Today we are going with a couple in our neighborhood to a local happy hour and art show. They came to our party Saturday and invited us over for the Superbowl. I’m a little uneasy today, thinking about the evening ahead.
I think it’s because we are so used to being home alone. Also, moving from a town I lived in for 30 plus years to a new area makes it challenging to be social.
I was reading the Wall Street Journal and discovered my feelings are not uncommon at all. The article was called “Why Friendships Feel Weird Right Now” By Alex Janin. She said that “new tensions and discomfort are emerging as people socialize more.”
Here are a few excerpts:
We’re getting together with friends again but it can be awkward.
Two years of getting together less often—or not at all—with friends in-person have created new tensions in relationships, psychologists say. We’re more sensitive to slights and we’re out of practice navigating conflicts. Being left out, even by accident, can make us feel more insecure.
Less in-person interaction can make us feel lonelier, which can cause insecurity and over analysis of our interactions with the people we care about, says Marisa G. Franco, a psychologist based in Washington, D.C., who studies friendship. An innocuous delayed response to a text message or the lack of an invitation to a social event can balloon into something worse.
“When we’re lonely, we are hypervigilant to social threats,” says Dr. Franco. “Our minds go into overdrive overthinking things, thinking a friend is rejecting us, or reinterpreting events in our friendships more negatively.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-so-many-people-are-super-sensitive-about-friendships-right-now-11645046357?mod=life_work_lead_pos1
What are your thoughts about this? Do you feel more insecure being social than you did pre-2020? Did you find you like being home and less social?
