Hydrogen bonds are much weaker than covalent bond because of its bond is formed through fundamentally electrostatic interactions.
Hydrogen bonds happen due to dipole-dipole attraction while covalent bonds happen when valence electrons are shared.
Reasons why complementary nucleotides across the double-stranded dna bond together using hydrogen bonds rather than covalent bonds are (1) the distance between two strands, (2) size of the bases, (3) geometry of each base.