Going through a breakup in the middle of a pandemic/quarantine

“Going through a breakup in the middle of a pandemic/quarantine has really put a crimp on dating.” So spoke Becca Kufrin, in words that blend humor with sorrow — a modern lament wrapped in gentle irony. Yet beneath their light tone lies a profound reflection on human longing and the trials of the heart in an age of isolation. Her confession, born in a time when the world itself was wounded, reveals a truth that transcends her circumstance: that love and connection, the most natural of human instincts, become both more fragile and more sacred when the world grows distant.

In the ancient manner of wisdom, let us gaze deeper. The pandemic, like a great storm, swept across nations and silenced the rhythm of life. Where once there was laughter in the marketplace and the hum of conversation in crowded halls, there came quiet — a stillness heavy with loneliness. In that silence, many hearts broke not only from love lost but from the sudden absence of touch, of presence, of shared humanity. To endure a breakup in such a time was to face not one solitude, but two — the emptiness of the heart and the emptiness of the world. Thus, when Kufrin speaks of a “crimp on dating,” she does not speak merely of inconvenience, but of the greater human ache: the yearning to be known, when even closeness itself has become forbidden.

The ancients would have understood this trial. During the long wars and plagues that scarred their civilizations, men and women were likewise separated by circumstance and fate. In the letters of Pliny the Younger to his wife, written during a Roman epidemic, one finds the same longing that fills Kufrin’s words: the desire to bridge distance not only with words