Which friendships to keep

Now that we're getting busier and back into in-person get-togethers, you'll need to be more intentional if you want to maintain those friendships. Vellos recommends continuing to carve out time to be in touch with these far-flung friends to demonstrate your commitment-and perhaps start making some travel plans. Creating a new collection of shared memories besides lockdown life is a great way to deepen your bond. That super-tight circle was essential in the thick of the pandemic, but they may become less important as we start to open back up.

It's not sustainable for every friendship you've ever had to be maintained at their highest level of intensity forever. You may even want to talk with them about it. Rather than just ride off into the sunset, let them know-in the nicest way possible-that you aren't able to maintain the same level of friendship. Whatever you do, don't just disappear- ghosting is just as terrible in friendships as it is in dating.

Headshot: Lisa Milbrand. By Lisa Milbrand June 08, Save FB Tweet More. And that same story has been playing out with billions of people around the planet. We saw each other constantly—at home, on campus, over dinner. We got drunk together; took the train to New York City to go clubbing together; emailed during our summer vacations. This proximity, we knew, would be lost to time and adulthood.

But almost 20 years later, after children for him and a divorce for me , Adam and I have rediscovered a new intimacy. The pandemic has deepened our bond, even though we have abandoned proximity entirely.

We keep an almost weekly FaceTime appointment to watch TV together. Read: How friendships become closer. Friendships involve emotional intimacy, but people have assumed that this intimacy is best mediated in space. How many times do we conclude that serious conversations need to happen in person? And yet, exercising a friendship at a distance has been possible for decades—via letters, telephone, text, Facebook, Instagram DMs, and so on.

But the pandemic has also released us from the expectation that closeness requires physical proximity. Instead, it offers an opportunity to decouple good relationships from physical intimacy and to open up other ways for friendships to flourish. Those lessons could improve our relationships now, and later. T he pandemic has narrowed my social circle, but it has also made me more aware of the dynamics of social life.

The places I go are fewer, which has limited the people I can see. I used to visit a friend who lived around the corner every day. Now, less often. Four months ago, I went on a socially distanced, fully masked outdoor park date with my boyfriend whom I have seen nearly every day since.

The joy of a restaurant dinner has been overwhelmed by the logistics of safety, the concern of exposure. My friendships still form the center of my emotions, but not my physical life. Now they occupy the spatial margins. Eventually, she texts back in agreement. My last pre-quarantine outing was with two women I no longer speak to, and when we broke up it all happened over text—no spoken exchange, no I. After months of mutual silence, I made the split official by unfriending both on social media.

Whereas the pandemic helped put a definitive end to certain friendships, others petered out in ghostly whimpers. When limited to texting and phone calls and the odd celebration on Zoom, one gradually learns which relationships are held by enduring fondness and which will crumple amid structural collapse. In the absence of shared social spaces—the office, the coffee shop, the party, the gym—some relations were revealed to be friendships more of convenience than anything else.

As our physical and psychological thresholds for sociality changed, I found that certain friendships no longer met them. Gone were the rhythms of the lunch break, the walk home from work, and even—I am loath to admit—the gym date, where we breathlessly traded life updates between the narrow space of our neighboring ellipticals.

In retrospect, one begins to wonder: Did I go to the gym to see my friend, or did I see my friend in order to go to the gym? These questions have begun to wind their way to the foreground, as some of us are lucky enough to be returning to these shared spaces. I will eventually run into the people I explicitly fell out with, and I imagine those encounters will be marked by chilliness, tinged with embarrassment. Sociality, after all, includes as much prose as poetry—mere niceties compelled by the sharing of something as basic as an office or a commute.

For him, the possibility of friendship—any friendship—is ultimately not personal but structural.