How COVID Has Affected Our Friendships—and What to Do About It
Before COVID, we were already facing an epidemic of loneliness. Social isolation has become the functional status of life, and loneliness has made a profound and tragic impression on our mental health, physical well-being, and community life. And that was before we were all locked in our homes indefinitely. Last year, the cure for one pandemic only deepened another one. The antidote to the COVID pandemic—social isolation and distancing—has exacerbated what the former surgeon general called “the epidemic of loneliness.” Last year, the cure for one pandemic only deepened another one. The primary tragedies of COVID are well-known. We’ve lost loved ones. And the long-term health factors associated with COVID-19 are not yet fully known. We’re not yet living in a post-COVID world, and in a sense, we never will be. (Perhaps we might call this, with a crumb of hope, the late COVID era.) In the midst of all these massive and somewhat measurable tragedies, the effects on our relationships, frien