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Love in the Time of COVID-19
By: Emily Sinclair Montague
Being human. Much has been said about this condition, and whether you call it a mode of life, a factual statement, an incurable illness, or a practiced art, you’ll find plenty of people who agree with you. Most of the time, being human isn’t something we think about. Why would we? It’s background noise, a fact of our existence like the color of the sky or the law of gravity.
And then something happens.
The forms this “something” can take are pretty varied. A hurricane comes and destroys thousands of homes. A terrorist attack comes out of nowhere and causes an entire nation to go into mourning. A novel disease with no known cure seizes the globe in a matter of weeks, turning daily life as we know it on its head.
Suddenly being human is on everyone’s mind. Suddenly it isn’t background noise at all — it’s a shared experience spanning every race, culture, and country in the world. What’s behind this shift? What makes so many diverse, outwardly different people have the same feelings, the same realizations?
This is a well-researched phenomenon. Crisis bonding, disaster altruism, collective empathy…it has a lot of names, and a lot of forms. Humans are a social species — this is a core adaptation that has helped us to survive for millions of years despite heavy odds. Our…
