All about friends: love in friendship long after lockdowns
Leah reflects on the evolution of friendships during the COVID-19 pandemic and challenges us to expand our definition and depth of our love for friends and community.
“Maybe it’s a good idea, as Shakespeare said, to bind your friends to you with hoops of steel. They certainly are my armour and my fortress”
One evening in the midst of pandemic-ridden 2020, I found myself wrapped in blankets, sitting side-by-side a group of women eating dinner out of tupperware on a hill in Burgess Park, London. My ‘bubble’, as it was termed at the time, was fortunately four friendships established during my time at university. This was already, and would continue to be, one of many times where I would be embraced by these women, and would embrace them back—through break-ups, new jobs, and the mundanity of clogged toilets and family-size shopping lists.
Whilst it is clear that the burden has not been equally shared around the globe, the public health and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been devastating. The last few years have been a period of deep reflection for those of us working in global health, as we consider vital improvements to our health systems and ensure that we do not repeat the same mistakes. Here in the United Kingdom, as elsewhere, the pandemic also revealed cracks in our social fabric. While we often hear about lifestyle changes—including seeking alternate career paths, new ways of working, less frequent international travel, and changes to physical activity—a potentially bigger area of change and growth is in how we value, perceive, and communicate about the people in our lives.
During the first lockdown, I was privy to many conversations about friendships that changed or shifted as a result of the pandemic. In fact, there are countless blogs and columns published on the topic. Friendship is defined as a “state of enduring affection, esteem, intimacy, and trust between two people”. Philosophically, friendship has been considered a place where care, love, and activities are shared. As an adult, I have personally interpreted definitions of friendship as the family that you get to choose to share yourself with. Our friendships can take many forms, and allow our diverse emotional needs to be met. For me, they have always been a place where my ideas have been allowed to grow.
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However, the changes that have been reported in friendships since the lockdown took several directions. Some of us realised we had taken our friends for granted. Others learned the importance of spending time with people you love and of social connection more broadly. For some, the pandemic opened an opportunity to recognise friendships that were no longer serving them, and the clarity to let them go. Some writers have spoken about how friendship dynamics between men in particular have changed and strengthened during COVID.
Despite these different experiences and relationships, most of us found solutions to being apart. For my bubble, this was regular Zoom calls that we scheduled, group workouts and quizzes online, and socially distanced walks when we could. As a society, the desire to find new ways to reconnect demonstrated the importance of friendships and intimacy for social support and mental well-being—especially during an intense period where many were denied such interactions.
As life returns to ‘normal’ and social distancing rules begin to feel like a distant memory in parts of the world, it feels important to continue to have these valuable discussions around friendships and to carve out time to honour them.
Not only is taking forward these reflections on friendship and connection important for the health of these relationships, it is also important for our own individual and collective wellbeing. Although we know that friendship is important, loneliness is less spoken about, despite its prevalence and known mental and physical consequences. Friendships, especially fruitful and sustained ones, are an antidote to the epidemic of loneliness we are seeing. Moreover, the Psychology of Friendship details how friendships have a “powerful influence on physical health and even survival” through exploring conceptual frameworks about the impact of friendships on health. Much of the existing research stresses the importance of forming good social networks during childhood and adolescence. This may be driven by the acknowledgement that these are vulnerable periods in a life: we make many of our friends during our early developmental stages. Lastly, studies explore the positive and significant influence of friendship on promoting healthy behaviours and improving mental health—in some instances, friendships have been found to be more important factors in these outcomes than other relationships.
“However, the changes that have been reported in friendships since the lockdown took several directions. Some of us realised we had taken our friends for granted. Others learned the importance of spending time with people you love and of social connection more broadly”
The pandemic has given rise to many new and innovative solutions to sustain connections that remain relevant and important given the rise of loneliness across communities. For example, the development of befriending services for older people, and the increasing availability and use of apps for adults to find and make friends. The growth in the use of these apps likely corresponds with the increased value placed on seeking out friendships and not solely romantic partners. They offer an opportunity to counteract the cultures we live in that, for the most part, tends to emphasise the importance of successful romantic relationships in adulthood, often at the expense of friendship.
The development and use of befriending apps not only offers solutions to loneliness, but also acknowledges the importance of these bonds and the difficulty in forming and maintaining them in adulthood. Indeed, many people can relate to not realising the consequences of neglecting or deprioritising their friendships in favour of a monogamous romantic connection until the relationship breaks down. Romantic relationship dissolution therefore often marks a key moment where the importance of maintaining and nourishing friendships is underscored. Regaining a social network following a break-up can become even more challenging later on in life, when it is more likely that the majority of one's social network is engaged, married, ‘settled’, or partnered up in one way or another and rarely seek out time with just friends. It feels at times like we have created a system where people are embedded in and devoted to coupledom for support and connection. Yet arguably, coupledom is a lonely and fragile system of support on its own, especially given that people can also feel isolated in romantic relationships. If we sustain friendships—by living nearby, putting time into them, nurturing them—we have these as important and valuable relationships in addition to romantic ones.
In 2020, Rhaina Cohen wrote that friendship, and not romantic love, should be central to our lives. She describes how rejecting expectations around romantic partnerships and building lives around friendships instead can offer potential for new ways of living, with huge health benefits. The beautiful thing is: we do not have to choose between the two, although it may feel like that at times. Friendship and romantic love can and should play equal roles in our lives.
“In 2020, Rhaina Cohen wrote that friendship, and not romantic love, should be central to our lives. She describes how rejecting expectations around romantic partnerships and building lives around friendships instead can offer potential for new ways of living, with huge health benefits.”
There are also many people, including in my life, who are breaking out of the expectations that monogamous relationships traditionally uphold, and challenging the pressure to create and rely on nuclear family structures. Restless pandemic lockdowns similarly created space for me and my friends to think about how we might challenge and deconstruct some of these social norms to better align with our own relational needs and values. One pandemic evening, my friends and I discussed bell hooks and her definitions of love and friendship in All About Love. Here she discusses how we are taught friendships are not as important as family, showing this is something that we learn to be true, but in fact other and potentially more beneficial alternative arrangements can exist. For many, friendships are family, and vice-versa, so the distinction feels trivial. We also reflected on her definition of love as a verb— that love is choice and therefore something we do—and tried to incorporate more action and intention in our love for each other.
During these reflective conversations, my housemates and I also joked about setting up our own commune. Perhaps unsurprisingly, communes boomed following the first few lockdowns. Communes seek to reject the narrow nuclear family norm and social focus on heteronormative marriage, instead prioritising shared living and child rearing responsibilities for families, couples, and single people alike. In general, shifts towards new relationship structures—including a decline in marriages, increase in cohabitation, and women choosing not to have children—demonstrate a move away from traditional conceptions of coupledom as the centrepiece in many people’s lives. These shifts may offer alternative ways of living that rely less on one other person, and better incorporate friendship. Whatever partnership and family set-up people choose for themselves, we can be more intentional in our friendships.
Given the importance our first ever friendship has for all our following relationships, Kamila Shamsie advocated for a change in discourse when discussing her latest book at the Southbank Literature festival: our first childhood friend should really be called our first ‘love’. While life events like break-ups and globally enforced lockdowns might remind us of the value of friendship, it’s up to us to continue to prioritise this re-found love. Today the makeshift al fresco dinners of lockdown feel like a distant memory, but it is clear that our health—and that of the communities we belong to—requires love, and friendships, as central intentions to achieving it.