Episode 24 - Friendship During Covid
Transcript
David: 0:07
Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán,
Ellie: 0:09
and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,
David: 0:12
the podcast where two friends,
Ellie: 0:14
who are also professors,
David: 0:16
put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
Ellie: 0:19
Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. This is the first episode in a three-part series on how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed relationships.
David: 0:35
Ellie, moment of truth. Have you become friendless during COVID?
Ellie: 0:45
Yes. No, I have not become a friendless but COVID has put major strains on friendships and it's caused this sort of redrawing of the lines of different friend groups in ways that I really hope are reversible because it's honestly been totally stressing me out.
David: 1:02
Wait, so you- you're saying that your current configuration of friendship is not good and you want to go back to what it was before? I'm sure your friends who are in that configuration will love hearing that.
Ellie: 1:16
I haven't made any new friends during COVID, I've just maintained some friendships and others have sort of not been maintained as well. And I'm hoping that's reversible.
David: 1:27
So if you had to put it into a few words, what your experience of friendship has been under this pandemic, how would you put it?
Ellie: 1:41
I would say that a lot of my friendships feel like they've gone into hibernation mode, where I'm not seeing my friends and we're doing a pretty bad job of keeping up with each other's lives but I'm hoping that the friendship survives and kind of thaws out and flourishes once after the pandemic.
David: 2:01
And then it freezes again and gets thawed again.
Ellie: 2:06
No, cause hopefully there won't ever be something like this again. I mean it's been really hard honestly. It's been one of my major sources of stress during COVID. How about you?
David: 2:16
So I've been struggling with this quite a bit. And in reality it's made me realize what a bad friend I am, and that has made me feel pretty terrible about myself. A long time ago, a really close friend of mine told me she thought I was a really really good friend in person, when I'm there, when the other person is in the vicinity, but that when I step out of that element of immediacy, I become a terrible friend because I have a poor moral imagination. I think that's right. I don't think about people who are not in my short term goals and objectives as much as I think morally I should, even people whom I love. And so-
Ellie: 3:06
Does that mean you're not taking the time to catch up with them or you're like doing things that violate them in some way. Poor moral imagination seems pretty strong.
David: 3:15
No the former, definitely not the latter. I'm not doing anything to violate that the moral dignity or integrity of my friends. Um, no it's more that I fail to think about people who are not there and as a result I don't take the initiative to do the things that one needs to do in order to keep those friendships alive. Even when people reach out to me, I'm bad at responding, I don't feel that motivation or that energy to engage. I feel guilty about this because it's not a reflection of how I feel about my friends, but it doesn't change the fact that I ignore my friends
Ellie: 3:58
I can totally relate to that. I'm also really bad about responding to people a lot of times and I can be bad about reaching out and like maintaining especially long distance friendships outside of actually seeing the person. I think the difference for me is I didn't resonate with your suggestion that you don't think about your friends so much when you're not seeing them because I actually think about most of my friends on like a daily basis, it's just that that doesn't necessarily translate into actually reaching out to them. And I'm just sort of like, "Oh well you know I'll see that person when I go to New York this summer or Paris this summer," or I'll see that person who lives in my same city when you know we have a park picnic later this month. And so not having those things to look forward to has been really hard because I haven't found myself replacing them with like a Zoom meeting or something. Instead, I just realized I haven't actually seen one of my friends in nine months because we haven't had a chance to hang out in person.
David: 4:51
Well in my case it really is the stronger version of that. It is that I don't think about people who are not immediately there and so that's why I think that what my friend said is accurate that I have a poor moral imagination, because I don't imagine or think about my moral duties to people who are not immediately there in the moment. And so it's kind of like out of sight out of mind and I'm not saying this as a way of justifying it or intellectualizing it, because I do think it's a character flaw.
Ellie: 5:26
So I just have to keep you in my clutches at all times in order to remain friends with you.
David: 5:31
Oh yeah. As soon as we end our recordings I completely forget about who you are.
Ellie: 5:40
It's funny because I think what you're describing is a way that when you're distant from people, you tend to be kind of a bad friend to them. I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with that as your friend but it sounds like that's what you're saying this other friend had in mind, and you know, lately, all of us have had to be distant from our friends and it seems to me like a net negative. Why do we have so much malaise around this?
David: 6:06
Today we're talking about COVID and friendship.
Ellie: 6:09
How has social distancing altered our friendships?
David: 6:12
And why have some friendships become stronger, while others have weakened or dissolved altogether?
Ellie: 6:23
In thinking about COVID, it's impossible not to think about space because it's a spacial constraint that's having an impact on friendship. It's our confinement. It's the fact that when we do see each other, we have to be six feet apart and/or masked. And so I think one way to think about the connection to space is that in friendship, there's a very important role for sharing space together, performing activities together.
David: 6:51
What are the kinds of activities related to space that you miss doing with friends?
Ellie: 6:57
Oh man, where to begin. I mean I'll tell you about my perfect day with a friend and maybe that will be illustrative. My perfect day with a friend is one where we start off by sharing brunch together, I know brunch is so cliche but its so nice.
David: 7:15
It's okay, I do gay brunch all the time.
