The coronavirus lockdown has put a strain on couples, new data has confirmed, with family therapists and lawyers noting a jump in clients seeking counselling or divorce.
A study on the impacts of Covid-19 by Relationships Australia, the leading national provider of relationship support services, found that 42% of people had experienced a negative change in their relationship with their partner during the last few months.
Its national executive officer, Nick Tebbey, said this statistic was directly related to the finding that 55% of people reported feeling challenged by their living arrangements during this time.
“We are seeing that the kinds of calls and inquiries that our counsellors have received over the last few months are from people dealing with juggling working from home, looking after the kids and their home schooling,” he said. “Basically, everything happening at home and them not being able to get out of the home.”
While couples getting married mid-pandemic made headlines globally, Jacqueline Wharton, the founder of Separation and Divorce Advisors, said she had noticed a rise in client numbers since restrictions eased.
Anne Hollonds, psychologist and director of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, told Guardian Australia that lockdowns had created a situation “similar to the dynamic we see every Christmas when people have their Christmas holidays”.
“Pre-pandemic, every Christmas and January, this is an issue that comes up: people are spending more time together, they don’t have the usual structures of their lives like work and school, and that is when the cracks become very visible if there are things in the relationship that haven’t been addressed, like hurts, misunderstandings, disappointments,” Hollonds said.
“We can carry these resentments for a very long time because we make ourselves busy and spend a lot of time away from each other. Often a lot of people find that it gets pretty intolerable over the break and, come January, they call a counselling service or seek help.”
Indeed, the psychologist Rachel Voysey said her Sydney-based couples therapy practice, The Relationship Room, had encountered an influx of new clients reporting that the coronavirus had exacerbated existing issues in their relationships.
“It has also brought up a lot of intimacy issues for couples,” she said. “We tend to justify problems with intimacy as not having enough time, and now couples are thinking it’s not the lack of time that is the problem, it’s a problem in the relationship.
“But also having too much togetherness isn’t good for intimacy as it can kill desire, so there is that problem too.”
Voysey said the pandemic had made it financially impossible for some couples on the brink of splitting up to go through with a planned separation. Some had come to her wanting help with going through a separation under the one roof, or delaying those plans “because it is hard enough keeping one household going, let alone two”.
Wharton said she had more clients wanting help to work out “nesting” living arrangements, where the parents rent a separate apartment and take turns staying in their family home caring for children.
“They can get a better grip on what is happening in the housing market, while also trialling separation, or getting the kids used to things and not having to move into different rental properties,” Wharton said.
“When property prices are going up and superannuation is going up, everyone feels a lot more confident about their financial future with divorce. When things are uncertain, people want to stay put.”
But there was a “glimmer of hope”, Tebbey said. While Relationships Australia had received a large increase in call numbers during the pandemic, “People have been really prepared to compromise and to come up with clever ways to figure things out, support each other, and maintain their relationship.”
More than 90% of survey respondents also said they had experienced no change or a positive change in their relationships with their parents, children, friends, extended family, neighbours and colleagues.
“We have seen people having embraced the idea of being creative in this time, and not just in their intimate relationships,” Tebbey said.
“There are these brilliant stories of people trying very hard to connect and maintain connections in all the different kinds of relationships, and that is where the silver lining is in all of this.”
