The Disappearance Of Edge Friends
"Edge friends" is the term that just came to me for people we really like, whom we see in our day to day lives (or used to, back when we left the house), but whom we aren't close with. In some or many cases, we might not even know their names.

In The Atlantic, Amanda Mull has a piece: "The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friendship: There's a reason you miss the people you didn't even know that well."

She'd watched Emily In Paris and realized how much she missed being in packed bars.

In the weeks following, I thought frequently of other people I had missed without fully realizing it. Pretty good friends with whom I had mostly done things that were no longer possible, such as trying new restaurants together. Co-workers I didn't know well but chatted with in the communal kitchen. Workers at the local coffee or sandwich shops who could no longer dawdle to chat. The depth and intensity of these relationships varied greatly, but these people were all, in some capacity, my friends, and there was also no substitute for them during the pandemic. Tools like Zoom and FaceTime, useful for maintaining closer relationships, couldn't re-create the ease of social serendipity, or bring back the activities that bound us together.

Understandably, much of the energy directed toward the problems of pandemic social life has been spent on keeping people tied to their families and closest friends. These other relationships have withered largely unremarked on after the places that hosted them closed. The pandemic has evaporated entire categories of friendship, and by doing so, depleted the joys that make up a human life--and buoy human health. But that does present an opportunity. In the coming months, as we begin to add people back into our lives, we'll now know what it's like to be without them.

American culture does not have many words to describe different levels or types of friendship, but for our purposes, sociology does provide a useful concept: weak ties. The term was coined in 1973 by the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, and it comprises acquaintances, people you see infrequently, and near strangers with whom you share some familiarity. They're the people on the periphery of your life--the guy who's always at the gym at the same time as you, the barista who starts making your usual order while you're still at the back of the line, the co-worker from another department with whom you make small talk on the elevator. They're also people you might have never directly met, but you share something important in common--you go to the same concerts, or live in the same neighborhood and frequent the same local businesses. You might not consider all of your weak ties friends, at least in the common use of the word, but they're often people with whom you're friendly. Most people are familiar with the idea of an inner circle; Granovetter posited that we also have an outer circle, vital to our social health in its own ways.

During the past year, it's often felt like the pandemic has come for all but the closest of my close ties. There are people on the outer periphery of my life for whom the concept of "keeping up" makes little sense, but there are also lots of friends and acquaintances--people I could theoretically hang out with outdoors or see on videochat, but with whom those tools just don't feel right. In my life, this perception seems to be largely mutual--I am not turning down invites from these folks for Zoom catch-ups and walks in the park. Instead, our affection for each other is in a period of suspended animation, alongside indoor dining and international travel. Sometimes we respond to each other's Instagram Stories.

...All of the researchers I spoke with were hopeful that this extended pause would give people a deeper understanding of just how vital friendships of all types are to our well-being, and how all the people around us contribute to our lives--even if they occupy positions that the country's culture doesn't respect very much, such as service workers or store clerks. "My hope is that people will realize that there's more people in their social networks that matter and provide some kind of value than just those few people that you spend time with, and have probably managed to keep up with during the break," Sandstrom said. America, even before the pandemic, was a lonely country. It doesn't have to be. The end of our isolation could be the beginning of some beautiful friendships.

I realize that there are introverts in the world, but personally, I've always loved the interactions I've had with strangers, simply by being friendly. In fact, one of my dear friends, the talented painter Max Ferguson, I met after I, while living in New York called a wrong number and kept talking.

Sure, that happened on the phone, but when we don't leave the house, we miss those relationships with other people that are actually very important to us. I can't wait to get them back.