Ellie: 7:19
Oh my God. I know I'm like early 30 something white lady who lives in a major city, could I be more cliche? Um, but yeah we share a meal together and we catch up, right. We have like a couple of hours of great conversation where we're checking in about each other's lives but also shooting the shit about banal stuff, just sort of running the gamut in our conversation. Then maybe we would pop into some thrift stores, walk around the park, and then later in the afternoon meet up with another group of friends and have a whole gathering together. Maybe it's a picnic or drink somewhere, right. I think that kind of combination of heart to heart conversation, with an activity that I do with a friend, with joining up for other friends is like my perfect friend date.
David: 8:05
Okay so it turns out you could get more cliche, because then you added thrift stores. No but I definitely get what you're saying, and I have a very similar experience because one of the things that I really really miss about pre COVID times is playing team sports. Typically, I play three four sometimes five days a week. These are activities that of course revolve around space, like a court, but they are woven into a larger structure of interaction where, for example on Saturdays, my typical schedule is I play volleyball for about three hours, then I do gay brunch with my gay volleyball team, then after brunch we will go to the park, do some day drinking. We will gossip and chit chat and we will socialize with other people who are also at the park or at the bars then follow the spirit of the day wherever it might take you it might become a day or it could be that you then decide to go play more volleyball or you decide to go to a movie. Either way, it's that back and forth between spaces that have definite activities associated with them that is the kind activity with friends that I really cherish.
Ellie: 9:27
I also want to just point out that your ideal day with friends was exactly the same as mine except instead of thrift stores, it's volleyball, instead of brunch, it's gay brunch. I have a lot of friends that I only see like- you're one of them, David. We only see maybe once a year at say a professional conference or while traveling, and I really miss those relationships too because I have a lot of what I would consider to be very close friendships where I only see the person once a year and we'll maybe catch up on the phone like once or twice besides that, but it's really in those moments of connection, where we come back together, that those friendships really gain their sustenance. And that has been totally impossible during COVID.
David: 10:12
I think that's exactly right that contact equals strengthening the friendships.
Ellie: 10:18
And I want to also note that even when I have had contact with friends in person during COVID, I think it's a common experience for a lot of folks that there is this sort of undertone of uncertainty and even of moral judgment around different expectations of social distancing that's been really challenging during the pandemic, right. Like when I show up to a place and you know there are different expectations among different people about what's safe for them, I think it's been really tough and really shitty, honestly.
David: 10:47
Well because it means that we suddenly have to negotiate friendships in new ways and maybe we discover things about how the other person relates to things like risk that maybe we don't agree with. This has been a common theme, not just for a lot of people, but even in my circle of friends and acquaintances, all these eruptions of interpersonal conflict that have to do friends not seeing eye to eye about COVID and that suddenly putting the friendship in question in a way that it never would have been in the first place had it not been for the pandemic.
Ellie: 11:24
Yeah it's almost like in the same way that we judge people when they are anti maskers and we feel like we've discovered something essential about their moral character, we think we've discovered something about our friend's moral character when we realize that they're nosers, people who wear their masks under their nose, or like you know maybe they wear a mask more than we think they need to, it's like, "Why are you still wearing your mask?" And it's so hard here because I think it's been really challenging for people to not jump to moral judgment there. I've sometimes felt that, whether it's a projection or not, but I actually don't think that in most cases we're discovering something essential about our friend's moral character by figuring out how they deal with COVID. I actually think it's like sort of more arbitrary and random and people just have different personalities and different levels of comfort and being okay with that is the most important thing.
David: 12:17
Yeah but it's very difficult to get to the point of being okay with that, especially if that difference in people's assessment of risk or what is acceptable gets in the way of the friendship itself, right. So if you want to see your friend and they're nosers or they just refuse to do things that another person demands or demand too many things that other people think are unreasonable, it does get in the way of the friendship but I hear your point that maybe we make a mistake when we interpret that in moral terms, as if suddenly discovered a moral vice at the heart of this person's character.
Ellie: 12:57
And I think it's hard too because it's like suddenly so much of what gets to be implicit about friendship, which is like levels of distance from each other, and know we don't usually have to think about that, um, like think about personal space, all of a sudden has to become really explicit and it requires difficult conversations that we don't always have the energy to have. Pair of experiences that made me think about this a lot, where I have one friend who, um, is a little bit more lax about social distancing than I am and my friend was like, "Hey I totally respect that, no worries," and she ended up having an outdoor birthday party and invited me and went out of her way to create like a little separate table for me feet apart from the rest of the folks.
David: 13:39
You sit in the children's table that includes only you.
Ellie: 13:43
I felt really appreciative that she didn't make assumptions about what I was going to be comfortable with but just checked in with me about it. And then on the other hand I had some experiences where I think I wasn't invited to something because friends thought that I wouldn't be comfortable with it, um, but then I was sort of sad that I wasn't invited and it was a case where it's like I actually think those friends were probably just trying to respect my boundaries, but even it came out of a place of respect or just like a recognition of differences, it ended up feeling crappy, outside of anybody's intentions.
David: 14:15
I mean that even when you try to tiptoe around these disagreements, you end up accidentally harming those around you and things that seem relatively minor then take on this air of magnitude. So I've had couple of friends that fall into this category who didn't see eye to eye and at some point, I had to step in and play the role of a therapist, and we sort of had to come to this conclusion that actually you two just need distance from one another because I don't see exactly how you can interact given what both of you are telling the other you need order to do so, kind of like a formal putting the friendship on hold.
