Love on February 14: When kissing is a luxury

It is no longer about the longest kiss in the world, which belongs to a Thai couple who remained kissing for 58 hours, thus beating a Guinness record, but rather kisses, just kissing, which is a luxury amid these pandemic times.

Although there are no specific studies in this regard, it can be categorically confirmed that kissing has become a luxury since the pandemic made its way into this world, disrupting lives, projects, and also loves.

COVID-19, which is still a gloomy reality in many latitudes —although some nations have already gone into a de-escalation process—, disrupted our lives, but today is the Day of Love, so let’s see COVID-19’s effects on couple relationships.

There are so many couples that will not be able to kiss each other, even today, February 14, due to COVID-19. Here are some reasons: either they do not live together and because of COVID-19 they shall wear their facial masks, or because one of the two got infected and / or is isolated because they are suspected of contagion, or just due to bio-security protocols and measures, which keep them at a distance, sometimes hundreds and even thousands of kilometers apart.

And since today is also Friendship Day...what can we say about friends? Even though they are close to us, fist-bumps became the mainstream greeting and substitute kisses and hugs.

These are common ground for Cubans and others worldwide, even when it is impossible to make generalizations. Dr. Beatriz Torres, president of the Cuban Society for the Multidisciplinary Study of Sexuality, warns of this premise every time she has been asked to give her view on Cuban couples in times of coronavirus.

The expert also notes that, depending on the quality of the bond before the pandemic, this may have impacted positively, or not, the love relationship.

Such is the diversity of these impacts, that although such distancing has been the most painful impact for many couples, living together full-time has also meant the final blow for others.

At the same time, this living together permanently, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for other unions has represented a consolidation of the bond, the rediscovery of their life partners, and also of new ways to give each other love.

That is why, in this topic, talking about numbers and percentages will always be risky. However, Dr. Torres has specified that "the evidence points to those who remained distanced, because they were in other countries or provinces, as the people who suffered the most from this situation, despite maintaining contact virtually."

When impossible turned into ordinary

For the historian, philosopher, and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Yuval Noah Harari, "COVID-19 is emerging as the decisive moment of our era," since we have entered "a historical wormhole," that is, a time when "the normal laws of history are suspended;" in other words, in a matter of a few weeks "the impossible became ordinary."

What described by the also author of several bestsellers is extended to the reality of couples; hence, regarding love ties, there will always be a pivotal moment after the pandemic, which cannot yet be shaped up because we still remain immersed in it.

Despite so much ups and downs, love is still saved. This seems to be proven by a research published over a year ago by the Directorate of Academic Publications of the University of Havana: Loving attachment of young university students from Havana.

After inquiring with 353 students of Medical Sciences, Computer Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Civil Engineering, Social Communication, Journalism, History, Sociology, Arts, Letters, Law and Psychology, all from universities in Havana, the authors concluded that almost half of the sample (48.3%) showed a confident style in their relationships.

This shows young people with greater facility for intimacy and commitment, warmer and willing to offer emotional support and help to their partner, as pointed out by researchers Adis Aymée López Bauta and Eniuska Hernández Cedeño, from the School of Psychology at the UH, and Gretter Anaudina Rey Rodríguez, from the University of Sonora, Mexico.

“What I have observed the most is that what we call home, the private and domestic environment, desperately needs the public stage; namely, friends, work, the streets, in order to fulfill its function,” highlights the also university professor and author of famous volumes.

The most important learning

What has been described so far are all coexisting realities derived from this world crisis generated by the coronavirus, as microscopic as terrifying, which has revealed, also as an undeniable certainty, how selfishness, inequalities and the desire for profit have been about, worldwide, to make us collapse as a species.

But also the pandemic itself —despite its terrible effects, and forcing us to rethink even the ways of living and living together— has brought us certain lessons.

The learning that COVID-19 leaves us. A sociological approach summarizes them in a way that is well articulated with this February 14, although transcending the scope of couple relationships to cover our entire human condition: “the most important lesson that COVID-19 leaves us is that both our happiness and that of those around us are actually cultivated if we embrace optimism as a shield, solidarity as a strategy, and love as a flag.”

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff