How the COVID-19 pandemic changed relationships, and how to move forward – WHYY

This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.

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For the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Angie and a couple shed befriended in Los Angeles made a hard decision. The friends agreed to a freeze in hanging out.

We were almost like family, said Angie, who asked us to only use her nickname to protect her privacy.

Shed first met the two, a husband and wife, while taking an adult French classand the three of them had done everything together for over a decade afterwards.

I came over to their home a lot, Angie said. Id go hiking with them, eating with them, to events throughout the city. Whenever they had crises, theyd talk to me about it. They even took Angie with them on vacations and work trips.

But when the coronavirus came ashore and began infecting Americans in March 2020, the friends didnt see each other in person for months. When they finally did, they wore masks and stayed outdoors. Even when vaccines became available in 2021, Angie and her friends blanched at the prospect of hosting parties or dinners in their homes.

Soon, though, for reasons Angie cant fully explain, things changed.

They started going to events, and going indoors, with no masks, she said. It was a complete 180.

Eventually, Angie said she felt her friends pressing her to step out, too.

They said, We just want to see you, she recounted.

But Angies partner at the time had lost his father, an ER doctor, to complications from COVID-19. A few months later, the boyfriend contracted post-COVID syndrome, known commonly as long COVID. He went from an active, engaging lifeengineering by day, martial arts by nightto outsourcing his laundry and struggling to walk from his couch to his dining room. And Angies part-time gig as a contact tracer flooded her with stories about coronaviruss consequences. So, she stayed vigilantand, eventually, was left far more vigilant than many of the people around her.

Angie pulled the wife aside and explained where she was coming from, in the hopes that her concerns would be understood and respected. But when the curtain fell on that conversation, they both felt worse than ever.

Her response was, Ive been doing all these things, and I never got COVID, Angie said.Everything was being minimized, and I got really flustered.

Her friend had become frustrated, too and mentioned that the couple had once kept a birthday party outside, in the rain, so that Angie could feel safe. To the friend, that felt like proof that she was taking the pandemic seriously.

Angie saw it differently.

It felt like she was trying to manipulate me, Angie said.

Angie and her friends were on a road that millions of people had taken before them: In August of 2021, a survey found that about 1 in 6 adults had severed at least three friendships amid differences of opinion on vaccines and precautions, according to OnePoll.

For people like Angie, the pandemic and its fallout forged new bones of contention between friends and families. For Carey Cadieux, a nursing PhD whos taught RNs in Maine and New York, COVID-19 only widened a rift that was already there.

Before 2020, Cadieux said her marriage of 24 years often piled on responsibilities and rarely brought her help.

I was the primary breadwinner, she said. I was the primary caregiver for the children. I organized everything.

When Cadieux came down with COVID-19 in February 2020, she didnt return to full strength for over a month. During her illness, she didnt just want the duties and dynamics in her house to change she felt they needed to, for her childrens sake as much as her own.

But they did not.

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How the COVID-19 pandemic changed relationships, and how to move forward - WHYY