Anyone else lost friends post-covid?

[bookbard]

I was thinking about friends at this time of year. We used to do Christmas Eve with some European friends (who baked great cookies!) We haven't seen them since Covid. I called a few times and emailed a few times and after a few replies haven't heard anything in over a year. 

But they're not the only ones. There's a good work friend who I email and do the whole, want to catch up on Fri, want to catch up next week, want to catch up . . . no, always busy, there is never a possible time. Again, haven't seen since Covid.

Was trying to get onto another old friend, same. Just no response. I do 'get it' - people are exhausted and don't want to use up their energy on someone who isn't a best buddy. But still, it feels sad to lose touch with people you shared so much with. I am lucky that I have a lot of other friends, and have three different Christmas catch-ups ahead. 

[kbutton]

We changed churches so…yeah. 

[ScoutTN]

Not really, though my opinion of some people has shifted substantially. But they were and are acquaintances, not real friends. My circles of real friends haven’t changed. 

We actually made friends in our neighborhood during the shut down. Now we know them, and not just their dogs!
 

[J-rap]

Are you thinking it's because of a difference of opinions on Covid, vaccines, politics, etc., or just that life has changed since then for other reasons?

 

 

[Katy]

Definitely lost respect for many people who used to be close to, yes. But our close friends remain, thankfully.

[bookbard]

28 minutes ago, J-rap said:

Are you thinking it's because of a difference of opinions on Covid, vaccines, politics, etc., or just that life has changed since then for other reasons?

 

I think it's just because people are stressed, life is busy. I would say one of them is likely to be anti-vax (only based on her being into essential oils and so on!) but that wouldn't be the main reason - just busy. 

[Carol in Cal.]

I would not say that I'm less of a friend to people since Covid, and definitely not BECAUSE of Covid, but I got kind of used to not getting out much during Covid and that habit has stayed with me to some extent.

[Arcadia]

7 minutes ago, bookbard said:

I think it's just because people are stressed, life is busy.

I didn’t lose friends. However life is definitely busier than during pandemic with classes going back to in person and work from home became three days at office.
During the pandemic, my kids and husband are at home all the time as kids’ classes went online only and my husband only goes to office for lab work. So I had all the time in the world to meet friends at the cafe or go for walks with them. 

[rebcoola]

We left our church so yep but some friendships have been strengthed.

[KungFuPanda]

I’m the person who checked out on everyone. So far they’re giving me a wide berth and I still need it. I don’t know when or if I’ll get back to normal social levels. 

[Bootsie]

We moved right before COVID and had not had a chance to establish close friendships in our new area before COVID.  It has been very hard because we are now not "new" to the area and doing all of the things you do to meet people when you move to a new place.  Friends we had moved, retired, died, etc. during COVID so our paths don't cross any more.  

It has been harder for me to keep in touch with out-of-town friends than it was before COVID, which sounds counterintuitive.  I think it is because there was a rush at first to write, ZOOM, etc. and then as the pandemic drug on people just got tired of virtual communication.  I know I got sick of being on my computer.  And there wasn't the "we will see you this summer when we are in town" or the other routine things we would plan.  

People I worked with retired.  Some people were hired and then left for another job before I even met them.  People are not in the office as much as before COVID so friendships at workk are different, also.  

[Clarita]

Mostly, I had a lot of friends move away either during or immediately after COVID. I haven't lost them we just don't hang out as often or do what we used to do anymore. 

There were some friends that we didn't see for a long time during and post COVID. Recently, though, we started getting back together. This had to do with the COVID risks. So there is hope yet for your friends to come around. I think with some the routine just has to get established again. 

[Starr]

We had good friends that could not cope with our difference in opinion over Covid.

[Mrs Tiggywinkle Again]

So much never reopened here after Covid.  The beautiful drop off play space at the mall, several coffee shops, a game place where you could play board games with friends, many restaurants.  Nothing has really opened either to fill the voids left by Covid, either.

It adds up to fewer places to meet new people and fewer places to go be with people. For instance, none of our gyms here offer childcare.  Once the drop off play space, which has a contract for childcare with the gym at the mall, closed, many of the friends I used to work out with could no longer go to the gym, so that social contact stopped.  There are unfortunately long range effects to everything.

[Mrs Tiggywinkle Again]

Also, musing more on this, the homeschool culture here radically shifted.  Co-ops shut down, the large homeschool co-op at my in laws church refused to meet there anymore because my SIL, who made these decisions, demanded people wear masks especially during spikes in Covid.  They left and formed a hybrid school where instead of a co-op, homeschooling parents drop off their kids 2-3 times a week. So the chances to meet and interact with other homeschooling parents dropped there.  Many parents formed micro schools that are not open to other people. Three of the major co-ops have lost the majority of their members to either pods or the two hybrid schools and shut down.

