How to Make Friends During the Apocalypse
On why we need community and chosen family.
The world is falling apart and all I care about is making friends. This of course is an exaggeration, but it’s also not too far from the truth. Because after I divorced right before the pandemic, and then went through so many weeks alone with my child, I realized: I need closer friends. I need friends who I can text each day to share my ups and downs. I need friends who check in on me often when they know I’m down, and who welcome me checking in on them too. Friends who would show up at my doorstep with a pot of soup or send a “thinking about you” card in the mail. Friends who I can put down on an “In Case of Emergency” form. Friends who would drop everything and accompany me to outpatient surgery for removing my embedded IUD, or who would help me with a home repair. In other words, friends who function as family usually does—the people who are there for you no matter what, who you don’t just talk to once in a blue moon, or once a month if you are lucky.
To be clear, I have good friends. For example, a small group of women who go back 20-30 years, who now live a few hours away, to whom I’ve felt closer in recent years, e.g. we’ve been on a group text thread together, since 2020. And a local writing group that became more of a mental health support group during the pandemic, talking once a month over zoom. And other wonderful individuals whom I might meet for a walk every few months, and talk with, about writing or work or parenting. And I even met a wonderful man online who has now become my boyfriend of 3.5 years; I only see him about once a week due to our schedules, but it’s been solid, and steady, and good. Also, my parents live a mile away and I talk to them most weeks, although not about my most intimate matters. And my child is with me half the time.
So, yes, I have people, supports.
And yet. The things that I learned during my time of greatest need—during the worst of the post-divorce and pandemic days—was that I still need a closer circle of friends I see regularly in person. I need friends that don’t let months lapse once our lives turn super busy. Friends who might prioritize you as much as they do their families.
After I divorced right before the pandemic, and then went through so many weeks alone with my child, I realized: I need closer friends. I need friends who I can text each day to share my ups and downs. I need friends who check in on me often when they know I’m down, and who welcome me checking in on them too. Friends would show up at my doorstep with a pot of soup or send a “thinking about you” card in the mail. Friends who I can put down on an “In Case of Emergency” form.
I am asking this of myself too: Who am I willing to show up for in greater ways?
Who can I commit to?
We live in a society that prioritizes the tight nuclear family of you and your spouse, or other familial inner circles formed through blood relations. If you are lucky you might have another couple you hang out with often, or a friend you see on a weekly basis. Some people also have close families or authentic spiritual communities. But for so many of us, our partners and homes occupy most of our existence outside of work; this used to be my baseline too, so I get it. Now that I’ve experienced single parent life during a pandemic (albeit with shared custody), I see the huge loss that this kind of default engages.
Where is the prioritizing of community in this equation?
Where is the prioritizing of friendship?
***
In my case, I work alone from home, so I often don’t talk to or see another adult in person for days—sometimes longer. Eventually, about a year ago I decided I needed to get more intentional about addressing my longing. My longing for close connections that has been with me my whole life. I needed to stop feeling disappointed when my friends on our group text sometimes didn’t respond. Or when, year after year, it was me who initiated or who followed up on the necessary planning to make our in-person gatherings actually happen. I realized I needed to stop feeling resentful that my oldest friends weren’t filling my friendship-longing gap. To remember that their lives were busy with their own hardships and priorities that perhaps were also going unspoken or unseen.
When I stepped back with perspective, I could realize (not from a place of resentment but as simple fact), that they might not depend on our group texts (and friendship?) as much as I did in those years. That you really can’t explain to people who haven’t gone through it how hard a divorce is, or how hard a divorce during a pandemic is, even if on the surface it seems like you’ve moved on and are doing great—dating, publishing, writing, teaching. You can’t explain what it’s like to lose that best friend, that intimate partner, that one who you talked to every day. That one who would be there for you in an emergency, who provided a deep sense of security, who you could turn to for problems large and small. For you can have all the friends you want, but without that intimate partnering that usually only accompanies committed romantic relationships, the one that says, I’m here for you no matter what, there can be a deep existential sense of aloneness. A sense of being uncared for. Or at least this is how my patterns of attachment primed me to feel. With this came a dawning awareness: the way we live, the insular and often co-dependent way that we turn to our partners for everything, is unhealthy. Or, if not unhealthy, then limited. Steeped in capitalistic, each for their own, systems. Forgetting so many people in the gaps.
I know I’ve left people behind before too.
Sometimes I want to say to my friends: Imagine if your partner died. Who would you turn to? Don’t you see? It could happen to you too. You could lose your partner tomorrow. You just never know. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! Nurture those close friendships, keep them close. Consider, too, how most of us women married to men will statistically outlive our male partners. We need to keep building the sisterhood. Not as an afterthought, as a lesser priority. But as an essential core of our lives.