Ellie: 15:03
I think that's been precisely my response for better or for worse, to treat some friendships as on hold during the pandemic and my rationale there is that trying to negotiate people's boundaries is really stressful. And so just kind of like taking that out of the equation and hoping that once things blow over, the friendships will remain in place has been a coping mechanism for me. I don't know like maybe- maybe that's like being a shitty friend, um, cause I have felt sort of torn up about that at times.
David: 15:29
Yeah but I mean sometimes it also might be the case that the friendships don't recover. That's a possibility that is there whenever you put something on hold, and learning to process that loss is really difficult. We don't even have the vocabulary for thinking through it.
Ellie: 15:49
No I think this idea that some friendships are really on thin ice due to COVID and the fact that it might actually make them crumble all together to me is really really sad. And you know when I think about the friendships that have been most resilient during COVID, it's been my friendships where it's like I have a one-on-one relationship with a friend. I feel like it's been harder with friend groups, especially the bigger the group grows, right, because then you get more factors into the mix and it becomes harder and harder to negotiate especially if it seems like the group is kind of skewing in a particular direction regarding safety measures et cetera, and you feel yourself at sort of one end of that. I think it's been helpful for me to think about this in terms of the ecology of friendships, because it doesn't have to do in my view with profoundly moral issues and it doesn't have to do with intentions, it just has to do with kind of like the vibes, right. Like there can be a perfectly sustainable ecology of a given friend group in regular times and suddenly that ecosystem gets disrupted during COVID, and I felt myself on the margins of some friend groups with this new configuration.
David: 16:54
Yeah I haven't felt that because I'm always at the center of every social group that I belong to, um, but I mean I-
Ellie: 17:03
Friendless.
David: 17:04
Yeah exactly I am a friend group one and I am both the center and the margin, ,um basically my own best frenemy. Um but I think when we think about the ecology of friendships, and I really love that phrase, that tipping the balance toward one end or the other can happen for a number of reasons, right. Sometimes it can just be the law of large numbers, it can also be other factors like cultural backgrounds, because I do think culture has played a determining role in a lot of these dynamics, especially when people from different cultural backgrounds don't have the same assessment of risk and danger. And there is an element of incommensurability or untranslatability in those two elements. So you might relate to risk in a particular way but because it's the cultural element in which you've grown up, you don't even recognize it as such and you don't know how to make that legible to somebody from another culture.
Ellie: 18:08
Yeah I think the friends that I have had the easiest relationships with during COVID have a similar view of risk assessment and risk avoidance. We're like, "Hey, the science suggests that if we're six feet apart at all times then we're fine," and so that's very easy but I have other friends that they're like, "Hey, germs circulate and it's nobody's fault If somebody gets sick, it's just like it's in the air," and so there's a different sense. It doesn't mean that you're not responsible to your friends, it just means that you are not personally responsible for giving somebody else COVID which I think has been kind of foreign from my mindset.
David: 18:43
No I think that's exactly right. And so the interpersonal conflict that I described earlier of two friends who came to the conclusion that they just need to move in different directions for the time being also mapped onto a racial difference. I didn't think about the significance of that difference until later because one of my friends is a Mexican American. He had what I would describe as a more lackadaisical attitude about risk. He could live much more comfortably with honestly with the possibility of danger and death and sometimes he would make comments that would really upset other people in our social circle, which is you know death is not something that you can control. If it's going to come for you, it's going to come for you. And you can see why this is a very difficult terrain to navigate because of course you don't want to force anybody else to enter your level of risk proneness, um, but it is true that some cultures relate to danger and to risk and to vulnerability very differently. And so I started thinking about the privilege that goes into assuming that it is possible for one to manage risk entirely or to eliminate it altogether. And it reminds me of the work of the Mexican poet and philosopher Octavio Paz who wrote a book about the Mexican existential condition, in which he says because of the cultural history of Mexico, Mexicans have different understanding of death and of solitude than Americans, and that relationship to death and to solitude is illegible to those north of the border.
Ellie: 20:36
And what is that relationship to death and solitude, not to ask you to condense all of the book.
David: 20:41
Yeah I mean his point is that we celebrate it in a way that maybe Americans will never understand. We dance with death. And he does have very close reading, for example, of Dia de Los Muertos, uh, which is a time in November where we see the life-death boundary as playful and as malleable, not as an absolute division, you know ,between two realms that never touch. So this proximity to death is something that maybe Mexicans are more comfortable with culturally and maybe he's right about that, maybe he's not, but that sense that some people have to learn to live with a kind of vulnerability that others maybe haven't had to experience because of privilege then started making me think about these dynamics in a different way.
Ellie: 21:33
Yeah that's a really interesting point and I'm also thinking about one of the phrases that you use there which is comfortable with, comfortable with death, right, because I think comfort is what a lot of this comes down to. We're used to having our friends be a source of comfort for us but I think one of the things that's happened during COVID is that friendships have become a source of discomfort, precisely because of having to negotiate levels and boundaries of social distancing.