I truly do not currently know any other homeschooling parents. When I took my new job, my Mom and MIL suggested that I pay another homeschool mom to homeschool DS the days he couldn’t go with me to the office and DH isn’t home.  They homeschooled in the co-op/support group/park day heydays of the 1990s and early 2000s(my mom started homeschooling in 1985 so she’s seen everything anyway)—-they were absolutely beside themselves that I didn’t really know any homeschoolers that well.

Its just been a rapid and strange(to me) cultural shift since Covid.

[MaryCrawley]

Definitely! We used to have weekly dinner/game nights with a few other couples, but haven't seen them in several years. First there were the shutdowns, then when that ended, one of the families demanded that everyone wear masks during the entire event (down to the ridiculous pull it down to take a bite of food, pull it back up to chew), and we weren't going to do that.  I think they may have eased up some based on photos I've seen of them posted on their social media where they're out and about finally acting normal (they'd had their toddler in masks and surgical gloves before), but they haven't bothered to contact us since then, and we haven't bothered either. 

 

There was another group of people we'd have frequent playdates with who all had kids who were within a month of our kid's age, and we haven't seen them all together since then---we've randomly run into one or two at the zoo or the grocery store, but nothing planned. They'd all just shut themselves in their homes for months and then once their kids got older, started sending them off to preschools and public school, and so we just drifted apart. 

 

We have made new friends since everything happened though, so it's fine. 

[SKL]

It may be hard to pinpoint the reason.  When the Covid shutdown happened, my kids were in 8th grade at a Lutheran K-8 school, and a pretty big % of our socializing was around school activities and with school friends.  My kids did most of the school extracurriculars, so I spent a lot of time in bleachers chatting with other parents.  We used to attend church there, so I had some folks I was friendly with there, though most were not super close friends.  We also did AHG, with an entirely different crowd, and I had some friends there, but we never saw them outside of AHG activities.

I did make an effort to keep connections with my school parent friends.  We got the kids together when practical throughout Covid, and my kids still hang with some of them.  I threw some parties to which the parents were invited.  Some of them have been facebook friends throughout.  That said, some distance has developed, but I would attribute that more to the fact that our kids have less and less in common, and it was our kids who brought us together in the first place.

My kids started public high school in the fall of 2020, so we would have been done with the K-8's sports etc regardless, and most of their middle school friends went to different schools.  But we still would have attended church there if it weren't for Covid.  I think I did lose some friends from that.  (I still want to return, and so does at least one of my kids, so hopefully soon ... but it may not be the same after all this time.)  As for AHG, we couldn't keep up with it because meetings were at the same time as my kids' marching band gigs.  Besides that, my kids' opinions changed and AHG / church weren't really a fit, at least for a while during high school.  This may have happened regardless of Covid.

We've made new friends though, of course.  My kids' culture camp community has become much more active as the kids have gotten older, and I've spent time with the other parents since the activities are at more convenient times for me.  We made an excellent new friend through being GSD owners.  And while there was much less parental chatting at high school activities (due to Covid and then not knowing anyone), it didn't decrease to zero.  😛

I have never really had a ton of close friends to begin with, and I'd already lost a lot of friends before Covid, by becoming a WAHM and other life changes.  But the people I was closest to are still there.  I am not a person who dumps people or holds grudges.  As long as the person hasn't outright abused me or my family, and isn't seriously scary, we're good.

[Spryte]

We did, too. Some are slowly coming back and we are restarting our regular hangouts. A few have had life changes that might have happened anyway (moves, etc). Others are just — gone, and even when we try to see them they are not interested. One former friend couple is downright hostile.

The last group are the ones with a difference in opinion that yawns like a chasm between us. The hostile couple moved from anti mask to anti vax, to both in hospital, nearly dying of Delta strain while we took care of their house and errands, to protests at school boards and getting heavy into confrontational local politics, to now they are involved in Moms for Liberty and other pretty loud groups. I reach out, wave, text, invite to no avail. It’s sad. I miss them. We have never discussed the above stuff, and would not, but they have known us for years and know that we aren’t heading out to the school board to shout about *whatever*, you know? 

I thought this thread was going to be about losses involving death. The above is at least not so permanent, and I hold hope that we will all reconnect. 

Post-Covid losses of the permanent type, we had four within the last year: DH lost his oldest friend, who was in our wedding — and I’ve known him since we were teens — to a post-Covid heart attack related to clotting last Oct. In Feb we lost DH’s Mom (not Covid), in May we lost his Dad (Covid caught at funeral). And in Aug we lost a long time personal family and former colleague of DH’s to most likely post-Covid clotting. It’s a lot of loss. We have been in a lot of grief. (And now a PSA about heart health and staying on top of things post-Covid!) To boot, my college bestie was killed just before Covid started, and we lost not just her but her partner of 20 years, and I’m still reeling from that, Covid made grieving her loss hard.

