Wired for Connection - Harper's BAZAAR November 2021

As we continue to dip in and out of lockdowns, it’s normal to wonder what the pandemic is doing to our relationships. For Clementine Ford and Dolly Alderton, thinking about whom and how we love has inspired some timely new releases

Here’s a phrase that wouldn’t have made sense in 2019: Zoom fatigue. Zoom, of course, being a catch-all for any video calling service, in the same vein as BandAid and Velcro. Feel free to insert your preferred provider: there’s also FaceTime exhaustion, Houseparty apathy, Teams lethargy and Skype ennui. It was fun at first, to catch up with your colleagues on themed Friday nights, drink with friends on Saturdays, have coffee dates on Sunday mornings and catch up with family on Sunday afternoons, delighting in looking like the opening sequence of The Brady Bunch with each person peering out of their little square. It was fun. Until it wasn’t. Zoom meetings, Zoom school, Zoom workouts. It wasn’t long before we were googling “How to get out of Zoom plans” without the excuse of having somewhere else to be.

Without the incidental social landscape, it took so much more effort to stay connected and maintain relationships with the people we no longer saw on a regular basis. A 2021 survey by Relationships Australia found that in the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, 93 per cent of people reported making an effort to connect. Research from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) showed that the number of people aged 75 and older using social media and emails to stay connected with loved ones during the pandemic rose from 18 per cent to 41 per cent and 36 per cent to 81 per cent, respectively. However, also according to Relationships Australia, as lockdowns continued and restrictions stayed in place, people reported connecting becoming more difficult. In other words, we’ve cut back to the bare essentials, relationshipwise. As we emerge from the pandemic, how do we reengage with the relationships that fizzled — and do we even want to?

This is a topic Dr Ali Walker, a human connection scientist and senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales, has been researching. “The pandemic has given us an opportunity to reflect on the aspects of connection that didn’t work so well before,” she says. “We might have reviewed some friendships and realised that they were one-sided or not aligned with our values. It gave us a chance to reflect on the types of relationships we want in our lives. We’re wondering, Who do I miss? The pandemic gave us a chance to be more intentional about who we connect with.”

As such, there has never been a better time for a new spate of meditations on whom we love and how we love them. The London-based journalist, author and podcaster Dolly Alderton has made a career of reflecting on all kinds of love. In her advice column for the UK’s Sunday Times, she responds to questions from people of all ages about their partners, exes, best friends, siblings and parents. In her podcast Love Stories, big names including Stanley Tucci, Lily Allen and Jessie Cave wax lyrical about their first, everlasting and unrequited loves. And in her debut novel, Ghosts, she hits the zeitgeist on the head by infusing a romantic and familial love story with social media.

In a sign of the times, her best-selling memoir Everything I Know About Love — a collection of essays that explore all kinds of relationships: romantic, platonic, familial, professional — that was published in 2018 is currently being adapted for a seven-episode television series for HBO, due for release next year. Directed by China Moo-Young and executive produced by Alderton, the series began filming in August. It follows best friends Maggie (played by Emma Appleton) and Birdy (Bel Powley) as they move to London together in their twenties and navigate friendships, heartbreak and their careers — so, basically, everything we’re doing at the moment from afar.

Clementine Ford has also been thinking a lot about love and relationships lately. As one of Australia’s most forthright feminist voices, she’s been celebrated for her books Fight Like A Girl, an empowering manifesto, and Boys Will Be Boys, about the dangers of growing up in a patriarchal society. Her new book, How We Love, with its candypink cover, is a step in a different direction, but likely not the one you think. It’s not a gushy anthology of sickly sweet love stories, nor is it filled with the eloquent white-hot rage she’s known for on social media. This is something else entirely: an ode to the strongest feeling we can have towards other people, explored through essays about the many types of love she’s had in her life, starting with her mother.