David: 22:01
Yeah and so it just seems like the takeaway here is that friendship is really damn hard under of a global pandemic because suddenly, it becomes a terrain for negotiating things that, typically, we don't have to negotiate and, as I said before, for which we don't even have right concepts
Ellie: 22:22
Yeah I think philosophers really under theorized friendship and having a stronger sense of like what the norms are around friendship could be super helpful here. I want to also think briefly about how COVID in some ways has strengthened friendships, right. So what friendships have thrived under COVID, and I think there's a weird sense where COVID has brought together friends who like to complain about other's COVID behaviors, right. And so it's like I'm on a socially distant hike with a friend and then we see like what appears to be a COVID super spreader event or somebody wearing their mask under their nose, we're kind of like check that out which is like probably bringing out the worst of humanity, you know, bonding over judging other people.
David: 23:09
Tribalism in the most vulgar way.
Ellie: 23:12
That's why I'm talking here about like the culture ecology of friendships rather than the morals of it, because I think that's what it is.
David: 23:18
Yeah and when we hear tribalism, our instinct is to run away from that because it sounds archaic but maybe a positive side of that tribalism is the pods, the fact that many of us have had to be very intentional and conscientious about curating our most intimate social circle and really think about the kind of communal life that we would want to have with the people who enter that circle. Who is in your pod and what does your pod life look like?
Ellie: 23:48
Yeah. And getting closer through different activities within a pod I think can be really special.
David: 24:11
Well, Ellie, we are both in our thirties, which Lydia Denworth has called the decade where friendship goes to die. In their thirties, people typically start to see friends a lot less than before as they become more preoccupied with significant others, partners, marriage, career, children, you name it. So, in a sense, our age group is primed for the narrowing of social circles that has been already taking place under COVID. Maybe some of that narrowing would have happened to us either way independently of the pandemic. What do you think about that?
Ellie: 24:45
Uh, that is so sad to me. It's like, "Oh, well, we were doomed to lose friends during this decade anyway, it just happened to coincide with COVID when we lost friends." But I'm thinking here about a study that psychologist Beverley Fehr did where she studied 300 individuals of different age groups and found that teenagers spend 30% of their time with friends, whereas 40 to 65 year olds only spend 4% of their time with friends and those were retired spend 8%. And, you know, following this, I've been worrying a lot about teenagers and young adults during COVID. So our students are college students, right, and this is their time to build lifelong friendships. So I'm wondering how they're fairing during this time. How are they getting by when usually they would spend 30 percent of their time with friends.
David: 25:34
Yeah, this has been on my mind too, especially as my younger brother is preparing to go off to college. And so I think getting a sense of how people in this demographic have experienced friendship is super important. Lucky for us, we have just the right person to ask, our very own production assistant and social media coordinator, Anna Koppelman.
Ellie: 25:56
Anna is currently an undergrad at Pitzer College and has been a student in many of my classes, including a class on love and friendship, where Anna was especially interested in the friendship unit. Welcome.
Anna : 26:08
Yay. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. Now in our class, everyone was wanting to talk about romantic love and I kept feeling like I actually think we need to really define friendship. So yeah. Yeah.
David: 26:23
I'm just going to go directly for the juicy drama. What sorts of challenges has COVID introduced into your college friendships, and more importantly, how have you and your friends navigated those tensions? I'm really interested.
Anna : 26:38
You know, as Ellie was talking about earlier with that study, before COVID happened, I would spend time with my friends literally all day. Like I would wake up and immediately have a meal with someone for breakfast, and then I'd walk to class with someone, and then I'd have class with someone. And like my entire day was spent with other people. And then suddenly we all went from living our lives actively together to being separated across the country and the conversations we were able to have with each other was really just catching each other up on our lives instead of actively experiencing them together, which I think definitely changes the dynamic of our friendship. And also I think for a lot of people, this year has been incredibly traumatic or just has changed them in certain ways that aren't necessarily things they want to talk about on a phone call or that they can put into words.
Ellie: 27:26
I really like that attention you just drew to the difference between living your life together and catching somebody up on your life because that strikes me as so relevant. I hadn't thought about it in those terms before. It's like you're going on and having your own day-to-day existence, usually with very few other people, right? Like there's- there's not that much to catch people up on, and yet, what else can you do when you aren't sharing much with them on an everyday basis?
Anna : 27:51
Yeah, definitely. Also gossip has completely disappeared. Like you used to have so much drama to talk about, and now it's like, Oh, did you see that TV show, exclusively. Like, there's nothing. salacious anymore.
David: 28:04
So even the catching up hits a flat node where you're just staring at each other on this screen. And just hoping that that suffices to fill this gap that has been created. Um, but like, so now there is no drama in your social circle?
Anna : 28:21
No. I mean, I think what you're talking about, I've definitely experienced where, like, any drama or gossip is incredibly sad right now. Like there's nothing that's like, Did you hear this person hooked up with this person? You know, so it's really just like you run out of things pretty quickly. And you're left with this feeling of loving the person, but not quite knowing them in the same way.
David: 28:43
Or not building new things, right.
Anna : 28:45
Yeah, exactly.
Ellie: 28:47
And I mean, I'm thinking about one of the most iconic aspects of my college experience, which was Sunday brunch at the cafeteria. And yeah, we would talk about what had happened the night before, when we'd been going out.
Anna : 29:01
Yes.
David: 29:02
For me, one of the things that really stands out about my college experience was the spontaneity of social relations. You didn't have to do all that planning and organizing that maybe now all of us have to do, because we can't, you know, we can't bar hop. We can't just like go to stranger's house on a whim, um, so that spontaneity seems like maybe it's withering away and that makes me a little sad, honestly.