Maybe we need a spin off thread on how to rebuild social networks after Covid losses (of either type).

Edited December 1, 2023 by Spryte

[Dmmetler]

Yes, but part of that also was that L graduated high school, and I stopped seeing people in kid-related circles frequently if at all. And I'm, so far, the only one who's child has chosen to go to school out of state and live away from home, so while many of them now have college students, they have commuter students they still live with, who often are still involved in some of the local stuff they used to do. Not so much here.

 

 

[wintermom]

I'm very fortunate. I haven't lost any of my very close friends, and we still get together regularly, but it's less frequent for various reasons - a couple reasons stemming from COVID, such as one moved. 

I have met a lot more people from joining a new tennis club and dog park, which has been really nice. There are no meet-ups beyond the activity, though. 

 

 

[OH_Homeschooler]

I was going through a major life transition (divorce after moving to a new city) just prior to Covid. I had a long-term temp job in the new city, where I was only interacting with a boss and a co-worker. I changed jobs weeks after Covid was declared a global pandemic, and that job was remote. So I haven't had workplace interactions where I would perhaps have found a friend. 

Basically Covid was the nail in the coffin for the few relationships I was managing to maintain post-divorce and move. There were different reasons for these ending. My mom became really nasty to me about not being able to visit on a whim, so after decades of her mistreatment of me that was it for our relationship. My best friend was going through a divorce and got a major promotion at work, and lives several hours away. So we have just drifted apart, and I am hopeful when we are both more settled in our lives we will spark up a friendship again. 

I also have social anxiety and I find that Covid made it too easy for me to stay in my comfort zone, and now the idea of initiating any sort of social interaction is so daunting. I have a lot of work to do. 

[alisoncooks]

We had a family leave our church at the beginning of Covid. That’s cool, I get it, but they 100% dropped off the planet. No contact with anyone (and our church wasn’t full of deniers; we met online for ages and then outside for a while). The husband of this family had been meeting with my dh weekly in a close small group (2-3 men). The wife worked with our teens. They never really responded to any attempts at reconnecting with them.

 

[I talk to the trees]

Yes, sadly. My irl circle was very small to begin with, and I have recently realized that my worldview does not fit in at all with this particular group of women. It’s politics, and religion (which are pretty much the same thing in my neck of the woods), and Covid, and public health, and climate change, and science in general, really. 😞I still keep in touch with 1-2 of the women, but the others seem to be perfectly content to push any and all folks who are different out of the group. Somewhere during the past 4 years, people have just become more permissive about rudeness and hostility towards others.

[KSera]

Yes. It's very difficult for people who are immune-compromised or already dealing with disabilities, or otherwise highly aware of the risk covid poses to themself or their family members (some of whom became high risk and/or disabled due to a prior covid infection), because for the most part, people don't want to make any concessions in their life to allow society and social gatherings to include those people. When people at risk try to join social events, they are ridiculed for the precautions they take to try to protect themselves from what is known to be a potentially very risky illness.

4 hours ago, MaryCrawley said:

one of the families demanded that everyone wear masks during the entire event (down to the ridiculous pull it down to take a bite of food, pull it back up to chew), and we weren't going to do that.  I think they may have eased up some based on photos I've seen of them posted on their social media where they're out and about finally acting normal (they'd had their toddler in masks and surgical gloves before), but they haven't bothered to contact us since then, and we haven't bothered either.

I'm not sure why they would contact people who found them not worth accommodating their health concerns.

3 hours ago, Spryte said:

Maybe we need a spin off thread on how to rebuild social networks after Covid losses (of either type).

I'd be interested in a group for those who can't just "act normal" (as stated above) because life isn't normal anymore due to covid. Finding networks of people who care enough about other people that they care about even those who might require them to take precautions so they can have social connections is what we've really been looking for. They're out there, but it takes work to find and connect with them.

[happypamama]

Long story, several factors, but yes.  

 

 

 

[Grace Hopper]

Not sure I would say I lost friends, but due to a variety of reasons surrounding the events of 2020 (covid, racial tensions, politics) my social circles have changed. My youngest has aged out of some activities, which of course brought changes. As things revved up again after the pandemic, I started making more deliberate choices to be with people that inspire me towards my art practices, people who are willing to think and re-think faith issues, groups and places that are less homogeneous than those I previously found myself engaged with. 
 

As far as re-engaging with previous friends, there are some that had been steady all along, but others, well, it’s taken a while to be willing to trust some people. Conversation is cautions because people have strong opinions and I feel on eggshells waiting for eruptions. I pray under my breath I’ll remain calm if someone goes on a tear, and because that is exhausting I have definitely avoided some people in the last couple of years, including family members.