Life in quarantine, imposed since Tuesday to fight the Covid-19 epidemic, can also have serious repercussions on her married life. Usually two people only live for a handful of hours a day: you see each other briefly in the morning, before you go to work, then in the evening, after the day is over. Spending 24 hours with the other, for at least a fortnight, with very limited outing possibilities, can upset many of our marital landmarks. At the microphone of Mélanie Gomez, in Without an appointment on Europe 1, the psychoanalyst and sexologist Catherine Blanc explains how to prevent this confinement from turning into a divorce.
The advice of Catherine Blanc
“The confinement forces us to get out of the illusion of what the other is when we are absent and we are going to find it or there. We are in a division of territory, and we also realize that this Sharing territory is a power struggle, and all couples are forced to do so, more than ever when we find ourselves together, with functions and spaces to manage.
Should we avoid tensions or let them burst like moments of truth?
In times of trial, there is a lot of anxiety that we project onto each other through shouts and an exasperation that inevitably rises. It’s also a moment of union, where you realize how lucky it is to be with others, how lucky it is to have built things, to be able to come together and to be a parent. As a couple, we can lean on each other, provided, of course, we offer each other free spaces.
Should we isolate ourselves from time to time to preserve the life of two?
Isolation is not only geographical, it also consists in concentrating on an activity by ensuring that it does not overflow on that of the other, like television watched with volume at bottom, and which prevents the other to read. You have to be able to have moments of silence, of inner meditation, without being forced to separate, especially if the number of square meters is limited.
Can this confinement have an impact on sexuality?
It depends on how we are structured and how we manage our anxieties. There are those who have an urgency to live, as we know it in wartime, with this need to love each other before it is too late.
Others, on the contrary, are so much in the anxiety of contamination that they cannot even imagine mixtures, and in particular mixtures of substances, even if they are safe with each other. In this case, there is a risk of a decline in sexuality, without there being reason to worry about it. It must be said that we are doing our backs, only for the time of this quarantine.
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