Anna : 29:27
Yeah. Like you can't rebel against anything when you're stuck inside your house.
David: 29:32
Yeah, you just have to reinterpret what you're rebelling against. You're rebelling against the demand to be social.
Anna : 29:38
Yeah, exactly.
Ellie: 29:39
You mentioned, you know, the difference between being part of someone's life and catching up with someone. What other aspects have come to mind for you in thinking about the fact that you're no longer with people every day? What strains has that put on your friendship?
Anna : 29:55
You know, Ellie, um, in your philosophy of love and friendship class, we talked about Aristotle's emphasis on Athens as a necessity for friendship, of being in the same place with people in order for friendships to happen. And I feel like for a lot of college students, the friendships we had were no longer able to exist because we were no longer in the same physical space, sharing our lives together, and putting the same type of effort into our friendship. So like I've been saying there was no longer that shared experience, but instead separate lives that we were trying to merge together.
Ellie: 30:29
Yeah. It's like, I remember early in the pandemic when, um, people were trying to replace the term social distance with physical distance and they're like, no, it's physical distance, we still can connect socially. And I sort of was like, yeah, but also kind of not, like there is some real purpose to the phrase social distance. I think you're hinting at exactly that, Anna, this absence of proximity really does affect your friendships.
Anna : 30:53
Yeah, definitely. I think we put a big emphasis on romantic relationships. Like if you were in a long distance romantic relationship, there'd be many conversations about how to keep that going, how to make sure that you had time with each other, you'd be actively filling each other in on your life, whereas in a friendship, that expectation of value isn't necessarily there. So you're not communicating like you would with a partner, which means you're not saying feelings get hurt in the same way you would have in person. You're not saying I need more time in connection with you because like, you know, what are the activities you can do online? It sounds weird and like kind of desperate to that that.
David: 31:31
It also seems just impractical, right, because people have a lot more friends than they do partners, significant others, in a romantic sense. And as somebody who is in a long distance relationship, I can say that it takes a lot of planning and it takes a big commitment to, for example, watch a movie with somebody once or twice a week, um, especially given time differences, complicated schedules. I just wouldn't be able to do that even for a small fraction of my friends, right. Like I- I- and I feel bad saying that, but it's true that I wouldn't do it and I wouldn't want to do it.
Anna : 32:06
Yeah. And I think that is part of why a lot of friendships have begun to die or have simmered down during COVID because there isn't that need for them in the same way. And a lot of friendships are just friendships of convenience, but there's not that need to put that much dedication in.
David: 32:23
Yeah. And your reference to Athens and to Aristotle makes me think that college, at least in the United States, is one of those few spaces where we do replicate that Athenian model of the polis where you have a space that is walkable, that is ready for community, where people do communal activities. And once we move beyond college, it's really difficult to have the right kind of environment for the flourishing of multiple strong friendships.
Anna : 32:52
Yeah, definitely.
Ellie: 32:54
What's it been like to go from not seeing any of your college friends for almost a year to suddenly living with them in a pod?
Anna : 33:02
Um, that's a really good question. You know, I've been thinking about this a lot since we did a reading from Heidegger in actually Ellie's last class, and I think I've definitely felt the feeling of unhomeliness or uncanniness seeing my friends again for the first time where, as David you were kind of saying earlier, you have all the feelings of, like, I know this person, I love this person, but there's something strange or there's a distance here. But at the same time, I think that distance can be exciting because it shows that there once was a very strong feeling of friendship and there's all these memories that like prove that it can happen again.
Ellie: 33:39
So is the idea, Anna, that when you were back in proximity to your friends, you felt sort of not immediately at home with them because you started to realize like all of the things that you'd been missing by not being with them.
Anna : 33:53
Yeah, exactly.
Ellie: 33:55
And have you found yourself now kind of falling back into the homeliness with them or are you still feeling-
Anna : 34:02
I mean, I don't want to get in trouble for this podcast. No, I'm joking.
David: 34:06
It's like the podcast actually brought about the death of all of Anna's friends.
Ellie: 34:10
If you're one of Anna's roommates, stop listening now and resume in five minutes.
David: 34:15
Hm.
Anna : 34:16
Um, yes. I think that as time goes on, you get back into the routine with people and like you become part of the new memories. But I think there is that feeling that like an entire year has happened. And I think as we returned back into more social engagement, like that feeling will appear for a lot of people.
David: 34:36
I'm curious about the positive side. Is there a silver lining to COVID here in connection to friendship? Are there ways in which COVID has also changed your experience of friendship for the better?
Anna : 34:50
I don't know if this is a universal experience, but for me, yeah. When school ended last year, we went online. I suddenly realized like all the times that I didn't see my friends so that I could like work on an essay or I could stress out about an essay and not actually work on it at all like-
Ellie: 35:09
Just scrolling mindlessly.
Anna : 35:11
Yeah, exactly. You know, so I think that as I've gotten and to see my friends again, or even when I wasn't with them, I had this sense of like the next time we're allowed to do these things, I'm going to fully be in the present moment with them and I'm not going to be, you know, half talking to them, half with my phone because we've all learned like how valuable friendship is and how hard it is like for that not to be something around you all the time. So like this weekend, my friends wanted to do something. And at first I was like, Oh, I'm just going to sit home and then I was like, you would have been mad at yourself a month ago if you didn't say yes to doing this. So I think that's the positive side, is it has at least given me a sense of like gratitude and urgency.