“I came away from writing the book with an understanding that it would be a mistake to rank as less-than all of the non-romantic love that we have,” she tells Harper’s BAZAAR. “We’re so culturally conditioned to only think of love in terms of romance, but when we think about the love that truly travels with us throughout our lives, it’s the love that we have for our friends and family.”

Walker agrees, adding that there are proven health benefits to maintaining our relationships with those we aren’t romantically in love with. Her concern is a second silent pandemic: disconnection. In October, The Talking Loneliness report, which was conducted by YouGov and psychologist Michelle Lim on behalf of Telstra, revealed more than onequarter of Australians experienced loneliness for the first time during the pandemic, while 44 per cent said they regularly feel lonely. “If you have strong connections with friends and family, you have 45 to 50 per cent less of a risk of early death,” Walker explains. That’s better than eating six serves of fruit and vegetables each day (26 per cent less risk of early death), or exercising every day (23 to 33 per cent less risk). “Connection is the foundation of our physical and mental health,” she adds. “It prevents all sorts of things such as early signs of ageing, depression, dementia, and we heal from things faster physically. Human connection is at the heart of wellbeing.”

It is also the foundation of a productive and innovative workplace. Microsoft’s annual Work Trend Index surveyed more than 30,000 people in 31 countries and found that those working remotely consistently reported feeling disconnected, even though they’re having more meetings than ever before. When the pandemic started, colleagues who were also friends managed to increase their connection, while letting water-cooler-only contacts fall to the wayside. But nearly two years in, Microsoft reports, even those relationships with work friends are starting to slip in priority. What has become obvious is that strong colleague relationships heavily impact a business’ bottom line through productivity and innovation. Those who reported feeling productive also reported strong workplace relationships, while those whose social interactions with colleagues have decreased were also less likely to contribute to innovation. Yes, all those desk visits and coffee runs are just as important to the success of the business as hitting your KPIs — something to tell your boss when you get back to the office.

What has been widely reported since March last year is how the pandemic is destroying romantic relationships. Less discussed is the data that shows these relationships are now improving. According to Relationships Australia, in the early months of 2020, our closest relationships were the ones that suffered the most, with 42 per cent of people reporting negative changes and just 16 per cent reporting improvements. This year, the number of people reporting negative changes went down to 33 per cent, and the number of people reporting improvements went up to 21 per cent.

Less data still is available about the pandemic’s impact on our connections with friends and colleagues. Anecdotally, not all friendships survived the transition to long distance, with some blowing up in explosive arguments, and others fading into silence. Perhaps some of these friendships were already doomed and the lockdowns simply hastened their demise; others may recover once restrictions ease. Meanwhile, some acquaintances have reported escalations in intimacy, going from brief interactions (at the gym, say) to daily meme swapping (a huge upgrade in this era) to regular texting and phone calls (the absolute height of intimacy).

Walker adds that relationships with near-strangers are more important than we realise, and we could be subconsciously missing them the most. “We really underestimate how much those incidental connections impact our wellbeing,” she says. “There is research that shows that talking to strangers — if it’s gone well, of course — leaves people feeling overwhelmingly better than before the interaction. There is so much about human connection we haven’t realised before the pandemic; we’re not taught this stuff in school.”

One main aspect of Walker’s research in the past year has been not only the effect of the pandemic on our relationships but also what we can expect for the future of our connections. The outlook is promising. “There are patterns of human connection that have been observed throughout history,” she explains. “We’ve gone through wars and pandemics before, and social connection has remained unchanged. Human connection is our greatest psychological and, I would argue, physical need. We’re wired for it, and so in a fundamental way, this pandemic cannot change our need or our desire for human connection.

“You’ll see that the moment the world opens back up, people will just go back to what they were doing before,” she continues. “Imagine if you couldn’t drink water for months — you wouldn’t get to the end of it and never drink water again. That’s how I think about human connection — we’re never going to get to a point where we don’t want it. We need it.”

As for those relationships we’re not so keen to rush back into? Keep them on Zoom. Just think of the 40-minute cut-off as a bonus feature.

This article originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Photographed by Lilli Waters.