The pandemic shows us what friendships are worth keeping

In some ways, keeping a tighter circle during the pandemic has been difficult, she admits. But she went to the lockdown in March with a hangover feeling – and overall, her calmer life felt restful. “I detoxed myself from all the social connections I was making,” Carlton said recently. “I wanted this moment for myself and I’m so much more aware of when I need it.

Beyond his immediate family, Carlton regularly sees two friends – for some outdoor exercise and coffee – and for the most part, that’s enough. “There is a group of families who met regularly. … I miss it, ”she said. “But not much else.

Carlton feels blessed to have an abundance of friends. But once her family is vaccinated and life starts to speed up again, she wants to continue to focus primarily on his besties rather than stretching out to see everyone in his circle. His pod may well survive the pandemic.

Carlton isn’t the only one who finds solace in a streamlined social life. Just as working from home has revealed that going to an office five days a week is not necessary for all workers, some who have already tried to maintain dozens of friendships find that they are more fulfilled while. by staying up to their loved ones. After nine months of living in a prolonged state of emergency, it’s clear who’s on your drive or kill crew, who you can call if you need a walk, maintenance, or a bit help. For many, those inner circles are tighter than ever.

This period of squatting does not leave much room for those casual friends or acquaintances that you might have met for a drink or lunch every six months. Social networks trick their users into believing they have hundreds or thousands of “friends,” but most of them aren’t people you trust or rely on. Each of them is a square in your Instagram feed, a Facebook update you might “like” or someone you know. Besides the many lessons from the coronavirus era, there is one that comes with age and growing obligations: we don’t have to catch up with everyone. Some friendships won’t survive this time around, and that’s okay.

Shasta Nelson, a friendship expert who has written several books on how to maintain healthy relationships, finds that people who put fewer friends first and go further with them feel more connected. “The pandemic has given us this collective permission to speak without shame about the difficult things that are going on in our lives,” Nelson says.

However, Nelson points out, those who have friendships that haven’t made the transition to phone calls, texts or Zoom “are the people who are extremely lonely right now.”

Tam Sackman, a 26-year-old assistant in a communications company At New York, got closer to her best friends over the course of that year – and even had that rare joy of introducing friends from different corners of her life to each other. Over the summer she picked a small group, everyone got tested for coronavirus, and they locked themselves in a house in the woods of Pennsylvania for two months. They shared shopping and cooking tasks. Every night they would watch a movie or play a board game.

Even though each of Sackman’s friends started out as strangers, they believed her when she said everyone would get along. “They were gaining a lot of momentum trusting me,” Sackman says, adding that “we had a really special experience.”

In fact, it was such a wonderful time that Sackman says she has no more room for “inauthentic interactions,” that is, connections that are more like networking. Most of the time, she has no patience for “small talk” with acquaintances or casual friends. The past year has made her feel fortunate to have “an abundance of people I can talk to about difficult or deeper topics of conversation.” Now that’s all she wants.

Supriya Gujral has taken this quest for depth a step further. During the pandemic, the 48-year-old mother and tech executive from Silicon Valley sat down with her husband and pondered who they might count if they both got sick. They asked themselves: Who do we take the phone to call and check? And who takes the phone and checks us? Who do we ask to manage our estate or to trust our son?

Social accounting has led Gujral to focus only on immediate family, a handful of close friends, and his nanny. Everyone she would follow via social media. The past year has proven to her that “time is very limited,” and she wants the time left “to be meaningful to me and to the people of my tribe” as she has dubbed this inner circle. “As we get out of this, things are going to be different,” Gujral predicts. “We just don’t know how different he is.”

Gujral got a taste of what her future holds when she and her husband planned a small outdoor gathering to celebrate Diwali in November. They typically host around 70 guests for the holidays; this year they have increased to 10.

“For some reason it meant a lot more,” Gujral says. Just as she rethinks her priorities, she assumes others are too. After the pandemic, she adds, “I won’t be offended if I get half the invitations that I used to get.”

Once you’ve decided to keep the circle smaller, how do you define those boundaries? Gujral plans to be more transparent with invitations that she cannot accept, telling friends or acquaintances that an event would take away from family time.

When one of Carlton’s friends reached out around his birthday last month, asking when they were going to celebrate, Carlton spent an entire day figuring out how to respond. She had already had a scaled-down celebration and didn’t want any more noise. “I wanted to be honest and genuine – and not hurt her feelings,” Carlton said. Eventually, she told her friend that she already felt “just the right thing to celebrate” in her “hermit-like” coronavirus existence. Carlton has since seen this friend and reports that her polite refusal does not seem to have hurt.

Nelson, the friendship expert, predicts that some people never go back to pre-pandemic party and calendar levels. “We will have to be more thoughtful,” she said. “We can’t say yes to everything. We no longer want to say yes to everything. “