On Navigating Friendship During Several Collective Crises
I recently had a fairly debilitating altercation with a close friend. It was like new rain water pouring through a crack in the ceiling — at once shocking in its suddenness, and yet also the reckoning of what was, perhaps, only a matter of time. It was ultimately the result of a near year of no extended emotionally intimate moments with one another. It was the thing you look at above your head when you try to fall asleep each night, the thing you see and think, I’ll do something about that tomorrow.
And then tomorrow happens, and you don’t have the energy, so you file it into your list of things you’ll fix around the house when they get “bad enough.” A list that you do want to, and mean to check off, eventually, but which also begins to look increasingly like a list of qualms that you hope will just…fix themselves in time. As if structural repairs fall into the same camp as broken hearts and the memories of embarrassing moments.
The altercation has made me think a lot about the way our friendships, and our very relationship to friendship, has changed over the course of the pandemic. There’s lots of internet chatter about the strain that COVID-19 has had on romantic partnerships and “weak ties” — the acquaintanceships we have with casual friends or people we’d see regularly in our lives, like baristas and bartenders. But I’ve seen less talk about the confusing and gradually splintering effect that a year spent inside has on our very close friendships. How it’s especially confusing these days to find areas of friction with the people who share our same sentiments about the Big Things, like taking the pandemic seriously and the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement and the goddamn insurrection. Enough common ground and the hobbies and experiences that brought you together in the Before Times should surely make for a structure that won’t falter when a tropical storm rolls through.
And perhaps that is a rather naive and idealistic idea of how this batshit time would affect friend bonds. But seeing as none of us have ever lived through a global health crisis that killed 2.3 million people and counting before, I’m giving myself a pass for holding out hope for the best.
In a Royal Society Journal Proceedings A paper from this summer, Professor Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford wrote that, “We have to see people surprisingly often to maintain a friendship.”
Seeing people has, of course, been as hard as ever since March 2020. Zoom and FaceTime lack the energy and chemistry of in-person interactions, and selecting members of a pod means strictly limiting the number of one’s “indoor friends.” Professor Dunbar also wrote that it can take just three months for a friendship (or parts of it) to deteriorate, and, well, we’re at almost four times that.
I am a person who cherishes and treasures her friendships very deeply. In the truest sense of the word, I adore my friends. I am awed and inspired by them. I look up to them and learn from them and think they’re actually, in fact, some of the greatest people to ever walk the planet. I’m an unmarried, childless twenty-something, and my life in New York City is built of my friends. They are my family and the reason Brooklyn feels so clearly like home.
And yet. Even so.
Nobody stands on a ladder in your bedroom with a crowbar and hits the ceiling to make a crack. It happens when a hurricane, rare for your area, comes through town and rattles your house’s foundation.
I have often imagined an idea of my absolute best self, the person I try to emulate when I perhaps feel especially insecure or sad or lost. My ideal, favorite self is generous and available, helpful and patient. She gives great advice and fights fiercely for the people she loves. She is as loyal and dependable as she is charismatic and charming. This self has a remarkable ability to take life in stride and go with the flow. And she is as practically unrealistic as she is wonderful to imagine.
In thinking about my own relationship to friendship and the benevolence of my ideal self, I hadn’t (to no service of myself or my friendships, it turns out) spent much time thinking about the things I expect or need or want in a close friendship. In unpacking and washing down and refolding the events of this recent argument, I found that when the emotional intimacy starts to wane from a close friendship of mine — even if that’s not necessarily what either friend intends, but the result of 4 x 3 months of physical distance and a mutual inability to dive deeper than first date-level smalltalk on video chats — I put up walls. If I feel like someone is pulling away, I begin piling the mortar on brick, so that I am prepared and protected from the disappointment and sadness that will come with their absence. In the past, I’ve been burned from grasping onto the shiny hot moments of intimacy that avoidant or distant partners did intermittently show me, and so I’ve adopted protective measures that pop back up even when I know (or at least want so much to believe) that a friendship will resume its course post-virus.
This does not sound at all like something my absolute best self would do. It’s not even something I like to think that my average human self would do, and yet. Even so.
It can be tricky to know exactly how to act when a friendship dynamic shifts towards the less-close. In a romantic partnership, this kind of drifting can raise some immediate alarm bells — either effort needs to be made to mend the relationship, or the shift might indicate a natural time to go your separate ways. In friendship, the pressure to repair a tear can feel much less immediate, especially if it’s circumstantial. Things will be back to normal when we’re able to all be in a room together again. The weight of the current world makes it hard to connect over the things that used to bring us together. We’d talk about all of this deep stuff in person if we could, but we can’t. The crack doesn’t look so deep (and maybe it’s not, really), but it’s still enough to cave the ceiling in.
During the first few months of the pandemic, I referred to life as being on pause. This was a fairly widely shared sentiment, and the world did feel like it was just on pause — restaurants and performance venues closed “for now;” lots of “wait it out” and “we’ll get through this apart but together” rhetoric. We all probably needed to cling to some version of that sentiment in order to deal with the swift shock of those initial closures and quarantines.
But we have not all been frozen in time in some kind of sci-fi chamber, waiting to be thawed out when the virus is managed. We have continued to learn and grow and build our little lives. We have sustained collective and personal traumas, the effects of which we will likely be dealing with for years to come. Some of us have been able to find pockets of joy, to watch Harry Potter and paint and discuss the merits of lemon olive oil cake and our spiritual beliefs over wine with our pod members, rituals that feel like something close to normal. And some of us have not. There is a specific, splintering type of guilt born out of watching people you love struggle and not having the faintest idea of how to help. Of wanting to both preserve your own joy pockets and to be available, to empathize. Sometimes you see how easily a bleak conversation could push you into your own dark spiral and you choose the bite-sized joy.
I don’t think there’s necessarily a “right” way to build and manage and navigate friendships during an extended period of collective trauma (other than employing the basic elements of human decency. Which includes not throwing parties during a pandemic, for goodness’ sake).
I do generally believe that people are doing the best that they can with the tools they are given. And some of us may have thought we were walking through the world with a fully stocked toolbox, only to open it and find that a wrench or Philips head screwdriver have gone missing. And hopefully, we will come across these tools again, finding that we had not lost, but simply misplaced them. We will call the repair person and get our ceiling fixed. But in the meantime, we have been forced to live out a hellish situation for much longer than it should have been allowed to go on. We come across new personal hurdles and discover new bruises on our skin almost daily. We are confronting our own reactions to triggers we might not have even realized we had, and we are working to maintain our jobs (if we’re fortunate enough to have jobs) and the relationships we have with one another as best we can. It all takes extra levels of compassion, and our compassion wells are running dry.
And like a broken heart or the memory of an embarrassing moment, it’ll all take time.
