Charlie* just got dumped. “I think he broke up with me because he was scared that I was going to ask him to go see Wicked,” the 25-year-old New Yorker says.

It happened a little over a month ago. He’d been dating the guy for about a year after first meeting through a mutual friend. They courted for about a month before the pandemic forced them inside. With few social obligations and time on their hands, the two prioritized their relationship, finding solace in moving quickly while the rest of their lives paused indefinitely. “The world is crumbling, and I’m so happy. I’m falling in love,” Charlie recalls thinking last spring.

Today, Charlie isn’t so elated. He’s single once again, a gut-punch especially because he spent his 15-month relationship making plans for a partnered social life once vaccinated. He’d hoped to spend NYC Pride last month introducing his partner to friends, not dancing solo. This fall, he wanted them to go see Wicked on Broadway after it reopens at Manhattan’s Gershwin Theatre.

But when it came time for their grand post-vaccination opening weekend, Charlie’s boyfriend chose the first activity — breaking up. It’s only now that Charlie realizes he spent the pandemic dating a commitment-phobe. “It was always, ‘Can we decide later?’” Two weeks after his ex got his second dose, “there felt like a flip switch.”

The flip switch is a hazard facing pandemic couples who are just now socializing as a unit, many for the first time in over a year. Solid foundations might be more hollow than realized, and annoying habits can be revealed. With restaurants closed down and social distancing in place, crushes couldn’t fail to adequately tip a full 20 percent, carelessly manspread on the subway, or greet your friends with a chilling “Hey bud.” Now, as post-vaccination social life ramps up, all these hidden road bumps are finally emerging.

“Not to get too into it, but he’s a Leo,” Drew*, a 26-year-old Scorpio in Los Angeles, says of his boyfriend. They met on Hinge in February shortly after Drew moved to L.A. Still, Drew wasn’t fully aware of the extent of his boyfriend’s charm until he was the plus-one at a dinner party in March. While Drew engaged in pleasant side conversations, he says his boyfriend spent the party loudly holding court. “I first got to see the intimate, personal and sensitive side,” Drew says. “So if I had seen the other side of him that’s outgoing, sarcastic and chatty, I don’t know if I would have been as initially attracted to him.” Now Drew is recalibrating the decibels of his relationship.

Rachel Sussman, a licensed marriage and family therapist in New York, says these impediments are to be expected when acclimating an incubated relationship into the real world. “It’s kind of the same scenario as you meet someone on vacation and fall madly in love,” Sussman says. “You’ve been dating someone for a year, you think you’re in the homestretch, but really not.”

“I feel like we’re five years in,” says Jennifer McDermott, a public relations head in Los Angeles. She started dating actor and producer Chris Bagnall while they both lived in New York. Things were going so well they even took a two-week road trip in January to LA, now their new home. McDermott is only now discovering new aspects of Chris’ personality, like how he’s a “pay for the table” guy.

You know the type. They make a big show of going to the restroom at dinner only to secretly stop by the bar and pay for the entire check before returning to their seat. A few minutes later, you’re showering them with compliments, even though you could and did want to pay your way. It’s a nice but slightly self-congratulatory gesture. Except, as McDermott notes, when you’re “saving for a house.”

Bagnall is so notorious for paying for the table he once roped Jon Hamm into his scheme, convincing his friends that Hamm, who was seated at a table near theirs, had covered their bill. Little did he know that one of his friends knew Hamm and sent the No Sudden Move actor a ‘Thank you’ email. Still, Bagnall doubles down on his “generosity,” even when it causes others to cringe. “Ya, I do like to pick up the tab,” he says. “Does it deserve defending? Absolutely, it’s worth it.”

It’s understandable if some couples are now wondering if their relationship would’ve made it this far in normal circumstances. For Olivia*, a 29-year-old in Washington D.C., this means acclimating to her boyfriend’s penchant for partying. “There’s a lot more drug use than I thought,” she says. The couple began dating in March of last year and got serious atop the pandemic. In May, they even moved in together after receiving their vaccinations.

But now, as they spend their weekends meeting up with friends at outdoor concerts, Olivia is seeing a new, slightly more intoxicated side of her man. “I’m not actually not okay with this, but it’s just different,” she says of his social drug use. “The pleasant surprise is that actually our relationship does work, even in the normal.”

Jade*, a former party girl in Los Angeles, had the same concern. She met her now-boyfriend the first week of the pandemic in March. The global shutdown obscured the realities of a couple of things: that she was nearing one year sober, and he works in nightlife. Though they had spoken of their partying differences, she too worried what reopening would mean for their relationship. “Is this other side of him going to emerge that’s completely incompatible with my lifestyle of going to bed at eight?” she says. Her solution? To talk to him about it at length while they were still in lockdown.

Now that the world has re-opened, he is indeed a party guy, and she still likes to spend Saturday nights in with her dog watching shitty reality TV. But because they made sure to communicate their feelings and expectations months ago, there were no surprises. “We are our own people, and I trust him to go out and have fun with his friends after we have dinner,” she says. “We don’t need to enjoy all the same things and be together 24/7.”

“You would think that being around all these other people and meeting friends introduces all these new elements of possible chaos and drama,” she continues. “But actually the relationship is better now that we are allowed to see other people and have time apart. In that way, I’m very grateful.”

*Names have been changed to respect the privacy of the people who were interviewed.

Related Stories for GQSex and RelationshipsCoronavirus