THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Friday, April 3, 2020 |R7
W
hen it comes to so-
cializing in the corona-
virus age, Charlotte
Guy and a friend are in
the same boat. Literally.
Ms. Guy, age 63,
lives on the Pascagoula River in Gautier,
Miss., about 20 miles east of Biloxi. To
socialize, Ms. Guy’s best friend picks
her up from her dock. Ms. Guy climbs in
the back of a 21-foot boat, while her
friend pilots the boat closer to the bow.
Ms. Guy brings her own glass of wine
and disinfectant wipes to clean the
parts of the boat she touches.
Ms. Guy, who works in clothing sales,
doesn’t want to be a source of infection
for her friend, who lives alone. Nor does
Ms. Guy want to carry an infection home,
where she lives with her adult son and
husband. So the friends made the tough
decision to abandon home visits and car
outings—but they felt safe meeting out-
doors, at a distance. The compromise,
Ms. Guy says, lets them “have an actual
interaction with a real person.”
It is a yearning many are feeling—
and trying to satisfy, often with great
difficulty. For those spared the severe
restrictions that prohibit any socializ-
ing, the stakes couldn’t be higher: Let-
ting an infected person into your home
can affect the other people in your
household and, in a worst-case scenario,
put their lives at risk.
As infections spread rapidly, many
Americans are creating closed circles of
family or select friends to form in-person
“safety networks” where everyone sees
only the others in the same group, says
Benjamin Karney, professor of social psy-
chology at the University of California,
Los Angeles. But forming these networks
is complicated, since everyone has a dif-
ferent idea of who is trustworthy.
Even members of a single household
may disagree on who should be part of
the closed group. Prof. Karney sees par-
allels between socializing during today’s
pandemic and the assumptions people
had to make about sexual partners at
the height of the 1980s AIDS crisis. “We
don’t know enough to make an in-
formed decision...so people are making
their own rules of thumb,” he says.
As of this week, more than half of
the country is in lockdown mode, with
stay-at-home orders minimizing any so-
cializing with non-household members.
But these stay-at-home orders vary
state by state. Each poses different
challenges.
In Seattle, Jill Duffield is getting cre-
ative with how to expand her family’s
quarantine orbit without bending the
strict shelter-in-place rules too much. On
a recent afternoon, a neighbor came over
to her sloped backyard to play on a dif-
ferent level of the outdoor area with Ms.
Duffield’s son, Aaron, who has asthma.
The two were far enough away from each
other that they could use walkie-talkies
to communicate. Ms. Duffield, 45, and her
husband “were really struggling with try-
ing to balance what’s important,” she
says, even asking a doctor for advice.
“We debated for a long time.”
Others under lockdown are preparing
for the day things ease up by planningin advance. Kimberly Weiss, a 38-year-
old attorney from the Chicago suburb of
Lake Forest, Ill., and her husband, Mi-
chael Weiss, hope to expand their orbit
to one family that fits all the demands
for a little bit of safe socializing.
Ms. Weiss picked neighbors where the
children correspond in age to four out of
her five children. Online, she watched the
wife doing at-home fitness classes and the
husband demonstrating his cooking, while
her children played online games with the
other family’s children. All this behavior
made her believe her neighbors when they
said the children weren’t leaving the
house. She made sure with their mutual
housekeeper that the family also tempo-
rarily paused their home cleaning. “We
really have to be certain,” says Ms. Weiss.
When it comes to such high-stakes
meetings, the gloves are off. “People are
certainly trying to police each other,”
says Erin Vogel, a social psychologist at
the Stanford Prevention Research Center
in California. “It’s tough for people to
figure out what the boundaries are with
the people in their lives.”
Those boundaries can surprise some
people when they run through their fami-
lies. When a niece came to drop off hand
sanitizer outside the home of 65-year-old
Adelena Quevedo, she told her aunt they
needed to stay 6 feet away. The niece wore
latex gloves and carefully tossed the sani-
tizer toward the Miami-based interior de-
signer. While thankful, Ms. Quevedo was
caught off-guard by the social distancing.
“They think we [seniors] should be locked
up,” she joked.Some Americans think they are play-
ing it safe by socializing only with famil-
iar co-workers. Others, when they dine
together, order delivery and opt for dis-
posable silverware.
