Who Knew Lockdowns Would Make It Easier for Introverts to Make Friends?

Technology gave me an unexpected chance to make new friends.

By Barry Glassner

This article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal.

Who knew that lockdowns would make it easier for introverts to make friends? Even though I barely left my house over the past year, I’ve made enough new ones to fill a small theater.

My wife used to joke that I should get a T-shirt emblazoned with Groucho Marx’s famous line “Hello, I must be going.” There was no social situation I didn’t want to cut short. Take the weekly lunches at Los Angeles’s Magic Castle I used to attend before the lockdown. Other members who share my passion for magic hung out in clusters over leisurely meals. I grabbed something to eat, watched a show, and fled.

That was then. Now, every Friday for the past 50 weeks, I’ve gotten to know some of those same people at the virtual Magic Castle “lunch.” And after years of assiduously avoiding anyone I knew growing up, I started DMing those whose social media posts suggested we share interests.

I’ve even reconnected with long-lost family. The more we compare memories, the more skeletons in closets we find, and the closer we become.

If there’s a term for these sorts of friends, I haven’t seen it. I think of them as my pandemic posse. When everyone is stuck at home, you can approach folks you barely know. They won’t call 911 or even block you on Instagram. At worst, they’ll delete your message. At best, they’ll become new friends.

The novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen recently described online teaching as having “less human warmth, but more human connection” than in-person teaching. Although they aren’t in the same room, his students show a striking willingness to engage, and his classroom now reaches far and wide. The same can be said of my pandemic posse, and with a few, I’ve grown unexpectedly close.

Some live clear across the globe. After everything shut down last March, I cheered myself up by booking a vacation in Australia for late in the year. When that got canceled, my wife and I set up video chats with a couple in Melbourne we’d met on earlier trips and had planned to visit.

I’ve since helped their son with a school project and sat with his mum in the parking lot as he took his driver’s test. The four of us have commiserated about our elderly parents coping with isolation. And when they dis America for its handling of the pandemic, I counter with stories of Aussie overreach—like the astrophysicist who ended up in a hospital with magnets stuck in his nostrils. He was trying to invent a gizmo that would sound an alarm if he tried to touch his face.

Sometimes I imagine throwing a big party for my pandemic posse in a year or two, when everyone can travel. I can see it now. Mingling guests. Strolling magicians. Australian wine.

That’s a party I might actually enjoy.

Mr. Glassner is a former president of Lewis & Clark College and author of “The Culture of Fear.”