2020 forced me to confront my capacity as a friend. For the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to be the same friend that I was before I had children. I was half-arsing it constantly, because I wasn’t the same person (and certainly didn’t have the same timetable).
So when friendships abruptly became both contained by and dependent on technology, my aversion to my phone granted a new challenge: how could I be present for my friends? The answer – aside from the simple act of keeping my phone on more than I used to; a concession that felt much greater than it sounds – was to face up to the fact that I was attempting to keep in touch with too many people and going half-mad with the exhaustion of that attempt.
Successful friendships are built on shared language. You know (mostly) the oilings of one another and are able to (mostly) navigate your differences. But it can take a lot less than a pandemic to throw that balance off; and an actual pandemic can stretch clashing friendship codes to breaking point. ‘He wants to break lockdown because he is low,’ one friend despaired to me. ‘And I’m low because people are breaking lockdown.’
Friendship is also reciprocal, but it works best in tandem, when one is a little more up (to do the pepping) and the other a little more down (to be pepped). So what happens when everybody is frazzled, everybody is weary, and everybody is frightened? Who the heck props up who? A painful irony of this year is that when everyone needed each other the most, a lot of us felt neglected.
‘It made me realise how one-way my friendships were,’ one person told me on Twitter, when I asked how their friendships had fared during the pandemic. A stalemate of needs can result in indifference. ‘We’ve drifted,’ wrote another.
But the upside is that, for many, alongside a painful shedding of platonic wheat from chaff, is a clarity about who you want to walk a cracked and scorched earth with. I’ve had more than one friend covertly confess that the friends they actually miss the most are not their ride- or-die best mates, but their peripheral circle – who they only ever saw at parties and therefore associate with the kind of prohibited crowded, sweaty, shouty revelry they’re gasping for.
This year has forced me into a habit I hope I do not break ‘on the other side’: more robust conversations, but with fewer people. I feel like I now have a smaller but rock-hard solar system.
Pandora is author of ‘How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right?’