Beyond the game attempts at recreation, people in pods were bound by the same mission: survival. “Our pod lived in a house with no secrets,” said Sabine Heller, 44, an executive at a medical start-up in Manhattan who spent a large chunk of last year podding with a handful of friends at a house in the Hudson Valley.ĭespite brutal remote-work schedules that often had them hunched over laptops past midnight, the housemates forged powerful bonds during fleeting moments of downtime, Ms. Those conditions were all too apparent in many pods, particularly when podmates bunked together. (The quote comes from a 2012 New York Times article about the difficulty of making friends over 30.) Adams, a sociologist in The School of Health and Human Sciences at the University North Carolina Greensboro. “It was just understood that we were hanging out together every weekend, because we were the only people to hang out with.”įor decades, sociologists have identified three conditions to making close friends: “proximity repeated, unplanned interactions and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other,” according to Rebecca G. Hey, backyard margaritas with those folks down the block are at least better than another Zoom trivia party, right?Īs months rolled on, however, an us-against-the-world spirit began to take over. For most, they were intended as a stopgap measure. Who could have predicted this? Pandemic pods often were thrown together on the fly, with kinda-friends or whoever happened to be willing and available. As soon as lockdown started, they were inseparable, inhabiting a tiny world of six adults and six children who dined together, exercised together, and coached each other through anxiety bouts, marital spats and moments of despair. cities started to shut down.īefore the pandemic, the three couples were just parent friends from the neighborhood, Ms.

“There is just a feeling that something is missing,” said Shana Beal, 41, a communications director at a technology nonprofit who lives in Greenbrae, Calif., looking back on the three-family group, called the “Coronavirus Crew,” that formed simply because her family was sharing a house in Lake Tahoe with two other families over a long weekend in March 2020, as U.S.

But as vaccination rates increased and social calendars began filling this summer, some people found themselves pining, and are still pining, for their pods’ camaraderie and sense of collective purpose. It might sound strange to suffer a case of breakup blues over a social arrangement that in many cases was the equivalent of a lifeboat bobbing in stormy seas (and may, of course, return if the spread of the Delta variant goes unchecked).

Might be time up pandemic pod