Social Relationships and the Pandemic

This is an interesting NYT opinion piece. I checked out some of the "social science" data quoted. Feel free to disagree with it. I didn't find anything connected to a large body of data that could qualify as a lawful relationship that many social scientists might agreed upon. But the ideas and data are interesting as discussion points about our experience of relationships and  how the pandemic might have affected them. I have eliminated the author's speculation about what the future might or ought to be. 

The Pandemic Shrank Our Social Circles. Let’s Keep It That Way.

 The past year has forced a mass meditation on the nature and strength of our social ties. While our culture has encouraged us to accumulate friends, both on- and offline, like points, the pandemic has laid bare the distinction between quantity and quality of connections. There are those we’ve longed to see and those it’s been a relief not to see. The full reckoning will become apparent only when we can once again safely gather and invitations are — or are not — extended. Our social lives and social selves may never be the same.

My family ties have not changed much with the pandemic. They were all long distance phone calls before the pandemic and remain so with about the same frequency. They have become less frequent phone calls and  phone calls rather than visits as the closeness of the blood relationships have declined over the past two decades with the death of the older people in the family. 

Non family ties have declined during the pandemic as I have seen less of neighbors, church groups, etc. I have not missed talking to them, or going to their meetings.  

Research by Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist, shows that human beings have the cognitive capacity to accommodate only four to six close friends. These are the people in the top tier of your social network, for whom you have the greatest affinity and affection and who require daily or weekly interactions to maintain. Included in that group is typically your romantic partner and maybe a couple of family members.

Well maybe the key to interpreting Dunbar's point is cognitive capacity, to be distinguished from emotional  and situational capacities. For example through my entire life my parents were my two closest relationships. But there were many years and decades when I saw them or talked to them only a few times a  year, so that in those times they did not take up much cognitive capacity.  

Through my entire life there has been a whole network of family relationship, again people whom I saw only once or twice a  year or less. However once my parents died I kept up a phone relationship and personal visits relationship to two of my aunts, i.e. they replace my parents as my cognitive processing link to my family network, to keep up with what was happening.   

To be sure, there is a lot of churn in human social networks even in the best of times. Several studies show we replace as much as half of our social network every five to seven years. Little wonder when research also shows only half of our friendships are mutual. That is, only half of those who we think are our friends feel the same way about us. It just normally takes us a while to figure that out.

Certainly about half of my social network has changed over the years as I changed jobs, locations and involvement in various organizations such as parishes, Voice of the Faithful, Commonweal Local Community, etc.  

For example I was very involved as a voluntary pastoral staff member for a parish in Toledo for about four  years in the 1980s. Those relationships were very important for me then; I was also very important to the other staff members at that time, but it took me several years after I left the parish to live elsewhere to discover my importance to them. 

A lot of situational relationships — friends we’ve made through work or our kids’ schools and sports teams — have fallen by the wayside. And maybe that’s OK. “Once you don’t have those external forces making your contacts frequent, then you start realizing, ‘You know what? We really didn’t have that much to talk about,’” said Mario Luis Small, a professor of sociology at Harvard University who studies social ties. “‘And come to think about it, we haven’t actually confided anything deeply personal outside of that particular context.’”

Situational friendships are very interesting and comprise a large part of our lives. In my professional life I have always have a few fellow professionals who were basically situational friends. We processed with each other not only what was going in our professional lives but also our family lives as that impacted our professional lives. These would quality as part of Dunbar's few close relationships. However they also ceased once I left those professional environments.  At the time we gave each other our e-mail addresses, but without the situational environment of our professional lives there really was not much reason for the relationships to continue. We had not plugged into each others family lives or our religious lives (although we did discuss religion). 

Church related friendships are also very similar. Again a few close friends with whom I processed the parish, or other organization but not much reasons for the relationships to continue once the parish or organization was not longer important in our lives. 

William Rawlins, a professor emeritus of interpersonal communication at Ohio University, has interviewed people from age 4 to 100 about friendship and discovered that people have similar expectations when it comes to their friends: We want those who are there for us, who listen without judgment and understand what we’re going through. They may not agree with us, but they get us.

The underlined sentences are something I would connect to Dunbar's cognitive theory. A lot of the people in those close cognitive relationships are able to process certain environments (family, work, church) with us, understanding both us and their environments even though we might not agree on many things.  I could see a lot of evolutionary advantage to being able to do that in both the short and long term.  

Perhaps cognitive capacity explains the importance and the durability of this blog, that we are a diverse group of people who cognitively process certain environments with one another.  It does not really matter than we are not in the same physical situations, nor have the same personal networks, nor agree on everything.  We matters is with listen to one another, and understand one another, and our environments even if we do not agree with each other on some things.