College Love in the Time of Coronavirus

The day online classes were announced, I panicked. Should I go back to Brazil and risk not getting back for the rest of spring? Should I stay here in Evanston to be safe? Should I move out of my dorm? 

Gabriel, my boyfriend, who’s also Brazilian, aware of this new spiral of mine, told me that he’d be with me wherever I was, whether that was Evanston, Rio de Janeiro or anywhere in between. 

That same day, I packed a big black suitcase with my comfiest hoodies and sweatpants, made the three-minute trek to his apartment from Plex and officially moved into his apartment for the first time. Soon enough, we developed a routine. Our days were busy with competitive Gin Rummy tournaments, Betty Crocker brownies and watching House M.D. from the beginning. We would paint our nails together and I’d constantly steal his clothes. We’d been dating for more than a year, but we’d never been that close, 24/7 close, to be exact.

Many other couples find themselves in a similar situation during this pandemic. Going back home to family at this time is not the obvious answer for everyone. A multitude of factors play a role into a college student’s decision on where to isolate right now. At Northwestern alone, 5% of students (or approximately 200 students) have decided to stay on campus for the foreseeable future. Many of those who didn’t return to their families have taken this opportunity to live with their girlfriends, boyfriends and partners for the first time ever.

Gia Yetikyel & David Isaacs

For Gia Yetikyel and David Isaacs, it was the quarantine itself that made them an “official” couple.

“Quarantine really gave us a lot of extra time to sit with our problems, both in our own heads and with each other,” Isaacs said. 

Since their start after a “surprisingly successful” Tinder match in November, the duo had been taking it slow under with the curated label of “friends with benefits premium.” Yetikyel came over to Isaacs’s apartment often for just about any reason. “Even after a party, I didn’t go home, I came here,” she said. But though Yetikyel found it natural to come to Isaacs’s off-campus apartment most days of the week, she never considered his place to be her home. 

But when her sorority house closed indefinitely during NU’s extended spring break, Yetikyel’s place of refuge became Isaacs’ apartment. Given her father’s heart condition and the fact that her family lives in New York City (the coronavirus epicenter of the US), Yetikyel knew that moving into Isaacs’ off-campus apartment was the best option for her and her family. Besides the initial tension between Isaacs and his roommates about whether or not Yetikyel could become a permanent roommate, Yetikyel soon became an “official” resident.

Yetikyel and Isaacs took this time to deal with problems in their relationship that they hadn’t acknowledged before.

The couple recalls a moment in the beginning of quarantine where they were lying in the living room’s fuzzy, grey carpet at around 4a.m. and they started opening up about frustrations they had bottled up in the past. They talked about issues like their tendencies to hide their feelings and to not communicate with each other. 

“It was an important and necessary conversation we’d never had before,” Yetikyel said. 

And, as they began to understand and listen to each other, Yetikyel acted “like a fucking puppy” dancing her feet into the air in excitement. All the “dirty laundry” was out there for them to work and improve on, they agreed to work on everything that had once frustrated them. When they kissed, Yetikyel said that “it felt like the first time he ever kissed me.” 

Skye Li and Xanh Quang

The couple Skye Li and Xanh Quang moved into Quang’s family’s home in Chicago after both of their spring break plans were canceled. Li, whose family is from Shanghai, knew this would mean moving in with his family, but she also had no place to stay besides her dorm. “I'm lucky to have a really nice place to stay with a boyfriend and his family and they cook for me,” she said. 

Living with her boyfriend’s family did bring some initial tension. 

“His mom is scary and intimidating, and that is true by itself, but in my culture I'm conditioned to be scared of my mother-in-law,” Li said. At first, Li would not ask his mother for anything and would ask Quang to do and ask things for her at the risk of feeling “dumb.”

That initial awkwardness, however, has improved since then: “I even found similarities between us and I think we're both pretty crazy even sometimes in the same way, whenever Xanh sees the resemblance between his mom and me I just think that's so funny,” Li said.

For Quang, Li is anything but a burden for him and his family. “I have a queen-sized bed and so she just sleeps here,” he said, “she wouldn’t take up much space that I normally would.” And, while Quang’s mother does most of the cooking, Li also helps out in the kitchen, with chores or even gets Quang some food whenever he’s too stressed with online classes.

And, though Quang knows his family is “very loving” and “well-meaning,” he is not a big fan of going back home and regressing to old family dynamics. “Skye’s just physical presence is a very helpful buffer for how it could be. So I'm very grateful for that,” Quang said. 

Daniella Ueki & Luis Wolfrid

For Daniella Ueki and Luis Wolfrid, living together through this time was the most convenient solution for both. With Ueki’s family in Canada and Wolfrid’s in São Paulo, both of them knew it would be challenging to go their separate ways for the quarter, especially given that they have guaranteed internships in Chicago for the summer. 

Instead, Ueki pushed up the lease on her apartment for next year and decided to move out of her dorm and into her new studio-apartment during finals’ week. For Wolfrid, “the biggest memories are the heavy things we carried'' during that move. Wolfrid also moved into her apartment even though his own is only a few blocks away.

 “We don’t have roommates here which is nice and it’s more modern and fancy with a trash shoot and laundry in the apartment,” Wolfrid said.

Ueki recalls a day that Wolfrid went back to his apartment to “grab a button-up shirt” and returned with a suitcase full of clothes, an ironing board, an iron and a chair. 

“I’m not denying him the right to have clothes here but he doesn’t need to bring all of them,” said Ueki. 

Though the couple has since reached a compromise on how to share the space together, Ueki said “He started bringing stuff here and I got annoyed because it’s a studio so there’s not a lot of space here.” 

Their schedules have also made it convenient to have online classes together. Given their “almost perfectly aligned classes,” they take their classes sitting side-by-side. Though seating arrangements will most likely have to change during the summer because of confidential information from their respective consulting firms, both are confident in their decision to live together. 

“I’m even thinking of buying a noise-cancelling microphone from when we start working,” Wolfrid said, “I might sound a little robotic but it might help for them not to hear her.”  

For Gabriel and I, it feels good to know that we’re from the same place even though we can’t physically be there right now.

We speak Portuguese, we keep up with the same news, we sing the same Tiago Iorc song when we wake up. We learn recipes to fulfill our cravings for Brazilian classics like empadão, pastel and coxinha. We make our own Brazil, our own Rio, even though we’re cooped up in his apartment in Evanston. 

When, in the middle of a zoom call, my mom texted me that my favorite high school teacher was hospitalized, Gabriel knew exactly how I felt. As the tears streamed down my face the moment I clicked “Video Off,” he knew the distance I felt from my hometown, he knew how connected I was to my high school, he knew the pain of feeling so distant from home that it feels like you’re never there. 

He made me feel better, he made me feel safe and calm. We can relate to each other in this time more than I could ever hope for.