New measures for new times
A friend of mine recently posted on social media how she’d just had a melt-down at her husband. In the end, the causes of the melt-down were A) Pandemic Fatigue and B) Risk Assessment.
I’ve written about pandemic fatigue before. It’s real. I’m seeing it manifest even in some of my more introverted friends who have been happily feral for the last year-plus. We are all tired of this pandemic, of not seeing our friends and family, of keeping social distances, and so on.
Risk assessment has been a constant since the start of the pandemic. Everyone has had to become a risk assessment manager in their part-time, yet another job title to tack on to everything else. Humans are notoriously bad at it. And it’s exhausting.
For my friend, though she’s been with her husband for twenty-plus years, they occasionally still butt heads, as would any couple. But these times are different, and require different negotiations tactics, particularly when one person in a couple is more conservative than the other when it comes to health risk assessment.
None of us currently in long-term relationships picked a partner based on similar risk-assessment strategies. It was never important before now. You might have talked a little about risk when it came to planning out your finances together. However, someone may be willing to take more of a risk with their money than they will with their health. Or maybe not.
So does risk assessment become part of every dating site? Is this now a question that people will talk about with their potential mates? In addition to seeing if financial goals and family expectations are aligned, do you need to figure out health-risk tolerance?
Any questions you might ask are going to be so situational, and dependent on what’s going on in your life. For example, I have a friend whose husband has cancer and is going through chemo. Guess what? Her risk assessment decisions are going to skew more conservatively than a twenty-something woman whose friends are all young and healthy.
It’s such a complicated, sliding slope. Getting together with two other vaccinated friends in person at someone’s house might be within tolerance for some people, while unthinkably risky for others. Getting a haircut at a…
