"I’ve seen a lot of pieces about couples co-quarantining, but what I haven’t seen is a piece about significant others who don’t live together."

"My boyfriend and I live about an hour apart and until quarantine hit we were spending our weekends together. Now, he’s nervous about us infecting each other. I don’t know how to handle this, especially because all of my friends with significant others are still seeing them."/"The good news is that if you’re both self-isolating without roommates or other people, you should be fine to see each other and spend the weekends together, etc. You can consider yourselves to be a two-person household."

From "Will Single People Ever Have Sex Again?/How To Plague: Is it OK for couples who live separately to see each other — and what’s wrong if one of them refuses? Our advice column for life under the coronavirus" (at BuzzFeed News).

The idea expressed here isn't limited to sexual relationships. Can't any 2 households "consider" themselves a single household once they've been isolated for, say, 2 weeks? I had that question and went looking for the answer and found that sex-oriented discussion. But the same reasoning would apply to wanting to spend time with friends or family. I'm not seeing much talk about this proposition, perhaps because the experts and politicians don't trust us to reason our way through this and think we need big, blunt, concrete rules. And yet, as the discussion turns toward easing our way back to something like normal life, this seems like the sort of thinking that should encouraged. If we can trust people to think for themselves. I'm not that sure we can. People will justify doing the things they want to do. But perfection isn't needed. Some disease will be passed along, whatever we do, and the goal has never been to stop all transmission, just to slow it way down. So maybe start giving people some principles to follow and encourage us to move carefully toward interaction with our fellow humans.