Love Finds a Way

Three couples navigate love in quarantine

BY PAIGE HAEHLKE

Eleni Tongas spent her seven-hour flight to Dublin, Ireland, staring at the tracker on the seat in front of her as the distance grew shorter and shorter. She walked through the empty airport to find her boyfriend, Osgar O’Hoisin, eagerly waiting with flowers in hand. After spending four months apart, they finally had four days together in October to celebrate their two-year anniversary.

Three couples who quarantined and lived together for part or all of the pandemic have so far found silver linings in the unexpected circumstances thrown their way. They appreciated the new ways they came to know each other, and they grew stronger as a result.

Osgar, originally from Dublin, Ireland, played tennis at UW–Madison when he met Eleni three years ago during Thanksgiving break. The couple started dating about a year later, in 2018. After Osgar graduated in December 2019, life — and love — got a lot more complicated.

When the coronavirus pandemic worsened in mid-March, Eleni, now 22, was studying abroad in Florence, Italy. Osgar, now 24, was in Mexico, playing tennis professionally. The couple then quarantined together for 90 days in Brookfield, a suburb of Milwaukee, before Osgar returned to Ireland when his visa expired.

Eleni and Osgar made TikToks and binged shows like “Normal People.” They assumed Osgar would return to America soon after he left, but it became clear as the coronavirus spread and borders closed that he wouldn’t return for a while.

“The last two weeks we were so sad,” Eleni says. “I feel like I was crying the whole time.”

Less than three months after Osgar left, Eleni was set to fly to Ireland to surprise him for his birthday. Her plans fell apart when she woke up to a text from his mother that said he tested positive for COVID-19.

“It was a terrible birthday,” Osgar says.

They stay connected by texting and trying to FaceTime daily, but the time difference has complicated things. Sometimes their timing or moods don’t line up.

“When you’re both on completely separate pages and you can only talk over a phone line, then that’s where I feel like you can clash,” Osgar says. “Whereas if we were together, it’s easier to kind of help each other through it.”

Eleni is still in Madison for her senior year, and not having Osgar there with her has been difficult. But if anything, the challenges they’ve faced instilled a new level of resilience in them.

“Overall, I would say that our relationship has just gotten stronger, because it’s not an easy thing to do, to be away from someone that you’re in love with for so long,” Osgar says. “I think it just becomes more clear what you want. It sucks, though, I’m not going to sugarcoat it.”

Eleni is planning to go back to Dublin during the holiday season, but is only cautiously optimistic. Days after her visit in October, Ireland reinstated strict lockdown measures.

They don’t know for sure when they’ll reunite. But they view this challenge as a testament to the strength of their bond. However their situation changes in the coming months and years, they’ll take it on together.

“If anything, it just makes you realize that it’s all going to be okay, and even though we haven’t seen each other in four months, we’ve just made it work,” Eleni says.

It wasn’t love at first sight for Molly Burki (left) and Anna Kotecki (right), but it didn’t take long for their relationship to grow. Now, they’ve lived through quarantine together and have come out even stronger on the other side. When Mary Ryan worked as a nurse in Chicago in 1982, her patient’s son left her a rose and an invitation for a glass of wine as a thank you for caring for his father. She has now been happily married to that man, Dennis, for 33 years.

Mary, 60, and Dennis, 69, live in Madison and both worked from home during the pandemic until the end of September, when Dennis went back to working in-person four days per week as an assistant district attorney for Waushara County.

While marriages have been put to the test — divorce rates rose in China after lockdown ended there — Dennis sees being home with his wife as a blessing he’s grateful for.

“It’s allowed me to not just see the person that I visualize as wife, mother; there’s a whole other dimension,” Dennis says. “To see that, and to see how Mary does that — keeps the house going, keeps the family going, and puts herself last — it’s opened me up quite a bit.”

“He’s just saying that because I made him a peach cake tonight,” Mary says, laughing.

They established long ago how to create space for each other. Mary is more extroverted and social, while Dennis likes to keep to himself. Now Dennis walks their dog, does the dishes and helps with laundry more than he did before, which Mary appreciates.

“You’ve got to be willing to change, to accommodate, but I think most of all, you have to be sensitive to the needs of that other person,” Dennis says. “Those have to come first. You have to put yourself aside. And I don’t know how much I do that, obviously not a lot since she’s laughing.”

When Dennis went back to work in person at the end of September, neither of them were thrilled. They came to love their new normal of being together all the time.

“Dennis is going back, and it’s breaking my heart,” Mary says while tearing up and taking her glasses off to blot her eyes.

“It’s been a spoiled couple of months,” Dennis says, rubbing Mary’s back. “We’ll make it work, and we’ll take advantage of the time that we have and focus on that, not on the difficult things, which is how we got through this situation.” When Anna Kotecki, 21, and Molly Burki, 22, first met in 2018, they didn’t get along. But a mutual friend playing matchmaker put them in a group chat together, and now they’ve been in a relationship for over a year.

Anna and Molly are both seniors at UW–Madison. When classes moved online in mid-March and a state public health order limited nonessential gatherings, the couple spent the next six months quarantining together — making forts in their living room, rewatching dystopian movie series and choreographing dances — and their relationship flourished.

“[We found] ways to make life exciting when you can’t go anywhere, like getting dressed up and doing dates in the living room,” Molly says.

In mid-August, Anna and Molly moved into new apartments they signed leases for before the pandemic. They had become emotionally dependent on one another and had to relearn how to be alone.

“It really felt like my emotions didn’t know how to regulate on their own,” Anna says. “Just being around someone else all the time, never being alone, the few times then that I was alone, my brain didn’t know how to function.” Both Anna and Molly struggle with depression and anxiety, but living together helped them learn how to support one another on bad days.

“When I get really stressed or my anxiety is bad, it’s really easy for [Anna] to calm me down,” Molly says. “If [she’s] gone I’m just in my head about it.”

Quarantining allowed them to preview their life together after college. They both want to pursue arts careers in bigger cities, but they know those dreams might have to wait.

“We know now that if we do stay in Madison, if we have to, then we’ll live together, and we’ll make it work,” Anna says. “If we do move somewhere else, we’ll know that we can live together, and we know that we can handle a pandemic.” •