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If there’s any silver lining to our pandemic year - and that’s a big if - psychologists say it was all the time it gave us for self-reflection. It’ll be easier to arrive at new/old boundaries with one’s best friends - the people with whom you can be brutally honest - but less so, perhaps, for one’s medium friends (a category hard to define, but one which I’m sure call several examples to mind). “It’s saying: ‘I don’t do this with you.’ We don’t say it in those words, but those are the messages that may be perceived.” In relationships where one person perceives a need to make up for lost time, and the other wants to resume once-monthly hangouts as if no time had passed at all, tensions are sure to arise. “One of the reasons that setting boundaries is hard is because they have implications for relationships,” says Trefalt. There are friends we’re likely eager to see as soon as it’s safe to do so, and some, perhaps, who we realize we haven’t missed at all. On the other hand, it’s relatively rare for any two friends to value each other to the exact same degree. “You might not put the effort in to see someone you don’t really connect with.” On the one hand, it’s healthy to prioritize valued, rewarding relationships. “If you’re going to see someone, it’s going to be someone you really want to spend time with,” says Taejah Vemuri, a psychotherapist at Urban Balance. Once opportunity is reintroduced, so too is an increased potential for hurt feelings. Each relationship is a negotiation between its members, and over the past year, many froze.

While the threat of COVID-19 provided the most solidly impersonal excuse the homebody may ever have, it forced the socialite to submit so severely they may resent their less-extroverted friends and acquaintances for not feeling as frantic to meet up. Trefalt expects the winding down of the pandemic to expose the tension between both what we want versus what we think we want, and the differing desires between friends (and family members, and co-workers).

“Once things open up, I think the pressure is going to be on,” says Spela Trefalt, an associate professor at the Simmons School of Business. Some daydream only of a single friend joining them on the very same couch where they spent 2020. But maybe not quite as often, or with quite so many people. The expectation after a year of collective deprivation is that we all want to celebrate its end together. There will be many happy, teary reunions, and if Twitter is to be believed, a number of supremely hedonistic parties. But soon, maybe a month or two from now, our declinations will lose their faultlessness - no longer the presumed default of the responsible citizen, the no thank you will once again require explanation.Īs vaccination continues to ramp up, and restrictions continue to drop, we will be freer to spend time with friends and family than we’ve been in more than a year. I dutifully supported my friend’s decision, agreeing it was outrageous of her friend to ask her to dinner, but I was also distracted, suddenly overwhelmed by the coming social conundrum my friend’s situation portends.įor now, her decision was an easy one. She declined the invitation, and was annoyed when her friend accepted the RSVP curtly. She is not yet vaccinated, and only a few of the people invited to dinner had been. The governor of their state has made indoor dining legal, but my friend was horrified. More specifically, dinner at a restaurant, indoors, with 15 or so guests. In 2019, or any year before it, the inciting event would have been an inoffensive request: My friend’s friend invited my friend to dinner. The other day, a friend called me on the phone to complain about another friend - a cherished hobby for us both.