“That is why the same process can produce opposite results: the experience a couple goes through may bring one couple much closer, while leading another to break up more quickly. War may be less an ‘accelerator of love’ than an accelerator of shared experiences that reveal a great deal about each other”.
At the very beginning of their relationship, Nastya and Serhii talked about what would happen if he were mobilized. Yevhen had planned to propose to Romanna in the Carpathians, but shortly before the trip he received orders to head east. Both couples met after 2022 — there was no other, pre-war version of their life together.
We spoke with two couples who met after 2022 about how to build a life together when military service, distance, and changing plans are part of the relationship from the very beginning. Daria Tekutieva, a psychologist with a clinical specialization, explained what can genuinely be different in such an experience compared with before the full-scale war — and what remains an ordinary part of any relationship.
When Mobilization Comes Up Almost Immediately
Nastya worked as a manager at a coffee roastery and sold coffee, while Serhii was a barista at a café that bought that coffee. He was added to a work chat, and eventually Nastya’s best friend, who worked with Serhii at the same establishment, encouraged them to go on their first date.
They had been dating for about a month when Serhii was mobilized, but they had already discussed the possibility of this happening.
“We both understood that sooner or later it would happen. He immediately said that he wouldn’t hide: if he were mobilized, he would go”, Nastya recalls.
She describes that conversation more calmly than she thinks she might have several years earlier. Nastya remembers loud explosions and power outages, which were still a new experience for her at the time, whereas in 2025 she no longer saw possible mobilization as something distant: the question was rather when it would happen.
Daria Tekutieva explains that for couples who were together before 2022, the war became a change to an already established shared life, whereas new relationships emerge in a different reality from the very beginning.
“Uncertainty, air-raid alerts, possible relocations, separation, the risk of mobilization — these are no longer events that suddenly intrude into a couple’s life, but part of the environment in which people meet, fall in love, and plan their future”.
At the same time, adapting to such an environment does not mean that it stops having a psychological impact on people.
“What could completely knock people out of their normal lives in 2022 has, for many, become integrated into everyday life several years later. But I would not equate adaptation with these circumstances becoming psychologically normal or ceasing to affect us. We can learn to live under dangerous conditions, work, build relationships, plan — and at the same time continue to pay a certain psychological price for that adaptation”.
Romanna initially faced a completely different problem: she liked Yevhen, but he was her patient. Both were doctors — he was serving at the time and receiving treatment in Kyiv, while she was his doctor. When Romanna noticed that she was no longer treating Yevhen entirely as a patient, she began responding more dryly and tried not to encourage further communication.
Then a colleague reminded her: “You’re a doctor, he’s a doctor.” After that, Yevhen made the first move himself, writing: “Why are you still at work?”
“I thought: okay, that’s it, I’m not the one making the first move anymore, the patient is hitting on me, so it’s allowed”, Romanna laughs. At the same time, she adds that if Yevhen had not been a doctor himself, she would not have dared to pursue such contact with a patient.
“War Doesn’t Affect It, Feelings Do”
Yevhen’s military service was part of their relationship from the very beginning. While he was receiving treatment, they were in Kyiv, but Romanna knew that afterward he would return to the military. At the same time, because of service-related matters, Yevhen had to come to the capital from time to time.
“I understood that we would still see each other, even if it was rarely. It would be at least once every two weeks, not once every six months. So it was more or less okay, manageable”.
When asked whether the war affected how quickly their relationship developed, both answer negatively.
“We weren’t 16 anymore when we met. When you feel really great with someone, when you’re having fun and feel safe, why put it off for years if you can start a family?” Yevhen says.
Romanna also does not look for a separate reason here: “I don’t know whether the war influenced this decision in any way. I would rather say no. I simply realized that I really enjoyed being with Yevhen”.
“War doesn’t affect it, feelings do”, he adds.
Daria Tekutieva does not suggest determining the pace of a relationship solely by the calendar, because there is no universal moment when it is “right” to start living together, get married, or plan to have children.
“”Too fast” or “too soon” makes sense to assess not so much by the number of months or years, but by what is happening between two people. How much have they had a chance to get to know each other? Can they talk about difficult things? Do they understand what they want from the relationship? Do their key values and plans align? And most importantly, are both of them freely making this decision?”
War may indeed have changed the pace for some people, the psychologist continues, but that does not mean a new universal “wartime pace” has emerged.
The feeling of an unpredictable future also works differently for different people: some decide to postpone marriage or living together less, while others, on the contrary, do not want to take on new commitments.
“I wouldn’t say that war itself makes people more or less inclined to start a family. It intensifies the question of what a person actually wants from their life and what matters most to them right now”.
Another factor is the number of situations in which two people get to see each other in a short period of time.
“War does not necessarily ‘accelerate’ intimacy itself. Rather, it can significantly increase the amount and intensity of experiences a couple goes through over a short period of time”.
Relocations, long separations, financial difficulties, or difficult decisions that might once have emerged gradually can now sometimes fit into a single year. According to the psychologist, difficult circumstances can bring people closer, but they can also quickly reveal how a person behaves under intense pressure: how they respond to fear and uncertainty, make decisions, cope with a loss of control, and take the other person’s needs into account.
“That is why the same process can produce opposite results: the experience a couple goes through may bring one couple much closer, while leading another to break up more quickly. War may be less an ‘accelerator of love’ than an accelerator of shared experiences that reveal a great deal about each other”.
A Quick Proposal Instead of the Carpathians
Yevhen waited a month and a half for the ring and arranged several days off with his commander in the Carpathians, where he planned to propose to Romanna. But shortly before the trip, the soldiers were assembled and told that they would be leaving on a combat mission that night.
“I panicked. I didn’t know what to do”, Yevhen recalls.
So he picked up the ring, bought flowers, and invited Romanna for a walk before he left. She suggested leaving the bouquet in the car so they wouldn’t have to carry it throughout the walk. They went to the Dnipro River, reached Trukhaniv Island, and there Yevhen proposed.
That same evening, he left for the east.
“I’m sitting at home with these flowers, with this ring, so happy and joyful. On the one hand, I’m happy and excited, but on the other, I’m super sad because I wanted to somehow share that evening together. And Yevhen left me with all these emotions. I had to share them with my friends over the phone”, Romanna recalls.
“She Didn’t Wait,” “She Couldn’t Take It”
Nastya knew that Serhii might be mobilized, but the prospect of such a relationship frightened her even before he went into service.
“I had seen relationships with military personnel from the outside and saw how intensely people worry: a person doesn’t answer the phone — and you’re already panicking. It’s constant stress and enormous emotional exhaustion. You simply can’t not worry about someone close to you”.
Serhii had not yet been mobilized, and Nastya was already thinking about what their life might become afterward. She was also particularly affected by attitudes toward military partners.
“You can understand that something is wrong in the relationship, that it isn’t working out, but at the same time be afraid to leave the person because it seems that if you leave them now, you automatically become a bad person — “you didn’t wait,’ ‘you couldn’t handle it””.
Alongside the distance and uncertainty came the thought that a person might change because of what they had seen and experienced. “At that point, I was scared to build a relationship in such a reality,” Nastya says.
The psychologist says that intimacy in the face of real danger can indeed become another source of anxiety.
“A partner can absolutely become an additional source of anxiety — simply because now a person is afraid not only for their own life and safety, but also for someone who is very important to them”.
At the same time, fear for a partner does not in itself indicate a problem — what matters more is how that fear manifests itself.
“For one person, a message like ‘text me when you get there’ or a request to be careful can feel like care: ‘Someone is thinking about me, I matter, I am loved.’ A problem can arise when one partner’s anxiety begins to significantly restrict the other: when there is a need to constantly report where they are, stay in touch, or give up certain actions not because of their own decision, but so that the other person will not worry”.
After Serhii was mobilized, Nastya and Serhii broke up, but they did not stop communicating. Serhii continued to support and help her; they remained friends, and eventually Nastya began to think that perhaps she had made the decision too quickly.
Before her birthday, they talked a lot again, and then Serhii gave her a pair of headphones — without any hints, requests, or wishlist from her.
“What struck me wasn’t even so much the gift itself as the thoughtfulness. At some point, I realized that I was ready both for a long-distance relationship and for a relationship with a military man, because this person had already become very close to me. I don’t want to lose him because of my own fear”.
About six months later, they got back together.
“I actually thought everything would be much worse. I was very afraid of exactly this kind of relationship, but in reality, my experience turned out to be much more positive than I expected,” Nastya says.
“This Is How He Walks Me Home”
Nastya says that she and Serhii live in different circumstances — she lives a civilian life, while he lives a military one — but they do not feel like people from two incompatible worlds.
“He is interested in how I live and what is happening with me, and we can talk about his life, military topics, and more personal things. So for me, there is no strict division into “he’s military and I’m civilian””.
What Nastya misses most is physical presence — simply being together or going to the store. After work, she calls Serhii, and they talk “about everything under the sun” on her way home.
“And that’s how he walks me home”.
Whenever possible, they call each other every evening. Serhii may send flowers, they discuss books, share interesting things they have discovered, and before meeting they make a list of what they want to do together.
Romanna and Yevhen also had evening calls and constant messaging while he was serving.
“While I was serving, we would call each other before going to sleep, closer to midnight, and otherwise we were constantly texting,” Yevhen says.
Daria Tekutieva explains that after mobilization, it is not only the distance that changes: partners may have different daily routines, surroundings, problems, and levels of danger.
“And that raises the question for a couple: what, besides a shared everyday life, creates our ‘we’?”
When there is less shared everyday life, that “we” can be maintained through an interest in each other’s lives, shared plans, decisions, and the ways that are familiar to the particular couple for staying connected.
“In such circumstances, I think the feeling of ‘we’ depends less on having the same everyday life and more on whether two people, despite having two very different lives, continue to make room for each other in them”.
At the same time, reciprocity does not necessarily mean the same number of calls, the same amount of attention, or an identical contribution at a particular moment: according to Tekutieva, what matters is that both people remain engaged in the relationship as much as their circumstances allow.
Another risk is when the civilian partner begins sharing less about their own life because their problems seem insignificant compared with the military partner’s experience.
“People may start thinking: ‘How can I complain about being tired when he’s over there right now?’ or ‘Why tell her about my problems when her life is much harder?’ Sometimes a person may even censor the good things that happen”.
If this becomes a permanent way of communicating, one partner gradually knows less about the other’s life.
“Self-censorship may begin as an attempt to protect someone close to you, but if it becomes a permanent way of communicating, eventually it can protect the relationship from stress at the cost of intimacy itself”.
A Wedding in Two Weeks
After getting engaged, Romanna and Yevhen planned to get married the following summer, but one day in the car they decided not to wait.
“Yevhen asks, ‘So, when are we getting married?’ I say, ‘Well, as soon as possible.’” He immediately sent her a request through Diia, but Romanna declined: she wanted a dress, flowers, and a ceremony that wasn’t done “over the phone”.
So they opened the calendar and chose the nearest free weekend — two weeks away. Yevhen wanted to hold the official part in Donetsk Oblast, so they registered their marriage at the civil registry office in Sloviansk, and the next day held an outdoor ceremony on a small white chalk spoil heap.
“The weather was perfect, birds were flying over our ceremony. There was a training ground not far away, so the ceremony was periodically accompanied by the sounds of outgoing fire and gunfire”, Romanna recalls.
Yevhen explains their choice of Donetsk Oblast by saying that he wanted to preserve his connection to a region that is important to him: “We see, unfortunately, how the front line is moving, and these are some of the last little drops of home that we have left, and we don’t know when they will return to us”.
Romanna grew up in Lviv and says that before meeting Yevhen, she had many stereotypes about eastern Ukraine. Trips to Donetsk Oblast gradually changed her perception of the region.
“When I met Yevhen, I realized that this is a great example of how we can stitch our country together through relationships”, she says.
A House, Lots of Animals, and a Financial Cushion
When Nastya and Serhii had been dating for a month, they did not make long-term plans. After getting back together, they began talking about having a house of their own — for now, they are considering Ternopil, Zhytomyr, and Vinnytsia regions — and about wanting to have lots of animals.
Nastya is already putting money aside and thinking about the period after Serhii’s service: he may not find a job immediately, so for some time she may have to cover most of their shared expenses.
“That is completely normal for me; I just want to be prepared for it. So I’m saving money, and we’re thinking about where we would like to buy a house and which region to choose”.
Romanna and Yevhen are also making plans, but they do not tie themselves too closely to specific dates. Yevhen is not currently serving, although he is considering returning.
“We can set an approximate date or, if we’re invited somewhere in a month or two, tentatively agree to go. But we still decide based on what happens. Because even within a week, everything can change dramatically”, he says.
Daria Tekutieva explains that when external stability cannot be guaranteed, it can manifest itself within the relationship itself.
“It can manifest differently — primarily as emotional reliability. In the feeling: ‘I know this person is with me, I understand how they feel about me, I don’t have to constantly wonder whether our relationship matters to them’”.
Photos provided by the people featured in the article
