How have you been maintaining your friendships throughout this pandemic? Not only has it affected us physically by causing us to be sick but also mentally and socially. We must make sure that we are there for one another throughout this. Although it may be hard since we can’t exactly be with one another physically all the time. However, there are some ways we can stay in touch with one another.

First off, I would like to offer one of the best options to maintain contact with friends, which is a group chat. I started working at Hy-Vee this year and have made so many friends. Some of the friends I have made there created our own group chat so that we know who is working when and if anyone can cover a shift for us. We also just talk about work, life, and school. We are a very tight knit group that can joke around about anything. We look out for one another as though we are a little family. Not to mention being close like that makes work much more fun. While in the visual there is only nine of us, we have added a few more to our group chat. So, if you need new friends or want to see your friends more, I would suggest finding a place to work together if you can.

Other ways you can keep in contact with your friends and keep the energy alive would to facetime more, call more, meet each other to go grocery shopping, have a picnic and social distance. Other things include:

• Cook a meal together over facetime so its like you’re in the same kitchen
• Facetime someone and learn and practice some dance from tiktok or YouTube
• Create a shared tiktok account
• Use Rave which is an app where friends can watch movies together and there is a chat section to talk about it while you and your friends are watching.
• Host animal crossing parties
• Go live on social media platforms
• Eat lunch together over a zoom or teams meeting
• Get online and play with a friend(s) if you have a gaming console
• Start a random group chat for rants and debates

I am sure there are many other ideas on how to hang out safely during covid, but these are a few unique ones. We lose some friendships, we maintain some, and we gain some, but its all a learning process. Hopefully you found this helpful and can keep those relationships strong throughout this tough time.