COVID FRAGILITY

In the last three years, I have experienced multiple friendship shifts and ruptures. I experienced one significant friendship loss and I’ve witnessed several close friends have similar experiences of fractured or dissolved friendships. My peers and I, all women in our fifties, are displaying more social dysfunction that our teenage daughters.

I’ve started to refer to this phenomenon as COVID fragility. The timing works out — all the friendship explosions occurred well into COVID or shortly after the severe crisis time. 

In my little world, COVID fragility is marked by an extreme response to otherwise common social experiences. Disagreements, for example, or disappointments become cataclysmic events, often irreparable. Instead of having an argument and recovering, these various friendship breaches result in extreme friendship termination.

I listened to one of my favorite podcasts, The Hidden Brain, last week. The title of the episode, “Less is More” discussed, among other things, the idea of argument dissolution. Shankar Vedantam was interviewing experts on how to make convincing arguments.

Most of us assume that, if we present more arguments for our case, it strengthens it. For example, if I want to make a case to my partner to visit my extended family, I might think I am most effective to pile on the reasons — it’s been a long time; we visited your family recently; my mother is getting old; I miss them. 

One of psychologists on the podcast argued that our brains actually average the potency of all the arguments, so sharing one or two more potent reasons when trying to convince someone to get something you want is more effective.

In my example, the strongest arguments are: I miss my family and my mother is getting old. The other two arguments might be considered as petty or fluff. They don’t actually strengthen my case. So I would be better off just using two most compelling reasons instead of diluting my case in using all four.

As I listened to that podcast, I thought about how this might be happening in reverse with my friendships. Before COVID people saw each other all the time. Socializing once or twice a week in person was normal. In the old days, people last-minute canceled or changed their plans all the time. When that happened, people were momentarily, as my daughter says, “butt-hurt,” but they moved on. They called another friend and made another plan. A friendship kerfuffle was not a drama waiting to happen.

After two years during COVID, our social resilience atrophied. Returning to a version of pre-COVID socializing was bumpy and awkward. Most of us haven’t gotten back there yet. And as we’ve tried, COVID fragility has made friendships a little harder to manage.

COVID fragility is the idea of argument dissolution in reverse. During COVID, we had minimal contact with our friends and socializing was a BIG deal — lots of planning, organizing, COVID testing. If a social event fell apart after all of that preparation, we were devastated.

When we got back to “normal,” we were fragile. In her book White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo writes about white people’s paper-thin skin when being confronted with racist beliefs or attitudes. She argues that white Americans live in a world that protects and shelters them from race-based stress. White people are insulated from the realities or racial injustice that people of color experience every day. 

During COVID, we were isolated from each other, insulted against the struggles and stresses that are a natural part of socializing in the world, of having friends. As we return to pre-COVID socializing, we are fragile. The context is gone. Before COVID isolation, one disappointment or misunderstanding with a friend was an inconvenience, one experience in many. 

After COVID, this same disappointment is one in a handful. The emotional response is amplified, even explosive. Instead of facing the hard negotiations of repairing a friendship, being uncomfortable, maybe a little scared or anguished to face the conflict, we turn back inside, back to the insulated, safe zone we lived in during lock down. We do this because we are fragile.

During the social isolation of COVID, I experienced a great sense of ease and simplicity. My social world became uncomplicated and streamlined — really just my family and an occasional walk with a friend. There were no dinner parties or happy hours. No one was ever excluded because no one was ever included. 

I’ve felt so sad watching my friendships change, even disappear over the last few years, but I understand now why that happened. Many of us have become fragile. We are slowly recovering from those unsocial years. 

We’re in a period of reconstruction now, rebuilding our skills and resilience to be social again, to be in community. Sadly, I don’t know if the friendship destruction that’s already happened in my little world can be repaired, but I’m eternally hopeful.