My wife and I have been married 13 years now. We had a quirky handfasting which incorporated all the stuff we were into at the time, and just a few years later we found ourselves musing about what we’d do different, now that we’d gotten into some new fandoms and such. And I decided that I loved planning and putting together the wedding and reception so much that I wanted to do it again every 10 years. Have a vow renewal and another excuse to throw a party and dress up and have a big cake.

That first 10-year point happened in 2022. We’d lucked out when the pandemic happened, and we’d spent two solid years barely leaving the house since we had good work from home jobs and could afford to self isolate. So in 2022 we were just starting to loosen up our routines and have more social interactions, and I started planning our super fun vow renewal.

But we quickly ran into one very big problem: We no longer had friends to invite.

It’s not that we had no friends at all, but aside from the handful of people who comprise our framily group and a couple other people, all of our friend circle had evaporated. We had 40 people at our wedding. Our friend list was down to single digits, several of whom we knew wouldn’t be able to come to anything we planned anyway.

We hadn’t just lost contact with people. I’d changed as a person over those ten years, too, and some of the circles I was part of just no longer felt like places I fit in. But instead of making new friends as I was growing apart from old ones, I’d thrown myself into hustle culture and trying to make everything I did into something I could promote and profit from.

And I thought back to when we’d gotten married and the big circle of online friends we had, the amazine virtual communities we were part of, and they were all gone, too. Social media had evolved into an algorithm-driven behemoth which killed them all.

And what shook me out of that was realizing that I didn’t have enough friends to do anything bigger than a little ceremony in our living room and a tiny cake. We made the most of it, but it was a wake up call.

So I’ve been on a personal crusade for the past three years to not just go out and make friends for myself, but to try and encourage as many people as I can to care about real-life community, especially in pagan circles. Our local pagan community is pretty large and active as these things go, but it leaves so many people out. Everyone’s first instinct is to plan classes and public rituals and try to start covens, but it doesn’t work very well if people don’t ever have a chance to just sit down and talk to each other in casual conversation. We get to a place where everyone knows OF each other, but we don’t actually KNOW each other.

I know I’m not alone in isolating a little too hard during the lockdowns, getting too comfortable being comfortable and not wanting to go back to an over-stuffed calendar filled with interactions that aren’t meaningful anyway. And it’s really hard to come out of that. But I think people are starting to realize, for all kinds of reasons, that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and the comfortable place can also be very, very lonely.

It’s worth it to go out and make friends.