![]() All of this can help explain why you might be reluctant to reach out – and, in some cases, hoping that old friends and acquaintances don’t reach out to you, too.Īlthough you may feel guilty picking and choosing your circle if it means fading out on friends, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Keeping up with people outside these pods took extra effort – and while we were busy disinfecting doorknobs and panic-buying toilet paper, we didn’t have the emotional capacity to reach out to everyone with whom we used to interact, both intimately and casually.Īnd now that we have the opportunity to reach out again, we may find that we didn’t necessarily miss the people we didn’t talk to. We only had so much bandwidth to keep in contact with people outside our pods, which caused us to naturally narrow the friendships we kept going. We’ve had to be choosy about who we let in, and we suddenly couldn’t see all the people from our pre-pandemic lives in person like we could before. As we had to literally isolate from each other during the last year, Degges-White says this led to forming selective “pandemic pods” – a selective, close group of family and friends who were part of your ‘bubble’, and who also took the same health precautions as you. The pandemic is a perfect example of how life circumstances re-shuffled our friendship groups. These kinds of life experiences change your friendship networks, as you re-prioritise the people you want to spend your time with. It’s impossible to keep up with every single friend you’ve ever had, she says, especially as you add new relationships when your life circumstances change, such as moving cities or changing jobs. Shasta Nelson, a San Francisco-based author and speaker who specialises in friendship, agrees “it’s absolutely normal that relationships ebb and flow all throughout life”. “Not every friendship is meant to last forever. “When there’s a friend that you haven’t kept up with during the pandemic – if you didn’t feel the need to check up on this person, and they weren’t checking in on you – then kind of believe what your gut is telling you,” says Suzanne Degges-White, professor of counselling at Northern Illinois University, US. ![]() But if you feel obliged, or like doing so is emotional labour, take that as a sign you can cut that person loose. If you really do miss someone, you can always reach back out. While people have known for years that friendships are unquestionably good for your health, experts say it’s only natural for acquaintances and even friends to fall by the wayside as time goes on – and it’s nothing to feel guilty about. Should we feel bad about not caring for these relationships? As we figure out who the first people we want to meet up with are, we’re recognising there are friendships from the ‘before times’ we didn’t keep up during lockdown – and aren’t particularly excited to re-ignite now that we can. ![]() More of us are starting to pick back up the strands of our pre-pandemic social lives. Then you realise something else: you may want to keep it that way. If you’re vaccinated and heading back into the world, you may realise something: there are a lot of people you haven’t spoken to in a year and a half.
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