Perhaps a week ago, I wandered downstairs, laptop in hand, to show my husband an extremely dire Twitter thread from an Italian doctor. It had been translated into English and was rapidly going viral. He took one look, gave me an exfoliating stare, and handed the computer back to me. The thread was 20 parts long.

“Why,” he asked, “are you showing me this?”

It wasn’t because he’d been in denial all week, sticking his fingers in his ears. It was because this man — who’s had more chaos in his life than I have, and who’s contended with far more loss — was calmer in the face of adversity than I was. I was starting to wear even him out, and I hadn’t realized it.

The coronavirus may turn out to be the ultimate stress test for couples. There’s some literature we can rely on as a guide. In 2002, for instance, The Journal of Family Psychology published an extraordinary paper that looked at couples in the aftermath of a 1989 storm, Hurricane Hugo, comparing those who’d lived in the afflicted counties in South Carolina to those who hadn’t.

The results? More people in the devastated counties divorced the following year. But more people also married. And there was an increase in births. The hurricane spurred a great deal of emotional movement, in all directions.