How To Get Your Friendships Back On Track After The Weirdness Of Lockdown

The other day, I spotted a friend in the park. ‘How are you?’ I shouted, across the metres. ‘Oh, fine!’ she said. I noticed she had her kid and another woman in tow. ‘We’re doing bubbles.’

‘Social bubbles?’ I said. ‘Oh, right!’

‘No,’ she said, ‘ACTUAL BUBBLES,’ and brandished a bubble tube and wand.

‘Ah,’ I said, aware that my paranoia had jumped the gun.

Social bubbles are one of the many things I’m anxious about as we start reintegrating into each other’s lives. How will friendship be affected in the coming months? It feels as though life has changed in so many ways; as though we as people have changed in so many ways. Surely, friendship is going to have to adapt, too. If post-pandemic pods is the way we go, then isn’t it going to be like being picked (or not picked) for the netball team at school all over again?

A work colleague recently told me she was upset because she hadn’t made it into one of her friend’s pods. ‘She says her pod is full,’ my colleague said, clearly gutted. ‘I wasn’t in her Top Six.’ A Top Six! This isn’t like choosing Bob Dylan songs, this is actual PEOPLE. It’s the meanest birthday party list ever. It’s the wedding-guest list from hell. How do you whittle it down? Do you choose like you’re selecting a boy band, for your entertainment pleasure (a cute one, a funny one, a classically trained one, etc), or like you’re in a disaster movie and need a range of skill sets (an engineer, a maths genius, a dense-but-hench jock-type)? How? And, once we’ve chosen our perfect pod, what do we do while we’re focusing on these people? Is it like our other friends have been furloughed?

I arranged to meet a group of friends on the beach in Brighton last week. Our WhatsApp messages had been rabid with excitement as we planned whether we’d need swimming gear, parasols and whatnot. Hey, it was the closest we were getting to a holiday. But when we actually met and sat, spaced out, by the shore – we felt just that. Spaced out. Everyone was quiet for the first 10 minutes. It was awkward. We livened up after a while, but it took some settling into, and I suppose that’s what will be the defining factor of social meet-ups now: settling back in. Re-adjusting.

A lot of people are feeling social anxiety about group settings. We’ve got so used to the idea of not seeing anyone, suddenly a simple group barbecue can feel daunting and, quite literally, unsafe. There’s a new hardwired instinct to retreat when someone gets close – and I wonder how much of that will be emotional as well as physical in our wider relationships as we move forward. If friends want more of us than we’re giving, it might be natural to feel a little panicked. Talk about it, talk about it, talk about it. And give everyone – including yourself – time. That’s my best advice.

Many of the friends I’ve seen since lockdown have seemed different, and the friendships have felt like they’ll need a lot of (safe, sanitised) TLC in the coming months. I’ve argued with a few friends when we have had differing views about whether it’s safe or not for children to go back to school or nursery, and those rows have felt riskier than usual – as though it wouldn’t take much to sever bonds, which is scary. Weirdly, the friendships that have been through the mill in the past are the ones that feel like they need less work right now. It’s almost as though those friendships have the antibodies to deal with disruption.

And how are we supposed to make new friends at the moment? With no pubs or bars, no work environments, no leisure facilities open for a while? If anyone’s interested, I’ll be in the park with some bubbles. Actual bubbles.