Making Friends in the Middle of the Post-COVID “Friendship Recession”
I’m really, really glad Corona happened in the year 2020.
Not because I had a great time watching the entire world suffer under the tyranny of it, but because “2020” is such an easy date to remember. If you’re going to go through something as traumatic as COVID, you’re better off not needing to fumble around with hard-to-remember details like months and years during the inevitable times when you’ll have to refer back to it.
In November of 2019, I wrote a post for this blog explaining how my family and I moved to Columbus in March of 2019 with the express intent of finding community and how God had abundantly honored this intent by introducing us to The Village Church.
In February of 2020 (you kinda tensed up while reading that date, didn’t you? That’s called dramatic irony— when the audience knows right when the hammer is gonna drop but the people in the story have no idea…), the lot fell to me to write another post for this blog, this time highlighting an important aspect of community, which is hospitality: a subject I am very passionate about. We as a church were just beginning the Rosaria Butterfield book…
AND THEN COVID HIT.
That’s always how people say it, because it’s true. It hit us. All of us. Mercilessly and maliciously. I still get sort of nauseated and panicky when I think of picking up my daughter from Pre-K for the last time in March 2020.
Two or three months after everything shut down, I remember staring at the Butterfield book sitting on my bookshelf, the ancient concepts within it having turned illegal overnight, and feeling bitter and confused. Why did God have our whole church read this book only to take away every opportunity to practice the truth within it? Why did my family move two thousand miles to Ohio only to be locked in our houses? Don’t people know how damaging long term isolation is to the human psyche?
The whole thing felt like a cruel joke.
But deep down I knew God does not play cruel jokes. He had us read Butterfield’s book as a church for a purpose: because the world was about to suffer in ways it had never suffered before, at least on a global scale. Human connection was about to come under severe attack and God was prepping us to handle the aftermath.
Instead of seeming like a waste, our church’s study of hospitality now feels like we’re Joseph staring at the silos of grain he wisely frittered away just before the world stepped into the handbasket of dire famine. It must have been a wonderful feeling for him to see all this food just sitting there, waiting to help a bunch of very hungry people survive, knowing it was all because of God’s foreknowledge and grace.
“Our church’s study of hospitality now feels like we’re Joseph staring at the silos of grain he wisely frittered away just before the world stepped into the handbasket of dire famine.”
And people, both within the church and without it, are very, very hungry right now. Not for Egyptian wheat, but for connection.
I found a couple great articles about this very topic, written within the last few months, that I encourage you to read. The first one is an essay entitled Scientists Warn of a “Friendship Recession”— I’m Part of It, and it mentions a recent British study that reveals 58% or almost two thirds of the study’s 2,000 participants are trying to rebuild what Corona took from them, namely a social circle.
But it’s not just that people lost friendships during the pandemic; it’s that they’ve forgotten how to make, maintain or prioritize them:
Psychologist Marisa G Franco, author of Platonic, explains it this way:
“The issue we are seeing now is something called ‘learned loneliness’ — people have adjusted to isolation. It’s not that they have gone off socializing, it’s that they have learned to live with an unfulfilled need. A recent study from Pew Research showed that 35% of people feel that socializing is less important than it was before the pandemic.” [emphasis mine]
We aren’t just dealing with a brave new world of people starving for connection, but one in which a large percentage of those people have developed the eating disorder version of interacting with others. They feel the hunger but have been conditioned to do nothing about it.
But here’s the craziest and most helpful part of all this. The scientists who study this stuff— friendships, social connections, etc.— have narrowed down exactly how much time it takes to develop a meaningful friendship with someone, and it only takes 34 hours (or 2,040 minutes), spread out in 11 interactions over 5.5 months. Casual.
“What’s more,” the second article, a plucky British piece, goes on to say, “each interaction needs to last on average 3 hours and 4 minutes to be mutually beneficial – far longer than your average cup of tea!”
True. Three hours and four minutes is longer than having tea or coffee with someone. But it’s not longer than having them over for dinner, preferably in the comfort and humility of either your home or theirs. And isn’t three straight hours about how long most of us spend at our small groups during the week?
But I see you doing math in your head and you’re like, “Eleven interactions over 6 months… so twice a month I hang out with this person for 3 hours each. That sounds like a lot…” It is a lot (although it’s not too much), which brings up an interesting point about hospitality and quality human interaction: we may have to sacrifice our busy, overcommitted American schedule to make it happen.
At the same time, this is so not a bummer. Who doesn’t like to just kick it with a friend or get to know someone you knew nothing about? Remember being in high school and your parents sort of handled everything and you could just be with your friends for hours? Is it any wonder many people end up maintaining their friendships from high school for decades, even if they no longer live near each other anymore?
We need to allow ourselves to not be so adult— so productive— all the time so we can make room for what God wants to do in the slow, primal world of human bonding. Reminds you of Sabbath rest, no? Intentionally setting aside time to rest and connect with God. Turns out the more time you invest in a relationship, whether it’s with God or man, the better it gets. Crazy!
“We need to allow ourselves to not be so adult— so productive— all the time so we can make room for what God wants to do in the slow, primal world of human bonding.”
I find it interesting that decent, healthy friendships are born when we allow ourselves to abide by the schedule of someone who consistently and intentionally uses hospitality as a faith expression. In other words, all we have to do is keep doing what decent people and Christians have been doing for thousands of years, which is use our resources to bring rest, comfort, love and provision to the people God has put in our lives. And especially with our church getting as big as it has gotten— the official average headcount from Josh is 190 people per Sunday service— it matters all the more that we don’t let budding friendships slide, else we will feel ever more lonely in that huge room full of nearly 200 people.
Friendship math and exhortations aside, do you feel like Joseph a little bit now? Can you see the huge, packed grain silo of living our lives the way God intended and how the bleaker things get around that silo, the richer it’s contents become?
Now, more than ever, that silo needs to be tapped into and its riches utilized. If there was ever a time to cheat the world of your presence, it is certainly not now.
It’s almost too laughably simple— too accessible and pleasurable to be true— that we are tasked with the arduous labor of blessing our neighbors by just being a friend to them. By being simply ourselves as servants of Christ to them. Phew! Serving God is tough, you guys.
Just kidding. Now go out there and play with your friends and don’t come home ‘til the streetlights come on and you hear your mom whistle for you.
* * *
If you would like to deep dive into the science of friendships, I found this interesting study type thing that you can check out.
* * *
You can find more of Cas’s writing at + the sanitarium +, a weekly newsletter for disgruntled Christian moms.