David: 35:50
Yeah, we become more intentional about the time that we do get with friends, as opposed to taking it for granted, maybe.
Ellie: 35:57
It also strikes me, you know, what you said, Anna, that you were thinking to yourself, myself a month ago would have wanted this for myself. And one of the things that Aristotle says in his theory of friendship is that in order to be friends with other people, we also have to be friends to ourselves. And it sounds like in that moment, you were being a friend to yourself, your current self was honoring a commitment you'd made a month ago or a desire rather that you'd had a month ago. Has it changed at all your relationship to yourself as a friend to not be in proximity to your friends?
Anna : 36:28
No, I think that's a really interesting question. And I think that I had to spend so much time like alone with myself that I had to become friends with myself. I've always spent time alone cause I'm like, I like to think about things and just like wallow a little bit. But I think during COVID, the friend that I had the most was myself. So I think it took a lot of like introspection and like being alone definitely makes me more aware of how much of like a- I hate this word, but like a blessing it is to have people around.
Ellie: 37:02
Well on that note, Anna is #blessed, but will more blessed once she was able to be back on her college campus with all her friends.
Anna : 37:12
I know. I need like a live, laugh, love sign now or something.
Ellie: 37:18
Well, Anna, thank you so much for joining us today. You've given us so much food for thought.
Anna : 37:22
Thank you for having me.
David: 37:23
Have a great day Anna, bye.
Ellie: 37:25
Say hi to your friends.
David: 37:35
Enjoying Overthink? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Ellie: 37:50
It was so great to have Anna join us and provide the gen Z college student perspective, um, of which there is obviously not only one but we have one student who we could easily ask.
David: 38:01
Yeah. We're like, talk to us about the view of the youths.
Ellie: 38:07
You mentioned Aristotle who is definitely the most famous philosopher of friendship. And now I'm thinking about the three types of friendship that Aristotle identifies in relation to COVID friendships. So basically Aristotle has this idea that we have three different kinds of friendships. There are friendships of utility, which are basically like friends who can do something for you and you can do something for them. Friendships of pleasure, where the main thing binding the friendship together is your enjoyment of the other person and third, friendships of character, which are sometimes known as complete or perfect friendships. And these friendships bind people together on the level of their very selves. And when you have a friendship of character, you love the person as a friend, for their own sake, in and for themselves, rather than for the pleasure or the utility that they grant you. And now I'm wondering whether COVID has revealed the lines that are drawn between these three types of friendship because part of Aristotle's claim too is that friendships of utility are the most easily dissolved. Friendships of pleasure are the second most easily dissolved, and friendships of character are practically impossible to dissolve. So they would presumably be the ones that are hardest to break up due to social distancing.
David: 39:28
Well what I really want to know is whether I am a friendship of character, pleasure, or utility for you, Ellie. That's the burning question.
Ellie: 39:37
I mean answering that would require that I even consider you a friend.
David: 39:42
Thank you all for being today.
Ellie: 39:45
Now the end of Overthink. Final episode.
David: 39:48
But you know anytime you have a taxonomy like Aristotle's taxonomy of friendship, it's going to be somewhat arbitrary, and um one of the things that I do like about this trifecta of friendship is that it differentiates between friendships of character which are rooted in virtue, really, for Aristotle. You can not have a friendship of character if the two people in that friendship relationship haven't cultivated their virtue, right. So like two shitty people can't really have friendship of character and uh-
Ellie: 40:21
Only good people can have them.
David: 40:22
Yeah and they- and he says they're very rare. And so, I like the idea of friendships of character but sometimes I feel like it's a hyper romanticized concept. I like the idea of thinking of friendships as relations that move back and forth at different times between the value of character, the value of pleasure, the value of utility, um, maybe sometimes falling a little bit more toward one or the other but never being only about one.
Ellie: 40:53
Well and I have to see that for Aristotle friendships of character also are useful and pleasurable. So he says that the two other categories go into friendships of character, it's just that friendships of character transcend them because what you want in a friendship of character is you want what is best for your friend, for their own sake, rather than what you can get out of them, but these friendships do have these side benefits of pleasure and usefulness.
David: 41:18
And maybe what I dislike sometimes about Aristotle's writings on friendship is the cognitive dimension of it, that for him, these kind of complete friendships are perfect friendships are friendships rooted in a kind of knowledge, in knowing your friend in the same way that they know you. And I kind of like Kant's description of friendship a little bit better. In the Metaphysical Principles of Virtue Kant says what friendship really is about- it's not about knowing one another in an equal way, it's really about disclosing yourself to another person, revealing yourself to another even knowing that there is a risk that they might basically screw you over, right, because it's a it's a dangerous thing. And so I like to think of friendships in terms of this sometimes one-sided vulnerability, uh, that doesn't have to be fully equal.
Ellie: 42:14
One other thing that Anna pointed out here in terms of that reciprocity is that friends for Aristotle need to live together. He actually says that friends who don't live together have goodwill rather than friendship, and I think that's to some extent what's happened to me with a lot of my friendships during COVID is that they've moved from being friendships to being mutual feelings of goodwill, because a relationship is not being actively sustained due to the absence of proximity. But like I still really care about that person and I hope that we can resume the friendship in the future.
