The 75th anniversary celebrations of VE Day may have been more muted than planned, but they still had the ingredients of a national pick-me-up. It remains striking how little the annual commemorations make space for reflection on the reality of living through war and the years that followed. Speak to those affected, and individual memories are far more complex than the national story of years of hardship followed by the sweetness of it all being over.

So many of the parallels drawn between war and pandemic have come in the form of cheap battle metaphors, which have little to add. But a better understanding of the way in which the social earthquake of war, experienced collectively by a generation, profoundly affects family relationships over the long term, might offer something.

It’s the same for the first world war: we rarely talk about the fact that the dreadful death toll – almost 750,000 British men were killed – meant that single young women outnumbered their male peers by more than a fifth in the 1921 census, a group the press distastefully dubbed “the surplus women”. An account of that generation’s lives by Virginia Nicholson documents how many remained single long after the war, some content with their status, others less so.

Three decades later, the postwar baby boom bears connotations of joyful reunions after years of parents bringing up children alone under the strain of war. Yet we know that many men came back utterly traumatised and damaged, at best making it hard for couples to rebuild what they had, at worst resulting in violent and abusive relationships.

Living through a lockdown is, of course, a completely different experience to war, but it feels like we too are experiencing a moment that will have long-term implications for family relationships and emotional wellbeing. Partly because we don’t yet know what those implications will be, partly because it is easier to track changes to our economic and physical health, and partly because we value emotional health less, a lot of the discussion about this feels hopelessly superficial: well-meaning but cliched guides for couples on surviving lockdown; dating app press releases boasting of increases in their swipe rates; lawyers predicting a rise in divorce rates while others speculate about a lockdown baby boom.

Thanks to campaigners, we are talking about rising levels of domestic abuse more than I can ever remember. But beyond the awful situation of being trapped in lockdown with an abuser, there are plenty of people who will find themselves in fraught circumstances when it comes to their intimate and family relationships. The strain of negotiating unhappy relationships while physically distancing, home schooling and experiencing extreme economic pressure and the particular impact of this on women’s lives; the dilemma of whether to move in together if you’re in a relationship in its infancy; the challenges for long-distance relationships where circumstances mean you might not get to see your partner for months.

My single friends are debating whether it’s worth continuing to date, or to give up until things return to something like normality, which could feel like an eternity for women in their late 30s who want children. One is six weeks into a relationship based on daily video calls; while the intensity means they are having the sorts of conversations she might not normally at that stage, she’s wondering how long things can progress without meeting in person. Another muses: “Is talking on screens with potential partners just keeping us busy with unrealistic options and filling the void to keep us from feeling completely alone?” And that’s just the romantic side of things: there are grandparents missing birthdays, children not seeing their friends, cancelled family events.

Some might argue there’s nothing the state can do about something as nebulous as our relationships: it must keep focused on the public health response and providing a financial cushion. There’s something in that, not least because economic hardship takes a massive emotional toll. But there are some areas where the government should be paying a bit more regard to our emotional wellbeing, such as in decisions about which lockdown restrictions get relaxed and when.

In England, ministers have decided to allow an incremental increase in the number of people we come into contact with, and appear to have prioritised economic over social contacts, encouraging people to return to work before allowing them to socialise in multi-household “bubbles”.

Yes, it’s important to open up the economy to help secure people’s incomes, but the government could, for now, encourage them to see friends and family rather than their bosses. Sure, that comes at a price, but so does social isolation.

There are bigger questions at play about whether it’s right to seek to return to the trajectory of endless consumption and growth, or prioritise our social and environmental wellbeing by redistributing our existing wealth more fairly. It also seems incredibly shortsighted not to be spending more on making mental health services and relationship counselling universally available.

For me, the lockdown has served as a poignant reminder that what makes my life great is less a slavish devotion to excessive consumption and more spending time with those I cherish. Yet it feels like the pandemic response is set to prioritise our collective ability to consume stuff over nurturing loving relationships. We don’t know yet what the long-term consequences will be, but we may one day look back and regret it.

• Sonia Sodha is chief leader writer at the Observer and a columnist for the Guardian and the Observer