While most people celebrated this summer’s easing of lockdown restrictions by getting together, many couples welcomed freedom by separating—for good.
COVID to the rescue? That’s what happened in China. When that country lifted the novel coronavirus pandemic’s self-isolation rules in March, divorce rates increased exponentially. In one city, divorce rates went from one or two a day to eight or nine after lockdown. Anecdotal reports from Europe suggest a similar rush on separations. It mirrors a 21 percent increase in divorces in Hong Kong, after the 2003 SARS epidemic forced a lockdown there.
Some of those might be a backlog after months of not being able to get divorced. More likely, it’s a symptom of the intensity of constant companionship. You promised to stay together in sickness and in health, not 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For four months. With no breaks. Oh, and the kids are home too.
But more than just too much time together, the pandemic has magnified the different ways in which men and women deal with stressful situations.
“From the very moment that you’re born, biochemically the brains of men and women are a little bit different,” says Dr. Lisa Mosconi, a neuroscientist, director of the Weill Cornell Women’s Brain Initiative and the author of The XX Brain, a new book on the female brain. “It’s not just about reproduction. So many things happen in the brain are supported by hormones.”
That includes dealing with stress. Mosconi says medical research is only just moving beyond, what she calls, “bikini medicine,” the belief that the only things separating the sexes hid behind the three triangles of a bikini. Instead, Mosconi’s research shows men and women’s brains react differently to almost everything, including medicines, nutrition and risks—like deadly viruses and food shortages.
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