***
What do I long for? Small groups of friends who all know each other. Chosen family. Seasonal gatherings together. Fires and dancing and art-making and ritualized sharing of deep wisdom. Celebrating and grieving. Exchanging of gifts. Saying, come up north and stay with us when your house gets too smoky during the fire season. Saying, come be in my bubble and let our kids and spouses know each other better, too. Saying, let’s vacation together once a year. Let’s build traditions together, sustainable internal pools of connected wealth. Saying, if—or when—the Big One hits and your home is destroyed, come live with me. If things get really bad, let’s share our resources. Let’s remember that we depend on each other.
We live in a society that prioritizes the tight nuclear family of you and your spouse, or other familial inner circles formed through blood relations. If you are lucky you might have another couple you hang out with often, or a friend you see on a weekly basis. Some people also have close families or authentic spiritual communities. But for so many of us, our partners and homes occupy most of our existence outside of work; this used to be my baseline too, so I get it.
Don’t we all know by now that more calamities are coming?
What is it going to take for us to proactively reach out of our nuclear bubbles all the more, and build the foundations that are needed to take us to that next level?
So many of us briefly witnessed during the pandemic what it was like to have our worlds shrink. Suddenly our neighbors became the few people we saw on a regular basis. Suddenly the concept of mutual aid and emergency preparedness became less abstract.
Then, for many of us, life went back to usual.
But some of us are still wrestling with the questions that the pandemic revealed, not to mention still living with residual trauma, anxiety, or depression.
I don’t want to get complacent. I want to remember the lessons I started learning. To ask myself: What am I willing to give away—or give up—in order to prioritize a collective over my own little bubble?
How might we take turns with regard to who gives or receives more from time to time, or even recognize that some will just need more support, period?
And how can I lean into the larger implications of these questions—e.g. how much more am I willing to give from my own resources, and in this “giving up”, what might I also be gaining?
***
Ever since I was a young girl, I’ve wanted to weave a closer web of relations. As I’ve gone through different stages of my life—from my wandering 20s, to my settling and marrying and mothering 30s and 40s—my proactive search for more friends has waxed and waned. In recent years, I finally was in a position where I could take more initiative. For nearly a decade, I’d been building community as a freelance creative writing teacher—connecting networks of writers through my classes, many of whom go on to form writing groups and stay connected for years. While they might remain a group, I would then move on to help create the next group. Until I realized, I could stay in closer touch with my students too—I could invite some to become my friends, or into my home. I could hold salons, invite folks from different spheres of my life to meet, share, and make art together. I could pay more attention to those I felt a special connection to. And those who felt like they also had the bandwidth and mutual desire—who had reached out to me, too. For the initiative has to go both ways. A mutual desire to go beyond the noncommittal passivity of our times has to exist.
Sometimes I want to say to my friends: Imagine if your partner died. Who would you turn to? Don’t you see? It could happen to you too. You could lose your partner tomorrow. You just never know. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! Nurture those close friendships, keep them close. Consider, too, how most of us women married to men will statistically outlive our male partners. We need to keep building the sisterhood.
Now, I’m trying to meet at least one friend in person a week, for a walk or coffee date, and I’m getting it on the calendar a.s.a.p., because I know, if I don’t, work will take over and seem more important. There is always that deeply ingrained feeling that I should be prioritizing work over pleasure—especially since divorce necessitated doubling, if not tripling, my income. Capitalism and my upbringing with anxious, work-and-security-driven parents have also imprinted the notion that “I’m being good” when I’m checking things off my list, making money, and being “productive,” gaining wealth and financial security—versus making art and socializing.
But what gives us true security in these changing times, I ask? Yes, it’s important to have money in savings. But what happens if the banks shut down, if the grid goes down, if money loses its value, if resources are scarce, cell communication cut off—what then?
In the Pacific Northwest, where I live, we have the “Big One” to prepare for—the massive overdue earthquake in the Cascadia Subduction Zone that scientists predict a 37% chance of hitting in the next 50 years—which comes with the advice to have supplies on hand for a couple weeks’ worth of self-sufficiency without water or power. This is only one natural disaster to contend with. There are also the severe storms, fires, and droughts we have all been seeing. There are sudden job losses, accidents, losses of insurance, wars, market collapses, global pandemics, and the many climate-driven emergencies that our children and grandchildren and beyond will face in much more extreme ways than we face now. Even as we too are facing them now.
And so I ask again, where does our true security come from?
Who is checking in on us, who is willing to share their resources, who will welcome us, and who can we welcome in as kin?
What can we cultivate that is within our means to influence?
What is actually essential?
***
Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar writes in his book Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships about how the average human can hold about 150 people in their network of friendships; this number is reflective of the number of people that might have belonged to a village or within three living generations, descending from an ancestral pair of great-great-grandparents; such settlements with houses for a few hundred people date back about 10,000 years. Prior to that we lived as hunter-gatherers, where three or four camp groups or bands would form a community—also with close to 150 people. Through his research, Dunbar posits that 150 is now still the upper limit of how many “friends” one can have, with an average of five people in the close inner circle of friends, 50 in the “good friends” and 500 in the “acquaintances” categories, and 1500 in the “known names” category. These numbers might also change depending on how large of a family one is close to, for family is evolutionarily prioritized before friends.
