The coronavirus may turn out to be the ultimate stress test for couples. 

There’s some literature we can rely on as a guide. In 2002, for instance, The Journal of Family Psychology published an extraordinary paper that looked at couples in the aftermath of a 1989 storm, Hurricane Hugo, comparing those who’d lived in the afflicted counties in South Carolina to those who hadn’t.

The results? More people in the devastated counties divorced the following year. But more people also married. And there was an increase in births. The hurricane spurred a great deal of emotional movement, in all directions.

We are now reckoning with a crisis of a much larger magnitude. 

The coronavirus pandemic forces all of us to contend not just with the customary tensions of a disaster, which are financial and logistical, but with a sense of dread as well. To live through it means tolerating a painful uncertainty — particularly in these early days, as we’re all still waiting to see just how many cases there are, how overwhelmed the hospitals will become, and how bad the economic devastation will be.

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