I've FaceTimed my best friend for two Fridays in a row now. OK,?? ?? ?? I know, that doesn't seemlike much to brag about.
But that's something we never really did before — gestures vaguely at the state of the world — all of this.
I love my best friend. We grew up together; I was the best man at his wedding. But he lives in a different city, we're busy, and we don't call or text as much as we'd like. On a pre-pandemic Friday, we'd likely be caught-up in other things, relishing the comfort of the coming weekend. But now... well now, we don't have shit to do beyond mixing up an adult beverage and talking via the magic of FaceTime.
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Weirdly, I feel closer to him, despite — gestures vaguely again — all of the horror. I'm not alone in that experience. People across the world told me they've experienced something similar.
Anna Davies, 42, is a British expat living in Switzerland. She and Rachael Underwood, a 42-year-old living in the U.K. were childhood friends who grew apart when they left school. They reconnected a few years back at an event for a mutual friend. The friendship sparked back to life but was limited to meeting up a couple of times a year.
Everything changed with coronavirus. Both women love fitness, so they decided to do daily virtual workouts together as a form of motivation during quarantine. The duo might knock out dozens of burpees together, then sit and chat over breakfast until it's time to work.
"I'm not great at phoning people, even my family, but I think maybe because we have a shared love of sport and keeping fit, this became our impetus," Davies wrote in an email to Mashable. "I can’t imagine starting my day without this now."
Underwood agreed the new ritual mentally sets her up for the day and added she was a "little worried [for] when life goes back to normal."
"I actually don’t know where I would be without her!" she wrote in an email.
Davies (upper left) and Underwood (center) after knocking out 60 burpees together over videochat. Credit: Courtesy of Anna davies Dr. Jonathan Kanter, director of the Center for the Science of Social Connection at the University of Washington, said he's noticed that lots of folks are reconnecting — or connecting more deeply — with family and friends during this crisis.
"I think it's an interesting phenomenon that none of us were quite prepared for: When we simply lose our daily routine, it disrupts us psychologically in ways that are hard to put words to but are fairly significant," Dr. Kanter said in a phone interview. "We feel as if we've lost our grounding. We feel as if the earth beneath our feet is no longer quite as stable."
"And I think people are yearning for, and searching for, ways to re-establish that stability," he added. "Going back to some of these earlier relationships I think is a way of reconnecting with times in which we felt more stable."
Isolation is lonely. It's a witch's brew of the surreal and the mundane. It's anxiety-inducing. So we reach for loved ones. Maybe friendships we cherish but have faded with time. And now you can call them and there's no concern about having nothing to say — we all have this pandemic in common.
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Jon, a 40-year-old who lives in Los Angeles who preferred to only be referred to by his first name, initially got in touch with two old hometown friends when they started a group chat to share coronavirus-related articles. Soon enough, they were on Zoom calls every day. Eventually they started bringing on surprise guests to spice things up. (The best thus far was Jon's Dad, whom he lovingly called a "wiseass.")
"I think it's making everybody realize what's important," Jon said about the coronavirus crisis. "And I hope that when this clears up we don't forget that. I hope that we remember the connection, and [that] the people in your life are really what's important. You can't be too busy to understand where you come from."
Jon lives alone — his girlfriend is in a postdoc program in Boston — and normally he'd be traveling a ton and busier with work. Practically speaking, he and his friends just have way more time to hop on Zoom calls.
And in my personal experience, I'm less worried about bothering someone with a call because what else do they have to do?
"I think there is like a tacit approval for this sort of reaching out right now — and explicit approval for this sort of reaching out — at the social level that didn't exist before," Dr. Kanter said. "And so that may make it easier for people to overcome some of the obstacles that may have led them to not do so in the past."
There are, of course, drawbacks to connecting digitally. You can't fully pick up everything from a video that you would in real life. People's emotions are harder to read over video chat and, obviously, you can't do things like hug or shake hands. But it does provide an avenue for real connection.
Yael Bar-tur, a 37-year-old digital consultant in New York City, has spent far more (online) time with her family, who all live in Israel. They even got together for a virtual Passover dinner and she's done storytime readings with her nieces and nephews.
"I think people are more inclined to do stuff online now, and people who weren't necessarily too comfortable with digital [spaces] are becoming more and more comfortable because they have to," Bar-tur said in a phone call. "But also there's all this, I don't know, like emotional space, that's usually taken up by like going to bars, and running around, and just doing all these other social things."
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To be clear: Nothing could ever offset the horror and suffering and death caused by the coronavirus pandemic. And, as Dr. Kanter pointed out in our call, "this crisis is playing out inequitably, and some people are suffering at tremendous levels, where they probably would feel that it's even harder right now to reach out to people ... because they're just so filled with pain and anguish."
But there are lessons we can take away from quarantine. Like how sometimes it takes the terrible mix of boredom and fear of isolation to inspire us to reach out to people we love. Dr. Kanter himself said he got in touch with an old best friend — he was the best man at his wedding — after a decade of not speaking.
"It was fantastic and, yeah, just like talking about having him back in my life gives me a sense of soothing in my body that is palpable," he said.
Dr. Kanter then added: "If we can bottle the way people are reaching out to each other and trying to connect, and drink from this even after the crisis is over, I do think that would be a genuine silver lining amidst all of the horror and grief."
The world is upside-down, the future is uncertain. But I can FaceTime my best friend this weekend and, hey, that's something.