Unmoored from all but a few friends, I fear lockdown has atrophied my social muscles
“How has it been, all this time?” A casual acquaintance – the mother of a vague friend of my children – asked this question on the street, from behind a mask and at a safe social distance. We hadn’t seen each other for months, and my children had drifted from hers, as they had from all but a handful of friends. We regarded each other curiously, reminded in the moment of how strange this all was. “Fine,” I said reflexively. “It’s been fine.”
I have no idea if this is true. For those lucky enough to have avoided catastrophic health or economic losses, measuring the cost of the last year can be hard. How, in fact, are we doing? I have watched my kids adapt, with an almost seamless ability, to online learning and no indoor playdates. We have grown accustomed to barely leaving the neighbourhood and not seeing family for over a year; and, on the rare occasions when we have a babysitter, to wearing masks inside the house. Meanwhile, we are unmoored from all but a handful of close friends. If it is fine – and it is largely fine, or at least it is this week – I also wonder if some social muscle has atrophied and we have become weird. A year ago, it was weird having to stay in all the time. Now the idea of going out, going anywhere, seeing anyone or doing anything, fills us in the first instance with dread.
Other parents have noticed this: that their formerly bouncy kids, who loved karate, or swimming, or just going to the park, often have to be bribed these days to get up off the sofa. Adults are feeling it too. A friend recently suggested doing a video call with a few others that would start at 9.30pm, and I felt myself recoiling in horror. Why so late?! I wouldn’t have to shower, let alone change out of my sweatpants, and yet the imposition seemed monstrous. Who, these days, if they’re not up bingeing Netflix, isn’t in bed and asleep by 10pm?
If the virus is holding us hostage, many of us are suffering from a kind of Stockholm syndrome that comes from the good instinct to make the best of things. Over and over this year, it has been instructive to remind ourselves that we may, in our lifetime, never have a commensurate opportunity to spend so much time with our children. Haven’t many of us longed, for years, for a stretch of open diary, with no commitments, no plans, no obligations beyond the essentials? Finally, we’ve been given the chance to watch all six seasons of the Sopranos.
And we have found workarounds for some of the drawbacks. Like a lot of people, I put on so much weight in the first six months of lockdown that by last autumn, I was 15lbs (6.8kg) shy of what I weighed when eight months pregnant with twins. I felt alien to myself, sluggish and odd, and along with thousands of others, joined the Amazon waiting list for their 8lb dumbbells to come back in stock. I downloaded the Nike fitness app (never once opened). I live on a high floor, and at least once a week I forced myself to skip the elevator and take the stairs.
All of these measures were, I told myself, essential for staying healthy in a way I associated obscurely with not catching Covid. What’s curious to me at this point is that, while the impact of the virus on our physical fitness strikes most of us as a very bad thing, the equivalent withering of social health – a desire to see people with whom, prior to all this, we enjoyed the occasional drink – is, at least in my case, not treated with anything like the same seriousness. A much commented-on piece in the Atlantic last week mourned the loss of second-tier friends and acquaintances, a notion I heartily scoffed at. What was the point of all that, anyway? I’d rather lie on the sofa and watch back-to-back episodes of blockbuster vampire series, Van Helsing. (It’s really good).
I’m assuming it won’t last, this resentment and recoil, although who knows how profoundly our habits have changed? Occasionally, at the playground after school, I’ll chat to another parent – sitting masked and at the far end of the bench – and be dimly reminded of the pleasure of new people. It happened this week: a conversation with another mum about books we had both enjoyed, and what our options were for childcare this summer. This is fun, I thought: a person, with a personality, who I like and want to like me. And then almost immediately – how long before I can get out of it and go home?
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist