I’m not sure anybody had a chance to consider how lockdown might change their life, but it has surprised me. More politicised, more meditative, and, perhaps most of all, less boring than expected. Since mid-March a jam-packed calendar has quietly emptied itself of drinks and dinners, parties and weddings. In its place arrived a nothingness that has somehow become life-changing. I entered it wondering how my partner and I would live and work in one little space. Nine weeks in, we got engaged.
While I had tried to fill the shape-shifting hours of lockdown with government-approved walks and too much screen time, he had been thinking about our future. Unwittingly, I’d collected my own engagement ring from the doorstep. When I idly asked what the brown, square package was, he said it was the latest Tessa Hadley novel, and I’d thought nothing more of it.
Friday nights, these days, are spent on the tiny balcony garden I’ve lovingly cultivated. With each week that passes, the sun stretches lower and longer through the thickening leaves of the trees nearby. And so it was there that he bustled out with a bottle of champagne that he had had hidden for weeks – first, in a shoebox, then in the fridge veg drawer – and a couple of my grandfather’s antique coupes. He used the excuse that we’d both had a good week to celebrate; I just thought it was fun.
Matt had managed to scrub up while I’d popped out to get milk, but I was in the same jeans and T-shirt I’d been wearing for three days. He didn’t seem to mind. Our conversation meandered before he brought it to a delicate pause: lockdown had made him realise that really, all we needed was one another. Would I marry him?
I swore, then said yes. He unearthed an elegant Rachel Jackson ring from behind a flowerpot (we’ll find something more permanent together when lockdown eases, but I love it). We cooked pasta from the local deli and danced to this year’s Icelandic Eurovision Song Contest entry as the kettle boiled. No mountains climbed, no far-flung islands travelled to, just at home – and all the more dizzying for it.
People always ask the newly betrothed if they had expected it, and I hadn’t. We’d discussed marriage in the abstract, usually in the small hours at other people’s weddings, but Matt had always said he wanted us to live together beforehand. Both too stubborn to give up our homes, we’ve spent most of our three-year-long relationship flitting between them. It was only in February that he and a small library of books shuffled into my one-bed flat in Forest Hill. We were hoping to move in May to somewhere bigger, then lockdown happened. Like most couples, we’ve never spent as much time together. For us, it’s never been as good.
We kept the news quiet for 24 hours, then we gatecrashed a pre-ordained family Zoom quiz – what else? – with the surprise. No smothering hugs, no rustled-up fizz, but an uncanny pleasure in watching the joy and shock (I don’t think they had me down as the marrying kind) simultaneously spread over their faces across a laptop screen, the app choosing to highlight whoever squealed the loudest. Over the next week, we’d see a lot of that: happiness expressed in the new, intimate language we’ve all learned, of sofas, pyjamas and bare faces of the people we love.
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Based in south-west London, Matt’s family were somewhat more conveniently placed for a physical visit than mine, and so we spent the next afternoon making our way around their garden paths, slipping the news into conversation just as he had the proposal. The two metres between us added an extra layer of surreality.
But there are some people you just can’t tell over Zoom. I usually see my girlfriends – the two women I would ask to be my bridesmaids – weekly. Since lockdown, we’ve been making do with fortuitous daily-exercise collisions and plenty of WhatsApp chat. When we managed to catch up in a park, a full week after the fact, my announcement made our three-month reunion (each of us perched on three distinct blankets) all the more golden. They were too surprised to mind that I’d kept it a secret from them for seven days.
I’ve always considered a short engagement quite romantic: once you’ve decided, why not crack on? The notion of being bogged down in napkin colours and menu tasting for 18 months seems exhausting. But wedding planning at the moment is nigh on impossible. We don’t want to pick a date when there’s still no end in sight for social distancing, and most of 2020’s weddings have been moved forward into next year as it is. Even the matter of dress shopping seems unthinkable; the familiar touch of my mum’s hand on a hip or shoulder to judge the cut of something is more memory than expectation.
The neurotic Virgo in me is obviously miffed about this, but as Matt, a far more relaxed soul, maintains, there’s nothing much to be done. While I’m thinking about a day, he’s been considering a lifetime. And we have gained other, less glamorous things from lockdown: the conversations over dinner every night, the silent hours of reading in each other’s company, the affectionate nicknames we’ve given to the birds we see through the windows each day.
Time has been an unlikelier gift, something we always wanted more of. And something, considering the huge losses of the pandemic, we hold more tightly. At a moment when nothing is guaranteed, we have agreed to keep one thing with certainty: one another.
Alice Vincent is the author of Rootbound, Rewilding a Life (Canongate, £14.99).
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