“Now it’s a love story of crazy or nothing”: faced with the crisis, singles reveal themselves to themselves

They experienced celibacy with successive confinements. Unless they had already been experiencing it for weeks, months, years. They are part of a cohort of 18 million people knowing this situation in France, when 10 million live alone. “Ah, I couldn’t wait to talk about it!” On the phone, Marie is talkative. Lots of things to say, to share. “Even a guy in jail has more social activity than me”, she jokes. Anger, dismay, too.

This thirty-something from the Parisian suburbs arrives at the end of a year of celibacy, after a breakup “not chosen”. It’s not so much that celibacy weighs on him. “I don’t have to worry about living alone, I’ve hardly ever experienced anything else in my adult life.” She also can’t say that her previous experience as a couple makes her regret going through confinement without a spouse to wake up with: “I imagine myself confined with my ex: it would have ended like a gory movie” so much the latter was reluctant to do housework,

The problem Marie dwells on is that she wants children. At 36, time is running out, especially as she does not intend to carry out this project alone or to have recourse to medically assisted procreation. “If I do it, it’s two, having married before”, she said, annoyed by certain interventions on assisted reproduction in the Assembly that her professional activity leads her to follow. “People who say that after 30, women are good to throw in the trash”, she sums up. The maternity project has been undermined by successive confinements, increasingly restricted curfews, and the shutdown of places of social interaction. The first confinement over, summer has arrived. Marie tried to make up for lost time – mischievous, she adds: “to have a young girl’s life, to cite a well-known author“. Syears meeting in love with the key, the autumn returned, and with it, the confinement, where his life is absorbed by the work … and that is it. “When do I meet people, exactly? My life, my job, requires me to work late, evenings and weekends. And no, I don’t feel like going for walks with the first guy. ” She concludes, a hint of resentment in her voice, “I lost a year of my life”.

800 kilometers further south, in Marseille, Marion, 32, unemployed, shows off her single life without regret. “I don’t want to have children, it takes the pressure off me”, she admits. “It’s been five years now, I’ve mastered.” The confinement has awakened in her desires for tenderness, for shared intimacy. “Sleeping alone, not feeling someone by my side, it becomes heavy. I was deprived of touch, with a hand placed on my shoulder”. Faced with this lack, she manages to fill what can be. “I made myself a bolster with a gray hooded sweatshirt. It’s like a blanket, my bed is a little less empty”, she smiles.

Dating apps are getting tempting. According to Ifop, one in three French people have used one since the first confinement. Without necessarily finding satisfaction. Guirec did not like these conversations “which do not go very far, without kindness. My first confinement went well, because I was talking from morning to night with the same person. But there, I had zero answer in front, so I decided to ‘stop hurting me’. Despite two last sexual experiences “shabby”, Marion tried her luck again: “There was this kind of permanent bedtime injunction, guys were asking me if I would be enough ‘brave’ to break the curfew with them, when I’m not already doing it to have aperitifs with my friends “. Marie did start some conversations on Tinder … for a rather disastrous result: “One gave me enough clues that I found out he was married with three kids. Another offered me a hardcore sex with a buddy.”

Is the solution to learn to be self-sufficient? A challenge, especially when you have a heavy heart from a recent breakup. Arthur, a student in Toulouse, took a long time to overcome this episode where his “universe collapsed” after a history of two and a half years. First at the factory, in his native region : “I kept my mind busy, despite the atmosphere of the world, around March 16, where you only go out to buy cigarettes and go shopping.” Then came in September his installation in Toulouse, in resumption of studies. And, again, confinement, home studies, and “that damn white wall every day in front of [lui] in [sa] bedroom”. There again, he ruminates, repeats the story over and over and sees only the void left by his ex: “In my entourage, no one was able to read me like her”. So he closed in on himself: “I organized my social suicide a bit.”

Decreased morale, isolation, dark thoughts … if the end of a couple, arrived before or during confinement, have a liberating aspect, they also have negative consequences on the psychological state, and even physical. Catherine, in her fifties used to successive periods of celibacy, testifies to this. After five years of a “very nice story”, the health crisis disperses everything in its path. “I found myself single, at the worst possible time. He composed a lot to please me, and he was unable to continue his efforts with confinement. He disappeared overnight.” Plans that collapse. The laptop that goes silent. The prospect of evenings spent with each other vanishes. “It made me sick in an incredible way. It was not so much his physical presence that I missed, but his support, even from a distance. I lost the hours of exchanges, the intellectual connivance, the confidence that I had in him. That’s what caresses me from the inside. ” This loss resulted in a still poorly understood suffering: broken heart syndrome, whose cases have quadrupled with the pandemic, with physical effects. Chest pain, swelling of breath, and the retracting heart organ. Catherine took a year to recover, with visits to the hospital.