Three months in, have the fragile relationships of corona newlyweds survived the lockdown?

When COVID-19 hit and locked down civilization inside closed quarters, it was widely predicted to spell disaster for marriage. “For every marriage that was on the brink, this is what’s going to push people over,” Jacqueline Newman, a New York divorce lawyer and author of The New Rules of Divorce, told Fox News at the beginning of April, in the early days of quarantine. “It’s really a make-it or break-it situation,” she predicted. “Only the strongest relationships will survive.”

With such dire predictions, it’s no wonder that the frum world braced for crisis as well. The picture looked especially gloomy for newlyweds, many of whom barely knew each other when they were forced into 24/7 lockdown in often cramped quarters — suffering through the stresses of the pandemic without the history of a solid relationship behind them for support. For COVID-19 newlyweds — those who married before or during days of quarantine and closures — the overturned wedding plans, illness or death in the family, 24/7 isolation, and financial uncertainties are surely challenges they never dreamed they’d face when they made the l’chayim. And unlike couples who’ve already spent many years building and growing together, these couples haven’t yet had a chance to develop resilience together and don’t yet have a shared reservoir of mutual struggle and growth. All these were clear warning signs for danger ahead.

And in fact, as the lockdown continued, many of us heard stories of newly married chassanim and kallahs returning to their parents’ homes “until things become normal,” of rabbanim encouraging couples to postpone their weddings, of batei din being instructed not to accept gittin cases for the next few months, of helplines and therapy services flooded with young spouses who feel their lives are falling apart. But as the lockdown lifts and the sense of panic dissipates, a different story is emerging.

“As coronavirus started, I was getting comments like, ‘your office is probably swamped with calls from newly married couples in crisis,’ but that really wasn’t happening,” says Duvie Kessner, director of operations for Relief Resources, an international mental health referral service. “Although we’re certainly dealing with marriage-related issues due to the stressed weddings and lockdowns, the numbers don’t reflect crisis proportions or cause of panic. But one of the major communal activists called up our organization and told us that there was going to be a flood of couples seeking divorce due to the lockdown. So I immediately spoke to two batei din. One told me it’s not true, that they haven’t had any ‘coronavirus’ cases, only ‘run-of-the-mill’ gittin. Another beis din told me that they did decide to hold off gittin, not because they’re getting more requests, but because in general people who are going through tough times aren’t in the best frame of mind.”

One person who categorically denies the reports that the batei din are inundated with petitions for “coronavirus” gittin is Dayan Yaakov Siemiatycki of Lakewood’s Beis Havaad. “It’s absolutely not true that young couples are klapping on beis din’s door,” says Dayan Siemiatycki, “and it’s also not true, at least for the Beis Havaad, that the beis din agreed not to take any new cases at this time.” What is true, he says, is that during the first week of quarantine, some concerned askanim projected a crisis situation and pleaded with the batei din to close their doors to gittin until the situation settles.

“I can’t speak for every beis din, but here, it’s unfortunately business as usual,” says Dayan Siemiatycki, who served for many years on Rav Yosef Fleischman’s Nesivos Chaim Beis Din in Jerusalem before coming to Lakewood four years ago. “We’re doing gittin all the time, but these are cases that have been going on for months. We haven’t had a single case of a newlywed couple in ‘coronavirus crisis.’ ” He says his beis din only had one pandemic-induced case so far, of a couple married 12 years, where the husband had longstanding emotional issues.

In five or six months, Dayan Siemiatycki projects, they may be seeing the fallout from the rough beginnings where the issues couldn’t be fixed, but he believes those are issues that would have emerged in any case —the pandemic just accelerated the process.

Regarding the reports of rabbanim advising couples to return to their respective homes, the Dayan says that from his 20-plus years of experience with gittin, it doesn’t bode well. “I don’t believe any rav is going to go on record with this advice, but even if they are saying it privately, I don’t believe it’s realistic. Because once a couple separates, it’s very hard to bring them back. Some people might advocate this as a way to preserve future shalom bayis, but from my experience, a couple that separates doesn’t generally get back together.”

Furthermore, he believes, it’s the rumors themselves that are causing much of the anxiety among corona-era newlyweds. “When the askanim called us at the beginning and told us there would be a crisis, it was really conjecture. Yet after all the talk that every couple is hearing, that they’ll definitely face crisis-proportion issues, that they’re surely in trouble but not to worry because there’s help available, when they do face a challenge, they’ll think, ‘oh, this must be the crisis they were talking about — maybe we should head for beis din.’ ”