Lockdown Love Stories, participatorary art project, website, 500 anonymously submitted true stories, launched 7th May - ongoing.

Lockdown Love Stories is potentially incredibly isolating, but what’s more isolating is shame. I wanted to show people that whatever they were experiencing emotionally as a consequence of lockdown, they weren’t alone, and needn’t feel ashamed. Lockdownlovestories.com is a website that asked people to anonymously submit their real-life experiences of love in lockdown – whether good, bad or complicated. Since its launch in May, more than 500 stories of falling in love, dating in lockdown, turbo relationships, surviving long term relationships and breaking up have been shared on the site. The project has been featured on ITV’s Lorraine, BBC Radio London, Grazia, The Metro.

When lockdown happened I thought the shift that happens to love and dating will be profound – I wanted to tell that story and tell it in such a way people were able to reveal truths they wouldn’t normally share. So that collectively I could reveal the reality of the experience of love, to normalise the intense emotions that are normally silenced and oppressed through a culture of shaming.

I was anticipating stories of loss, loneliness and heart ache and wanted to create a safe space for people to be able to share their stories and see that what they were experiencing was not abnormal, wrong or shameful. When our real life narratives do not follow the idealized, prescribed course of events often represented in popular culture, we can experience internalized shame. I wanted to show people, it wasn’t them, and they weren’t alone in the complex feelings being triggered at this time.

Having access to regular people's real life private truths gave people a sense of connection, hope and reassurance. If people could find love in this time, then it could happen to them, if people were being ghosted and heartbroken then it wasn’t just them.

Storytelling has a unique capacity to incite empathy and make people feel connected to one another. In lockdown this was more important than ever.

In Lockdown Love Stories I created a space for connection in a time of isolation, a time capsule of this unique moment in our history, and a public monument to love.

By using Instagram as a platform to show this project I took a platform that is synonymous with feeding societies unhealthy culture of comparison by offering unrealistic idealised representations of love and life and instead offered the antidote to that - presenting not ‘look at the idealized curated version of what love looks like’, but instead: ‘this is what the real experience of love feels like.’ The antithesis of Instagram, on Instagram. Normalising the reality of the experience of love.

Visit lockdownlovestories.com to view the full project