'The post-COVID friend famine is here - and now we're really hungry'

OPINION -- I knew how it looked to the cinema usher.

There was me, midday on a Monday, sitting in the enormous cinema with nothing but an empty juice box for company, watching a movie about male strippers.

Now wait, this isn't a Valentine's Day column on how to avoid the loneliness of being single. (I'm not single, which makes my advice on this as welcome as your teenage babysitter's thoughts on parenting.)

No, the sad part of this scene is my other half should have been there. Not my boyfriend, but my best friend. The one I've always spent Valentine's Day with at real male strip shows, giggling hysterically as the smell of dry ice and sexual tension takes us back to our high school ball.

READ MORE: 'Can we please stop cancelling plans with friends in the name of "self care"?'

But she moved to Sydney pre-pandemic. Leaving me here watching Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek gyrate off the mortal coil, texting her the whole time.

It was as miserable as eating vegan bacon. You do OK, until you remember how the real thing tastes, and then you find yourself crying with longing.

Why didn't I invite other friends along instead? Well, I'm in what The Atlantic magazine calls the post-pandemic friend recession.

It seems we all are. We've spent the last three years inside, ruminating on the importance of friendship, only to get out, look around, and realise how few friends we actually have or even like.

Young women were statistically the hardest hit by COVID, with 59 per cent saying they lost touch with a few or all of their friends over the pandemic.

But men are also in a friend drought; in 2021 one in three said they felt they had no close friends at all.

(Not to mention the unsociable truth that I've written about before: making friends in NZ is incredibly difficult. And maintaining them requires the same kind of logistical expertise as running a multinational shipping firm.)

At this point in a discussion about resuscitating post-COVID friendships, I'm supposed to tell you to "reach out."

READ MORE: Clean your makeup brushes in seconds with this $29 gadget

And despite the fact that it makes me feel like I'm a talking throw pillow, reaching out does help. We fell out of the socialising habit, and making an effort to actively restart it does make you feel better.

But there's also another, far subtler problem.

Part of the reason we're in this friendship desert right now isn't because we don't know how to open up. It's because we don't know how to react when other people open up.

I already knew this. When I was a kid, my mum had a life-changing accident that left her unable to use the right side of her body. And growing up, if I ever talked to friends about this, their eyes glazed over like Christmas ham.

So I stopped talking about unhappiness. Both to save them the embarrassment, and me the mental legwork of having to console them out of their discomfort.

I was reminded of this over COVID, when we each got delivered three years of personalised hell.

Did I open up to friends about how I felt? How running a nightclub during this time was like trying to remove your own appendix with a rusted teaspoon during a zombie apocalypse? God, no.

And did my friends open up to me about their own break-ups, money worries and black dog days of the pandemic? Nope.

READ MORE: Carefully forged document behind sneaky cruise proposal

It wasn't because we didn't want to "be vulnerable". But rather because we know that other humans struggle under the heaviness of someone else's unhappiness. And that was the last thing our friends needed.

So we find ourselves with a rather ironic friend famine. Three years of trying to save the other person's pain has caused friendships to shrivel up like carrots at the back of the fridge.

And now, we're really, really hungry.

Verity Johnson is an Auckland-based writer and business owner.

This article originally appeared on Stuff.co.nz and has been republished with permission.