Has the Pandemic Ruined Friendships, Too?
A Host of New Studies Show the Importance of Getting By With a Little Help From Our Friends
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Fifty-five years ago this spring, the Beatles released one of their most iconic albums, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The second track, which emerged organically out of the applause of the title number, was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney and sung by Ringo Starr. McCartney described it as “a wrong song for Ringo, a little craft job.” Lennon explained the origin this way: “Paul had the line about 'a little help from my friends.' He had some kind of structure for it, and we wrote it pretty well fifty-fifty from his original idea."
The group originally called the song "Bad Finger Boogie” because Lennon had injured his forefinger and plunked out the melody with his middle finger. But the track ultimately took the name of its signature line, “With a Little Help from My Friends.”
The song was recorded in London on March 29, 1967. As we approach that anniversary, perhaps the time has come for all of us to give this upbeat number a listen again.
The reason? America is in a crisis of friendship.
The comprehensive Americans Perspective Study released last year found that nearly half of Americans report losing at least a few friends during the pandemic. Ten percent reported losing touch with “most of their friends.” The study also found that those friends we have managed to maintain during the pandemic, we talk to less frequently and rely on less for personal support.
There was a glimmer of good news in this study, namely that four in ten Americans said they were able to make a new friend during the previous twelve months, but the overall trend is still down. Nearly a quarter of Americans say it’s been at least five years since they last made a new friend.
This decline is part of a larger trend. In 1990, 27 percent of Americans said they had three or fewer close friends; today, that number is 49 percent. In 1990, 33 percent of Americans reported they had 10 or more close friends; today, that number is 13 percent.
The pandemic, in other words, has made a bad situation worse.
What explains the brutality that Covid-19 has had on friendships?
During quarantine, many people purposefully narrowed their friendship circles to keep themselves, their families, and their friends safe. Young, single adults especially fled their shared homes in urban areas and returned home to their parents, while Americans of all ages went out of their way to avoid seeing the elderly for fear of spreading the virus, leaving this already lonely cohort even more alone.
Of all the ways people make friends, the workplace is the most effective. Fifty-four percent of Americans say they met a close friend at their workplace or that of their spouse.
And it’s not just offices. Markets and other public places are fertile ground where casual friendships are made and maintained. Virgil Henry Storr, an economist at George Mason University, published a study last fall observing that the loss of what he calls commercial friendships has been an underappreciated fallout of the pandemic.
Markets are social spaces where individuals can meet and form meaningful connections. But, because many market interactions that would have taken place in person before the pandemic moved remote and online, or were cancelled altogether, the COVID-19 pandemic has limited the ability of market participants to form and maintain meaningful social bonds.
Who wants to go out with friends when you’re feeling crummy yourself? Twenty-four percent of Americans said they were “not too happy” with their lives in 2021, up from 13 percent in 2018, according to the General Social Survey, a longstanding gauge of public opinion conducted by the research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. The share of people who said they were “very happy” collapsed from 31 percent to 19 percent during the same period.
Friendships take a lot of work, and we’re all exhausted. Ann Matsen, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, says our “surge capacity,” namely the mental and physical ability to bounce back from a stressful situation, is tapped out. The way I’ve personally been describing this problem to friends I bump into but haven’t been made plans with is, “I have only so much Covid risk to spend. I’m mostly saving it for my children." Given the choice between sitting in a crowded room watching my daughters in the Nutcracker versus sitting in a crowded movie with friends watching a movie, the choice isn’t hard.
The decline of friendships isn’t just a sidebar to the pandemic’s fallout on our country; it’s central to the larger problems we face. Friendships, especially those that cross religious, political, and generational divides, help pull us together, especially at a time when so many other forces are pulling us apart. Friendships also have been shown to pull us out of problems, especially when so many other pressures keep pulling us down.
Fortunately, we’ve also learned more about these positive dimensions of friendship work during the pandemic.
1. Friends promote Post-Traumatic Growth
In a study published last year in the journal Traumatology called, yup!, “I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends,” Emma-Louise Northfield of the School of Psychological Sciences at Monash University in Australia found that the aftermath of trauma like that associated with the Covid-19 pandemic can be lessened with the perceived support of friends. In fact, support was friends was found to be greater than support from significant others.
The reason, the authors write, is that friends are often of similar age, they are a source of social engagement, and they’re usually not living with you, so you’re not sick of them yet.
2. Zoom works!
Jaana Juvonen and colleagues in the Department of Psychology at UCLA published a study last year on the impact of electronic communications on friendship. They found that participants of all ages reported greater reliance on and satisfaction with video calls during the imposed isolation of the pandemic. “More frequent overall use of communication technologies was associated with greater anxiety,” the authors wrote. “In contrast, greater overall satisfaction with electronic contact with friends was associated with lower levels of loneliness, anxiety and depressive symptoms.”
3. People Do Want to See Friends Again
Pietro Birolli of the University of Zurich and colleagues in Italy, Britain, and the United States did an inventive, international study during the height of the quarantines in which they found that 64 percent of respondents wished to visit with friends once the lockdown ended. That news is encouraging for all of us, not least because it means that our friends are feeling just as isolated and unsure as we are. And it means that as we emerge from this latest variant and into the spring, we can take guidance from the wisdom of Lennon and McCartney:
What would you think if I sang out of tune?
Would you stand up and walk out on me?
Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song
And I'll try not to sing out of key
☀
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You might enjoy reading these posts:
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Or these books: Life Is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, and Council of Dads.
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