Chinese couples queue up to divorce at a divorce registration office in Shanghai, 29 August 2016. Photo: IC

The long period of quarantine at home due to the outbreak of COVID-19 appears to have tightened the bonds between residents in communities but has also led to more trouble and even divorce for many couples in China. 

Li Xin, a man living in Wuhan, Central China's Hubei Province who normally dedicated all of his attention to his work and did not have time to socialize within the community, said he developed a good relationship with his neighbors and the local community after being a volunteer during the pandemic. 

"In the virus battle, people could not meet up with other members of their family, and the closest people around them were their neighbors. They need to share information about the situation in their community and support each other, so their relationship improved," Ma Sainan, a lawyer providing legal services for marriage and family affairs at Beijing Jiali Law Firm, told the Global Times on Thursday.

But while people who were not that familiar with each other got closer, couples encountered more conflicts in this special period.  

According to Ma, the divorce cases and divorce litigation rate that she took charge of in Beijing from February to early April 2020 saw a slight increase compared with the same period of 2019. 

"Different personalities and values, different concepts about children's education and different living habits are the main causes that led to a divorce among the couples," Ma said.

She explained that people usually have a lot of ways to vent negative emotions, but due to the quarantine at home, they cannot go out to ease their mood and might lose their tempter and have a quarrel, resulting in a marriage crisis. 

Meanwhile, the novel coronavirus aroused many people's anxiety. Some who could not accept the behavior of their partner when facing the health crisis might have thought they did not share a common view of life and would choose to end their relationship.

"People's contact time and intimacy are not proportional, and distance sometimes produces beauty. Given the fast pace of modern life, people need to play different roles such as being an employee, a son, and a husband by day. But the quarantine gave them too much time to stay together, and this change made many people feel uncomfortable," Ma said.

She suggested that couples could share or develop some common hobbies like cooking to make life interesting when being stuck at home. 

"A good relationship for a couple is like playing a game of chess that will never end, and each section will have a response from each other," Zhang Tianbu, director of the Psychology Department at Shaanxi Provincial People's Hospital, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Zhang said that when a quarrel occurs, the best option is not to blame the other immediately but to express your own ideas first and give the other some time to think. This period of thinking can avoid a fierce quarrel. 

"Sometimes we need to know ourselves better, and then we can ask the other to be better," he said.