Even if 150 feels high to me (unless I broaden my definition of friends to people I occasionally have a brief friendly exchange with), these numbers nevertheless create context with regard to my own dance with community and friendship. For example, I would be thrilled to feel I am in good, friendly relations with 150 people, or even “just” 50 if we are talking local connections. How glorious! Fifty people I could invite to a gathering. Fifty people I wouldn’t feel ashamed to write out of the blue and ask for help. Fifty people I’d love to introduce to each other, to keep creating stronger webs of connection and mutual aid. Of course, from this 50, only a dozen (or a few) might become close, authentic friends, and who remains in the inner circle might change over the years. Nevertheless, I would have a larger sense of true community: concentric circles of closeness, radiating inwardly or outwardly with shifting intensity depending on the season; people who gather intentionally and come to know and love and support each other, taking turns giving and receiving in accordance with our needs, but never disappearing completely. Ghosting. An all too common practice these days.
What do I long for? Small groups of friends who all know each other. Chosen family. Seasonal gatherings together. Fires and dancing and art-making and ritualized sharing of deep wisdom. Celebrating and grieving. Exchanging of gifts. Saying, come up north and stay with us when your house gets too smoky during the fire season. Saying, come be in my bubble and let our kids and spouses know each other better, too. Saying, let’s vacation together once a year. Let’s build traditions together, sustainable internal pools of connected wealth.
Online community can be great, and occasionally an online friend does become an IRL friend—if the intention is there on both sides. But usually not. So online community feels less important for me right now. I just don’t have the bandwidth—the evolutionary bandwidth—to track and care about so many people, however lovely they may be. Instead, now, I’m focused on who I can get to know in person. Because right now, in the midst of so much global war, genocide, death and grief, deep abiding friendship is where it all begins and ends for me. True friendship, born of mutual witnessing that leads to trust. Trust that creates more shared energy and joy. Energy and community that are strong and authentic and tested enough that, together we can hold each other’s grief and pain. Together, we can hold the world’s pain—and not become overwhelmed in its tide, because our lovefield is so strong. That’s the kind of activist community I want to belong to. The one that begins with intimacy and respect and breaking bread. And grows to help as many people as it can.
Because I do feel like we are all practicing for larger and larger roles. I do realize that the planet continues to burn, to flood, to displace, and that people continue to lose their homes, their lives, their loved ones. I do realize that more and more of us are going to be called upon in greater ways to share our gifts, our resources, our strengths. And that gathering a few friends for a meal is about much more than just eating and talking and laughing together. It’s actually where mutual aid begins: with mutual enjoyment and vulnerability and exchange. With knowing: this is who I want to share my love with. And this is who I can turn to, or support when the shit hits the fan. This is me, this is us, now practicing. We are not going to survive without building the muscles we need through practice.
We will all need those smaller circles of people to look out for—to make sure they are okay and fed and not alone. And we will also need those larger circles. The ones we can trade and share resources with; the ones who remind us that family means more than just blood ties or looking out for those “most like us.” That the human and animal and plant and earth family needs all of us, connected—starting small, rooted in local spaces, and imagining big, bigger, wider yet. Imagining into all the hardships and new ways of being together that we—and our children, and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and spiritual relations—will be asked to live through. And all we have built and taught ourselves, in the meantime, about how we can keep showing up for one another.
When my sons were 16 and 14, and lovingly, appropriately pulling away from me and inhabiting their own social circles, I came to the stark realization that I had exactly zero close friends. Nobody to have a beer with, or watch the big game, or see the latest violent epic. What was worse, my friend-making skills had atrophied to the point where I couldn’t make the phone call, or extend the invite. I was locked into a very lonely world. Out of desperation I began reaching out, and a few stalwarts reached back. And now I have a bigger circle than at any time since college. But oh, that first invite was terrifying! Now I know: everybody wants to be valued, courted, listened to. Thank goodness I learned it in time.
Thank you for such openness. It hits me, as well, having retired from teaching high school where there was no lack of stimulation, even if that time was spent with people decades younger who cannot replace peers. Peer connection for me, except with my colleagues, was sacrificed in those years from exhaustion and moving an hour away from my original tribe. And getting divorced in my mid-forties. After building a "dream house" in the country. All that you describe, though, used to be the traditional role of a faith community, whatever faith you shared. For me, it was a church experience that naturally provided all of this. Yet in the last three decades, as we all have witnessed, those needs for community were replaced in many circles with political stances. That is what drove me away from that long held place of love and fellowship. I've tried to reckon with all of this in a memoir, just the idea of change and loss, yet the hopefulness of new relationships. I really appreciate the comments of hope here, and how we need to be purposeful and open, especially in these potentially disorienting years of retirement, not to mention the assuredly fractious coming four years.