I looked forward to the end of lockdown—but I didn't expect to struggle with socialising

We thought there would be an ending. So much of the past three months has stretched credibility, but now, as we find ourselves in these uncertain times, it seems scarcely believable that we bought into the comforting myth that there would be a neat conclusion to the virus.

But we did. The idea that there would be a clean ending—after which we could all go out once more and embrace our friends, go on holiday, get pissed at the restaurant and have sex again—was what got so many of us through those early weeks of sudden isolation. We told our families that we would hug the life out of them after this was all over; we agreed to deferred dates; we imagined ourselves at a raucous table, surrounded by friends in our favourite pub, toasting the end of the virus. A viral TikTok video in April imagined the joy of renewed community at your local once lockdown was over; thousands of geezers chorusing Truly Madly Deeply as one.

What we didn’t know (perhaps partly because other countries that haven’t made such a hash of their outbreak have managed smoother transitions from lockdown) was that coming out of isolation would be a more compromised affair, demanding an endless succession of anxiety-inducing judgment calls. In the process, those previously uncomplicated joys have come to feel tarnished. Fear and anxiety now sully our every interaction. As for spontaneity—to quote Mariah Carey, I don’t know her.

Now, the early spate of quizzes and group calls has abated in favour of the rare, mitigated pleasures of occasionally seeing a friend from a maddening distance. This simulacrum of contact, like a mocking ghost of what our relationships were before, carries a whole new set of frustrations. Foremost among these is what we have lost in touch. In the early stages of the pandemic we discovered with alarm how much we touch our faces—between 2,000 and 3,000 times a day, according to Kate Winslet in Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion—but data on how much we touch other people when interacting them was thinner on the ground. Now we can only estimate how much we used to touch our loved ones, because of the overwhelming frustration of not doing so.

I miss the introductory hug I now think of as a requisite to polite interaction, like a necessary shot of booze at the start of the night. Perhaps in that opening hug we work out the lay of the land—how close we will sit or stand; what wordless feelings that clasp can convey. Perhaps we need the smell of someone too, and to gauge their bodily warmth. Keeping each other at arm’s length would perhaps not be so hard if we at least had that opening gambit—two bodies meeting, squeezing, and releasing.

I think of how much I touch people without even knowing it. I’ve been thinking about the famous footage of Thierry Henry reacting to breaking news by touching Jamie Carragher’s leg: I misremembered his hand gesture as a full-on clutch, but of course it’s more specific than that. Henry lightly places four fingers on the top of Carragher’s leg, gently resting them there. That sort of contact doesn’t just punctuate conversation or provide the pleasure of flesh on flesh —although it does those things too—but it tells you who a person is. I think of a friend of mine who has—correction, had—the weird habit of holding onto your outer elbow as you walk together, while she natters away. Another friend routinely makes a grab for my nape with one hand, like a cross between a school bully and a child holding a cat. I suspect my own signature touch is hanging off the necks of tall male friends like a Miss America sash, but there may be other ones I’m unaware of. Are these little gestures all lost to us? Will they eventually come back to us after we have rehearsed human contact a few more times, or are some touches gone forever?

For now, sitting—adequately distanced—in a group of six at the park, or confecting what feel like wholly artificial excuses to meet up (a… walk?), gives our interactions an awful feeling of artifice, and on a few occasions it has given me the agonising sensation of being almost disappointed by seeing my loved ones. As we make our way out of this collective nightmare, it may be important to recognise the trauma of seeing our friendships morph this way; to do justice to the hardship of having disconnected so totally. And once this is over— really over, not during this Kafkaesque hokey-cokey, but weeks and weeks after the vaccine comes—perhaps only then will we experience those unmitigated pleasures once more.