Chapter 16: The Kiss of Death
A cautionary tale against selfish dead-eyed men, hyper-individualism, and the threats they pose to our collective well-being.
In the previous chapter, locked up in my flat during the first months of the pandemic, I reflected on the dangers of entangling my self-worth with the state of being married.
Sitting down on a sidewalk terrace, in close proximity to a new guy I had just met online, felt surreal.
It was early June, the Covid measures had finally eased while my need for human contact was rapidly increasing. After months of spending almost all the time by myself, meeting a new face felt rather strange before it could feel pleasant. Like learning to walk again after an accident, I needed time to get used to this guy’s face up close, to the limited safety of his hand touching mine.
But I quickly got used to the human closeness. My cervical muscles softened; sanitizer forgotten when he took my hand in his. At the end of the date, he kissed me and only when I got back home did I think oh shit, covid!, I just kissed a total stranger. A possibly deathly kiss!
That was the aftermath of having lived in isolation and loneliness for three months.
I only realized how starved I was of human contact when I forgot all about the cleaning and the masking, and kissed a stranger. During lockdown I thought I was doing great, I had filled my time alone with painting, zoom-yoga and movie binging. But none of that could replace human-to-human connection. Our bodies regulate through touching other humans. But we had all become overly suspicious of any unsanitized surface, avoiding each other like the plague in supermarkets and on the streets. A couple of my close friends had opted out of coming to celebrate my birthday en plein air, in a friend’s garden. Human closeness and touching had become the great killer. We couldn’t live with it, but couldn’t live without it either. So when a random guy from a dating app asked to kiss me after the first date, and after months of no human closeness, I forgot all about the closeness of death.
I was hungry for connection and I was willing to gulp down a slice of moldy bread and call it a royal banquet.
When he started treating me poorly, cutting contact or mocking my feelings when I expressed them, I suffered in silence like an abused wife with a blue eye. Just like an abused wife, I felt frozen, I couldn’t speak up. The way he looked at me should have been enough of a sign. His stare was hollow and his rehearsed smile couldn’t make me forget about his dead eyes. But I was hungry for connection and I was willing to gulp down a slice of moldy bread and call it a royal banquet.
I had no family close by and no one from my social circle was willing to risk potentially dying to keep me company. Fear is stronger than love. Most of my friends pulled back into their nuclear families, some even moving back to their countries of origin. He became bigger than he was for me, a dead-eyed stray cat with the shadow of a lion.
The Covid pandemic forced single people and those living alone into a sudden, artificial self-sufficiency. It was the extreme version of hyper-individualistic cultures. Even in more collectivist countries like Spain, the lockdown forced everyone to rip apart the ties of our social fabric.
Invisible collective actions are put in place so that societies function, even the hyper-individualistic ones. People act from their individual freedoms and autonomy, but within a common framework with its cogs oiled up. But when the larger ecosystem is put on pause, like it happened during Covid, citizens of an individualistic society become much more at risk than the ones of a collectivist culture. At risk of being lonely and of getting physically sick, at risk of being scammed, emotionally or otherwise.
We need people.
We need people every single day for a myriad of events, but often we don’t realize we do. Covid showed us how much we need healthcare workers, delivery drivers, and most importantly, human connection, to survive. And even when society works properly, we still need people more than we think.
If the bus driver we’re on has a heart attack or the air pilots are on strike, we depend on them to get where we’re going. If the water pipes are frozen or clogged, we depend on the plumber to take a shower. From transport, to access to food, closing a contract at work, showering, or having after-work drinks with friends — we always depend on someone else to collaborate, compromise, show up for us.
The Covid hysteria pushed some people to become hyper-individualistic, at the expense of others. Not wearing a mask in a crowded place, risking infecting someone else. Kissing a stranger because that’s what one wants, despite the risks. This approach becomes a zero-sum game, where there will be a loser for every winner there is.
When he left me, I was still starving. The illusion that I’d been at a banquet wore off quickly. Sometimes I could just smell the smoke of a sizzling steak on the grill and feel satiated. But when reality hit, the stench of moldy bread reappeared. The kisses he gave me were not filled with deathly viruses; they were deathly on a different plane.
Extrapolated to an entire society, his behavior was a demonstration of how damaging extreme hyper-individualistic actions can be for others.
After shaking off the disappointment, I pondered: if I’d established I didn’t need a man to be happy just a few months back, how come I was so upset when this guy didn’t turn out to be the right one?
Maybe, after all, we do need one another, men and women, in order to thrive.
This is such a powerful piece and interesting perspective. I love your writing style.
Loneliness is a proven killer. I’m so glad they made that style lockdown illegal in Spain.
I love this kind of reflection on lockdown times. I worked in a hospital in melbourne, lockdown capital of the world, and my experience has been very different to that of most others. I had to go to work sitting alone in a bus, I had to go out everyday, I had to do all the right things, I had to work with people, I had to pretend through the whole thing. No movie binging, no sourdough, no wfh in an oodie, no going outside only for bare necessities. Time at home for me was precious and welcome every weekend.