David: 42:48
Yeah and I think in disregard the Greeks are so much more advanced than we are in their thinking about friendship because there was this whole debate during the Classical and Hellenistic periods about what kind of community leads to friendship the most. If you were able to construct a community from scratch, how would you build it? And so for example are you going to build it at the level of the polis, kind of like a small city state? Are you going to follow the Epicureans who are like no that's too big, you can't be friends with all the citizens, you need- like you need a commune, you need a little garden just with- yes. You need a pod, uh hashtag Epicurious as the first pod philosopher.
Ellie: 43:28
Way too long.
David: 43:29
Yeah I like that that question is posed. The fact that friendship doesn't just grow anywhere, it needs the right kind of soil, the right kind of social and spatial scaffolding.
Ellie: 43:45
Exactly. In thinking about Aristotle, I'm also reflecting on the gender disparities between friendships and friendships during COVID, because there's some research that men gravitate towards friendships that can do something for them, or what Aristotle calls friendships of utility, whereas women go to friendships for emotional support. That's something that Lydia Denworth talks about in the book Friendship and I think this resonates a lot with anecdotes about how men have been worse than women have been about keeping up with friends during COVID, because a lot of times these men, you know, are no longer able to like have any use for their friendship, to put it in a very unfair way.
David: 44:26
Well I just read an article in the Washington Post about this, about COVID friendship and gender. And the argument essentially is that men's friendships revolve around shared activities. So it's almost like a triangulation between friend, another friend, and then a third object that their attention is converging on, rather than just focusing on one another. So think about those activities that typically men do with their friends, like watching a sports game or playing sports together. I mean I I feel personally attacked right now because we did talk about how much I like- um, how much my friendships turn on sports.
Ellie: 45:04
Well like going to the club together, right.
David: 45:07
Still-
Ellie: 45:07
Playing-
David: 45:08
Okay that one doesn't really apply me. So let's go with video games.
Ellie: 45:12
Yeah I read that article too and I found this phrase really interesting, which is that men tend to have shoulder to shoulder interactions whereas women tend to have face to face interactions with their friendships. And of course this is not to say that all friendships are between men and men and between women and women, but that was the dominant focus of the article. The face to face interactions that I have with a lot of my girlfriends include high levels of what psychologists called self-disclosure, right. We're talking about our feelings, we're talking about our experiences, we're sharing intimate conversations and that has been surprisingly pretty easy to transfer over into a socially distant setting. I can still do that in a park, I can still do that on a masked hike, but the shoulder to shoulder interactions, there are precious few of those that men can still do while being socially distant
David: 46:02
I think of the problem and it may be not just part of the problem but the root of the problem is the nature of male bonding in patriarchy is a purely externalist model of bonding in which men were not taught to bond with one another, we are taught to bond over something else. And I think this is why men- we are emotionally stunted because from childhood, we are denied the kind of training in intimacy formation that is essential for a healthy emotional inner life. Admittedly, the article did say that under COVID now, some men are sort of switching gears and they are beginning to bond by having more heart to hearts which previously they didn't have.
Ellie: 46:55
Because it's like what else are you going to do in a park six feet apart?
David: 47:00
Yeah that's exactly right. So you just have to talk and so as hard as it has been, I think for some men, this experience might be for the best because it has forced their hand move from shoulder to shoulder relations to a face to face relation.
Ellie: 47:18
Not to put a damper on that but I do think that one thing I've noticed a lot with my friends who are in opposite gender partnerships is that, already before COVID, it's pretty well-documented that women in relationships with men tend to be the sort of social coordinator for both themselves and for the man, it's like they're those social coordinator for the couple. And I've seen that even more during COVID. It's like a lot of men in relationships with women are just now relying on their women partners to plan all of their social interactions to the extent that a lot of them have seen their partners' friends more than they've seen their own friends because men are often not actually taking the initiative to hang out with each other.
David: 48:01
Yes I can definitely see that and it is not just patriarchy, it is also heteronormativity because of the panic over male-male bonding and the idea that that's just not what men do. They don't call each other to schedule a Zoom date, and so it on the shoulders of women to make sure that their, now using the plural, that their social life doesn't just entirely wither away.
Ellie: 48:29
I wonder whether a lot of men would worry that reaching out to a friend to schedule a phone call or a Zoom date would maybe seem desperate, to use a term that Anna brought up.
David: 48:39
And it seems too intimate. I mean as somebody who identifies as a man and who has definitely been socialized as such, I cannot stress the point enough that working through that aversion to intimacy is really difficult because of how deeply ingrained it is in the male soul. We are taught from a very young age that you don't show emotions, you don't demand emotional support, you don't show emotional weakness. And that's what we're all these kind of like rigid broken people, um, that can't pick up the phone and say Hey, I want to chat because I need a friend. For some reason, that just seems sometimes unthinkable.
Ellie: 49:21
In addition to transforming many close friendships, COVID has impacted our ability to make new friends. I have made zero new friends since the pandemic started.
David: 49:31
I'm on that boat. I think I've made negative friends. Like I've gone into the red. But I mean it's because it's really difficult without having the time and the space.
