COVID-19 has changed nearly all of my college life except for one thing: my relationship with my roommate Olivia. As I’ve watched classes on Panopto, met with professors six feet apart on the Overlook and incorporated temperature checks into my morning routine, Olivia is the one person I haven’t socially distanced from. We share a room in our house off campus and take turns cooking meals. I still hug her every day and snuggle up on the couch next to her to watch movies. We study together, watch sunsets, take hikes and still stay up late talking about anything and everything in our lives, just like we always have. I thought our relationship was the one thing the coronavirus pandemic hadn’t touched.
It wasn’t until the two of us got to spend time with another close friend that I realized something profound had changed. As I watched Olivia swap jokes with our friend Michael and, as the evening wore on and the conversation got deeper, reflect on her life at 30,000 feet, I realized that our relationship has actually changed. Living daily life next to her, it’s hard to zoom out and see the 30,000-foot view of God’s work in her life, and through her in other people’s lives, until I get to hear someone else ask her how the year has been for her. And there are sides of her that only other people can bring out—the way she and her brother tease each other, or the way a friend makes her laugh, or the way she lights up when she’s explaining her biology Capstone to someone who gets science. Those are parts of her that I can’t access on my own.
Our relationships are not spokes of a wheel, connecting us to discrete individuals; instead, we are embedded into a complex web of relationships. This means that the relationship I have with Olivia and Michael is different because of the way they interact. It also means that we can be deeply impacted by things that happen in other parts of the web. If two of my close friends have a falling out with each other, that affects me. If one of my close guy friends starts dating a runner girl I’ve never met, she just might end up being one of my bridesmaids. We don’t build friendships in a vacuum.
C.S. Lewis wrote beautifully, “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that [my friend] Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s [Tolkien’s] reaction to a specifically Charles joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him ‘to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.” In The Prodigal God, Keller summarizes the argument elegantly: “Lewis is saying that it took a community to know an individual.”
Fostering community has taken a lot of creativity and work this year. The Scots have done a fantastic job protecting and loving each other well, but it was inevitable that we would lose some things. Perhaps I’m not the only one who feels the loss of group relationships acutely. While we grieve each thing that we’ve lost to the pandemic, from unmasked classrooms to packed dance floors, perhaps we’re also learning to live a little more simply and to appreciate things we never noticed before, like the simple beauty of seeing two friends in conversation.