A Question About Closeness After Isolation

Do you remember the first thing you did after COVID restrictions lifted? For me, it was going to a cafe. It felt so wonderfully familiar: waiting my turn in line, talking to a person while placing my order, finding a table, and doing this thing I do with my coffee cup, which I hadn’t done in so long. I fold a napkin and tuck it under the cup sleeve so any drips from the plastic cover get caught there instead of splashing over me. Necessary? Probably not. But it was a ritual. And more than anything, it reminded me how much structure mattered once it was gone. It made me wonder what kinds of people we become inside the structures we return to after everything falls apart.

Well this newsletter is where I follow small, ordinary moments just like this and begin to ask what they might reveal. What kind of made-up question emerges when a search for meaning resumes after everything has been disrupted?

It reminds me of a similar experience I had during my freshman year of college, when I decided to join a fraternity. It was a choice prompted partly by my need for housing at the end of the year and partly by a desire to belong to something concrete.

Fraternities made sense to me at the time. Not as an ideology or statement – though I received plenty of warnings about that at UC Berkeley – but as a container. Launching into a self-directed life away from home, after year of living in a dorm, a fraternity – particularly a Jewish fraternity like the one I joined – offered something older and preciously simple: shared meals, camaraderie, a place where my absence would be noticed, and where Friday nights meant something a little extra special for everyone. I didn’t have to invent community from scratch; it was waiting, slightly scuffed, with instructions I could follow. On offer was belonging – meaning, if it came, would come later.

As it turns out, the research mostly supports my experience. In the years after campuses reopened after COVID, several studies and institutional reports found that fraternities functioned, for many students, as stabilizing social spaces. Some chapters reported reduced binge drinking, while others invested deliberately in mental health awareness and peer support. My point is that these groups didn’t just survive the reopening of life after COVID, they met a need that was suddenly obvious again. They brought stability.

A fraternity is a tight group and tight groups do more than hold people together, they shape the weather inside. This is where repetition matters: the same jokes, the same stories, the same rituals week after week. Over time these patterns begin to clarify what a group values – which jokes get the biggest laughs, which comments or opinions get rewarded and which ones fade out of view. This is just how all groups work. You learn who you are by learning what fits.

The pandemic intensified these dynamics. Long isolation cranked up the need for closeness and certainty. Spaces where the rules were legible and the bonds felt real became extremely attractive. When campuses reopened, groups that could offer immediate coherence – shared language, shared time, shared obligation – had an advantage. That intensity felt like relief. It could also feel like narrowing.

Political opinions tend to grow in these spaces, not from arguments, but through the atmosphere. Certain things are normal to say, for example. Certain disagreements feel worth having, while others feel exhausting before they even start. Research has long shown fraternities on many campuses skew more conservative than their peers but that fact alone explains very little. What matters more is what happens when a group becomes internally homogenous at the same moment its members are still learning who they are. Add to that the way fraternities have become easy symbols in larger cultural fights – over hazing, diversity, speech, toxic masculinity – and the effect is usually not openness but bracing. Critiques can often feel like a threat and reform can start to feel performative. The instinct to protect one’s group, which is also the instinct to feel safe, grows stronger.

Of course, this isn’t really just about fraternities. They’re a smaller version of something broader. In the United States right now, one end of the political spectrum—energized by grievance, fear, and a hunger for domination—is actively working to narrow the circle of who counts. The result is a culture of hardening: tighter identities, fewer shared facts, and an insistence that vulnerability itself signals weakness. In that climate, small groups don’t drift toward isolation by accident; they’re pushed. Dense bonds form not always because they’re comfortable, but because people feel under siege. And that’s when bridges between groups start to look less like lifelines and more like liabilities. The question, then, isn’t whether tight groups are dangerous—but what they teach us to do with closeness once the pressure lifts.

What I learned from my own experience in AEΠ was that closeness itself is not the enemy. I made so many mistakes while learning how to live with a group of guys. I insulted people. I was reckless with their things. I hurt friends. I generally acted like an idiot. But I also learned what it means to show up for someone reliably. I learned how to encounter someone genuinely. I learned how to disagree with someone without it being a cause for dramatic endings. I grew into myself as I grew into the container housing me – and meaning did come.

One summer, after someone crashed a car into our deck (it was wild – they abandoned the car, which we later learned was stolen, and just ran off while a few of us watched from the windows in disbelief), the deck had been removed entirely. For months, we could sit in the doorway with our legs dangling over the empty lot. One late night, while I was sitting there trying to write a poem, a brother came home after a rough night. His girlfriend had dumped him, and he was still in shock. He told me what happened and I listened as we looked out over a grid of small, wooden posts. When he finished, we hugged, and he went up upstairs – presumably to cry himself to sleep. That was it. Nothing was solved. No great wisdom was imparted. We didn’t even figure out why she broke up with him. It was an encounter made possible by years of living together, and it meant the world to me.

I’ve thought about that encounter many times since. After isolation, connection is not the problem. It’s the beginning. The hope is that bonds formed out of need don’t stop there – that what begins as safety grows into generosity, and what starts inside a house finds a way outward into the world. If we let them, tight bonds can teach us what kind of people we become when we learn to hold one another without shrinking the circle of who counts.