge sacrifice, for that one special lady they'll give up all their freedom. And they're allowed to be conflicted about it a little bit.

Women aren't. I'm supposed to be so thrilled I'm getting married. “Oh, my God. A man chose me! Oh!” And it's like fuck that, man. That's not how I felt. Anybody can get married. To actually want, to choose to get married to someone very special that you're fucking linked to forever possibly with everything, well… that's a whole nother thing.

Now that I know what it is, I'm like, “Okay, then that's normal. It's healthy for me to cry.”

Then one day we went to go pick out the cake and he's like, “Babe, what do you think about a big, red, heart-shaped cake?”

I'm like, “Okay.” Fucking cheesy is what I want to say, but he's so cute and sweet because he loves love. And this is what I love about this man. He's so tender. He's so fearless about being emotional and vulnerable and all that shit. And he helps me access parts of myself that I didn't even know were there.

So I realized, okay, it's okay to cry but like, look, I'm gaining a fucking teammate. And being on my own is awesome, but it's also hard. Being single is hard. And now, I can't go peg some dude whenever I want but, you know, there's also open relationships at some point if we want to. We could talk about that.

Anyway, we decided. We make our own rules. And I can talk to him about anything. He's the only person in my life that I can do that with, so fuck, yeah. I'm going to marry this dude.

And I'm a ‘tornado of rainbows’, is what he calls me. The only person in my life who loves my fucking chaos.

So I finally buy into all of this fully. I get a manicure the day before the wedding. First time ever, last time ever. I get my hair done like professionally, and they put fucking little white flowers all over it. I got my mask, I got my period dress on. I walk in there with them.

And he's a super sentimental guy, so he actually wore my Dad's little handkerchief that… my dad died two years ago of Alzheimer’s and he was like, “Babe, I really want him to be there with us.”

And then he does his vows. This is like 25 people in front of us, 200 people back home on Zoom because people convinced me I should just keep asking anyone I want. And I'm listening to these vows and they're so much more beautiful than mine. And I cry in public for maybe the first time in my life.

Then I realized, looking at that handkerchief that… so my dad always called me his ‘wild child’. He was sure I was not the marrying type. And I realized he would be so proud of me, not for getting married. No one gives a shit. He doesn't care… like that's not an accomplishment. But taking a huge step into this unknown and facing my biggest fear of my life, which is commitment, and doing that with someone who's not a fucking loser but like an awesome, awesome person… hell, yeah he'd be proud of me for that.

So as much as I love the thrill of adventure and tinder and hot models eating me out, none of that compares to being seen and loved fully by someone else. I guess it just took police locking me into a house for me to be willing to take that step.