We were like this for about a month, then my sanity dropped to critical levels, forcing us to have a conversation about what we were ok with in terms of like, going outside. This resulted in me going on bike rides very frequently all summer, which helped A LOT.
Then in late summer, we had another “figure out what probabilities we are OK with” session and decided that we were going to categorically allow hanging out masked and outside, because the sanity/risk tradeoff seemed very good.
(Then we moved to DC and a whole lot of things happened that we would otherwise not have been OK with risk-wise, but were necessary for moving, which we felt was very beneficial overall.)
At this point we’re still at “don’t go indoors at a place with other people” (we grocery shop only via delivery/pickup), “categorically allow masked outdoor hangouts.” Also, we will go indoors with a P100/N95/KN95 if it’s a rare and necessary event such as medical treatment.
Feels to me from reading the post that A) Having these conversations was MUCH more difficult for OP, because she lives in a house with many other people, whereas Roger and I mostly had these conversations with just the two of us and to a lesser extent our two roommates who mostly just cooperated, B) We actually had much fewer of these conversations early on? We tried to keep it to just what we needed to make a couple very specific decisions (“is it OK for me to go on bike rides”), which I guess was also easier because there were fewer people and so fewer variables that needed to be tracked.
I guess a takeaway I have here is that it seems like 2020 was a good year to live with exactly one partner who you are very close with. Enough other-human for sanity, not so much other-human to increase the negotiation burden drastically. Seems like the difficulty of allowing people to do more things increases exponentially the more people you live with, which makes it hard for things not to lapse into “by default no one does anything even slightly risky despite the massive sanity damage.”
We were like this for about a month, then my sanity dropped to critical levels, forcing us to have a conversation about what we were ok with in terms of like, going outside. This resulted in me going on bike rides very frequently all summer, which helped A LOT.
Then in late summer, we had another “figure out what probabilities we are OK with” session and decided that we were going to categorically allow hanging out masked and outside, because the sanity/risk tradeoff seemed very good.
(Then we moved to DC and a whole lot of things happened that we would otherwise not have been OK with risk-wise, but were necessary for moving, which we felt was very beneficial overall.)
At this point we’re still at “don’t go indoors at a place with other people” (we grocery shop only via delivery/pickup), “categorically allow masked outdoor hangouts.” Also, we will go indoors with a P100/N95/KN95 if it’s a rare and necessary event such as medical treatment.
Feels to me from reading the post that A) Having these conversations was MUCH more difficult for OP, because she lives in a house with many other people, whereas Roger and I mostly had these conversations with just the two of us and to a lesser extent our two roommates who mostly just cooperated, B) We actually had much fewer of these conversations early on? We tried to keep it to just what we needed to make a couple very specific decisions (“is it OK for me to go on bike rides”), which I guess was also easier because there were fewer people and so fewer variables that needed to be tracked.
I guess a takeaway I have here is that it seems like 2020 was a good year to live with exactly one partner who you are very close with. Enough other-human for sanity, not so much other-human to increase the negotiation burden drastically. Seems like the difficulty of allowing people to do more things increases exponentially the more people you live with, which makes it hard for things not to lapse into “by default no one does anything even slightly risky despite the massive sanity damage.”