Ellie: 49:47
Yeah. There's this study by the social psychologist Jeffrey A. Hall who basically analyzed people who move to a new city. And the studies suggested that it takes us on average 40 to 60 hours to move from being an acquaintance to a casual friendship. I have not had 40 to 60 hours with an acquaintance in the past year. And then beyond the 40 to 60 hours that it takes to move from an acquaintance to a casual friendship, it takes 80 to 100 hours total to call someone a friend and over 200 hours for someone to be a best friend.
David: 50:22
Yeah I mean you could do that in like three weeks if you just like meet a random new person and you're like we're going to pod together just arbitrarily because I need a new friend. So you're moving in.
Ellie: 50:32
My God. Now that I'm fully vaccinated I just need to find like a vaccinated acquaintance and we'll spend 200 hours together and become best friends.
David: 50:40
It's like the shotgun wedding version of friendship. But one of the things that has happened as a result of COVID 19 is that we're losing what psychologists call weak ties. Weak ties are social relations that are there in your life regularly enough that you'd take them for granted but you still benefit from them and yet you don't consider them fundamental to your own wellbeing. So think about like the barista that gives you your coffee every morning. You see them every day on your way to work and you have a kind of relationship with them, or think about the other regulars at your favorite bar or a good chunk of your coworkers. They're there but they just hang there in the social vicinity. But during COVID, these ties have been undone, so a whole segment, a whole chunk of our social life, has completely fallen away and we're only now coming to terms with just how important those weak ties really are.
Ellie: 51:43
In part because those weak ties not only buoy us up and enhance our wellbeing on a day-to-day basis, but they're also often, at least in my experience, the pool from which I draw new friends, right. It's like Oh I meet a friend of a friend, I'm like Oh my God you're so cool I really want to become friends with you. That's a weak tie that then can advance into a strong tie. But it's not these relationships that we've focused on as major losses during the pandemic but they also really add meaning to our life too.
David: 52:13
And we have to think about this relationally, that it is because we have weak ties that we can make sense of what a strong tie looks like. It's by comparison to those things and especially in a world in which it's already difficult to maintain those strong ties that already existed, as those strong ties weakened, and as all weak ties are sort of foreclosed by confinement and by the nature of the world under COVID, it's almost as if we don't even know where we stand with our friends anymore. And that not knowing of is our friendship on good terms or not can be its own source of trauma, especially because you can't say it because if you say it, it seems as if that may cause harm to the friendship if no harm had been done, right. Like nobody wants a friend who's like, Are we friends? Like it's just awful.
Ellie: 53:12
Oh I can totally relate to that. I don't want to ask friends uncomfortable questions and so I'm like do I just ignore the fact that we've gotten less close and that there's been some tension or do I address it? I don't want to create drama or make friends feel like I'm a burden by addressing. Don't want to put them in an uncomfortable position, but it's also kind of weird to ignore it.
David: 53:32
Well and it has to do with the fact that different people process things in very different ways so I know some people find that kind of confrontation or that demand for clarification traumatic in itself because they feel called out or they feel attacked or they just prefer to rely on non-linguistic cues. I for oneI am an over-processing subject, I need to process things as they are happening and I like to make them explicit and to put them in the domain of languageand it's through that making explicit that I come to feel better about the thing in question, but not everybody with things in that way. You're right sometimes you're like how do I tell somebody that I feel like we're not as good friends as we once were and that I mourn that friendship.
Ellie: 54:23
Yeah and I think it doesn't just have to do with personality differences, although that's definitely part of it, but also about the specificities of a given friendship. Is that the kind of friendship where you process things or not, because you know I mentioned earlier that the friendships that have been most successful for me during COVID are friendships that involve a lot of one-on-one heart to hearts. Those are the kinds of friendships where it's really easy to address potential tensions, but friendships that usually revolve more around the shoulder to shoulder activities that we mentioned or group friendships can make it much harder to address potential issues.
David: 55:01
Yeah and on top of that there is a structural component here having to do with the cultural scripts that are or are not available to us. So, for example, we all sort of know what it would take for somebody to be quote unquote justified in ending a romantic relationship. And we know sort of how breakups go. We see them in the movies, we're taught about them by our parents. What's the script for ending a friendship or for broaching the subject a friendship imploding? How do you talk about that with somebody without it seeming as if you're actually trying to accelerate the death of the friendship? As if you're causing it or want it to end?
Ellie: 55:46
Yeah. That can be very challenging, yeah, to have that conversation without it causing the-
David: 55:52
Like a self fulfilling prophecy.
Ellie: 55:54
Yeah. I'm not sure I've had a successful conversation of that type to be honest.
David: 56:00
Me either. I don't trust that I know how to have it in a way that avoids that self fulfilling prophecy.
Ellie: 56:10
I agree is why my M.O. now is just to be like, I'm fully vaccinated, I'm back, friends out of hibernation let's do that. I actually do have a brunch with girlfriends scheduled coming up.
David: 56:25
My God. Well I hope after that you go to a thrift store and you go to the park, meanwhile I am still in confinement or semi confinement in Paris and I am not yet vaccinated because I don't yet qualify for vaccination in Europe.
Ellie: 56:40
Oh no. You got to get on those shots soon. Well in the meantime I will be here as your virtual friend. So will our listeners.
David: 56:50
On that note, bye. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Ellie: 57:03
You can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com, as well as connecting with us on Facebook through our page or group.
David: 57:12
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.
Ellie: 57:25
Thanks so much for joining us today.