A Celebration of Friendship in All Its Many Forms

AMONG OTHER THINGS, this past year will be remembered as a period in which certain long-held delusions came to an end. The most troubling of those revelations concerned systemic problems. But some revelations were quieter, and more personal. Twenty twenty was a year in which we were forced to reconsider every relationship in our lives. Some people, shut indoors with their families or partners, realized that they valued them more than they knew; for others, these past 12 months have brought long-overdue (and, often, unpleasant) recognitions: The people they have made their lives with are no longer the people they want to be with. “When this is over” is a promise, but it is also a challenge, and, as restrictions continue to fall away, we will see, in a million small revolutions, how people decide to finish that sentence.

For those of us without partners or families, though, this year brought a different kind of reckoning, and many of us found ourselves relying on our friends in ways we never seriously imagined we would. The quality that makes friendships singular — that they are the one serious relationship in our lives not bound by money or law — is also what makes them fragile, and over the months, many of us found that the most important friendships in our lives were changing. These changes weren’t always for the better: Close friendships fractured or even splintered, hurt by distance, time apart and gaps in circumstance. Once-overlooked inequalities — of devotion, money and privilege — became unignorable, and the subject of resentments.

On the other hand, there was also a flourishing of renewed (and new) friendships. Circumstance accelerated an often-slow process, and some of us found ourselves growing close to, and even dependent upon, people who heretofore had been peripheral figures in our lives. This past year has been a reminder of how vital friendship is (perhaps especially in cities, where many people are single or without families), how sustaining it is and how elastic it can be. There are no rules about what a friendship can be: It needs only effort, and mutual commitment.

When the lockdowns in New York began last March, a friend who was visiting from Paris found himself trapped in the city, and what was an inconvenience for him became a salvation for me. Four or five times a week, we met in Washington Square Park and took hourslong walks, discussing the new information about Covid-19; how lucky we were to have our jobs and homes; how much we missed friends whom we couldn’t see. And although we had been close before the pandemic, the period moved our friendship into a new territory. Every day we walked, therefore, we were venturing deeper into the same beautiful landscape together. On Wednesdays, I’d pick out a recipe, and on Fridays, he and his boyfriend would make dinner. I’d come with a small gift — a bunch of Easter lilies from the corner bodega; a bit of marzipan from the market — and leave with leftovers, fresh-baked bread, a log of frozen cookie dough. For many weeks, the three of us saw only one another, and I could not have survived those weeks without them. In June, my friend returned to Paris, but the friendship has endured — a treasured and unexpected gift from this strangest of years.

THIS ISSUE IS a celebration of friendship, and the many different permutations it takes. It is also a feat of magazine-making. Our dedication to respecting various, ever-changing Covid-related restrictions meant that shoots were canceled and rescheduled at the 11th hour (you can read about the safety precautions our art and photo teams took here). The pandemic also made several editorial determinations for us: We weren’t, for example, able to photograph as many elderly people as we wanted to, nor those with serious medical conditions. Travel was complicated, which meant that most of the shoots were concentrated in major cities.

Along with smell, Covid robbed us of another sense: touch. We prioritized people who had been sheltering or working together so we could capture them holding one another — poses that, a year after this illness changed the world, startle with their intimacy.

But even those who could not or preferred not to touch were able to convey their affection for one another. That, too, has been a lesson of this year: that as much as the context may change, our need for our friends remains. Of all the new skills we’ve been forced to learn, this may be one of the greatest — as long as we can stay forgiving and gracious, then friendship can withstand the most punishing of climates. And if its shape may be different, the love that gave it meaning is not. We just have to learn to see it anew. — HANYA YANAGIHARA