The issue can be even more compli-
cated for multiple generations living un-
der one roof. With six adults and two
young children, everyone has a different
idea of the quarantine in her household,
says Malerie Holcomb-Botts who lives in
Kailua, Hawaii, with her husband, in-
laws, brother and another friend. While
she is scheduling virtual play dates for
her children and virtual hangouts for
herself, her elderly mother-in-law has
taken a different view. Cheryl Botts, the
mother-in-law, says she isn’t changing
her habits to live in total isolation. “I’m
not a worrying type of person,” says the
74-year-old retired homemaker. She says
she invited a friend to the backyard, but
the friend declined.
For larger families, it’s important to es-
tablish rules for how the entire family will
interact with anyone outside of the house-
hold, says Rebecca London, a sociologist at
the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Otherwise socializing can breed resent-
ment. Dr. London recently declined a book-
club meetup in someone’s driveway be-
cause it didn’t align with her own family’s
social-distancing policy.
In places where socializing is now for-
bidden, many are caught policing loved
ones across state lines. New Yorker Scott
Starrett, 48, was so shocked that his 79-
year-old father was still playing tennis in
South Carolina that he called almost daily
to ask him to stop. The composer for tele-
vision, who isn’t leaving his own apart-
ment, didn’t have to beg for long: “Thank
goodness they shut down the league, so
now he’s off the hook from me nagging.”Ms. Dizikis a writer in Chicago. Email
her [email protected].In a series called “How I Cope,” we speak
to people about the things they’re doing
to relieve stress. Here’s our conversation
with Brené Brown, a research professor
at the University of Houston who has
spent the past 20 years studying shame,
vulnerability, courage and empathy. Her
2010 TED talk, The Power of Vulnerabil-
ity, has been watched over 45 million
times. She is also an author and host of
the “Unlocking Us” podcast. Ms. Brown
lives in Houston with her husband, Steve,
and their two children.BYALINADIZIKWho Is Allowed in
Your Social Orbit?
People struggle to
create a safe zonebest way possible. Some days I suck at it,
but I’m trying to acknowledge that yes, she
loves us, but no longer having her freedom
and autonomy—and the life that she’d built
for herself—is a very real loss for her. Our
adult kids who have been forced to come
home need love, support and space.Reality-checking my expectations
There are going to be many frustrations in
the coming weeks, so I’m allowing myself to
feel a lot of tough stuff and not always get
it right. It’s also important to be realistic.
Like a lot of kids, my 14-year-old son is do-
ing online learning for the first time. I can’t
expect him to sit down in front of a screen
for three, four, five hours. Children can do 30
minutes and then they need a break. You
can be the best teacher—or parent—in the
world but attention spans don’t last much
longer than that.Practicing resilience
I’m doing everything I can to stay strong in
all the areas of my life that I have control
over. I’m cooking a lot and trying to eat
healthily. I’m exercising and praying. I’m also
very aware of how kind we need to be at
the moment—both to ourselves and each
other—even though our capacity for kind-
ness is probably lower than normal because
we’re feeling so much hard stuff.
I’ve been on so many Zoom calls for
work over the past week, and every time,
at least one person has ended up crying
because their toddler is crawling up their
back or their partner is screaming at them
not to talk so loudly. Working from home
requires us to combine our personal and
professional lives, and that comes with
huge challenges. We have to work on our
resilience in every way we can, but we also
have to give ourselves permission to say,
“This is my first global pandemic. I’m deal-
ing with a lot, I’m feeling a lot of compli-
cated stuff and that’s OK.”
—Ellie Austin FROM TOP: RYAN INZANA; KARA TRAIL; ICONS: ISTOCKTHE MEDICAL EFFECTSIs taking common-
cold remedies a
good practice? For
example, DayQuil?A: Experts saythis is helpful
for controlling symptoms,
which is the mainstay of
treating the new coronavi-
rus. But it isn’t a cure and
won’t prevent you from in-
fecting others.When will it be safe
to travel again?
What are the odds
that we’ll still be
housebound this
summer?A: The shortanswer is: It
depends on whom you ask.
No one really knows for
sure, and predictions vary
wildly.
Based on reports that
China is slowly reopening,
however, travel-industry
leaders, such as Marriott In-
ternational Chief Executive
Arne Sorenson, have been
cautiously optimistic that at
least some major hotel prop-
erties will be up and running
again by summer. In New
York City, some hotels have
said they may reopen in May
or June. Others are only tak-
ing reservations for July and
beyond.
But those timelines could
shift. “We are in wait-and-
see mode,” says Chris Hey-
wood, executive vice presi-
dent of NYC & Co., the city’s
official tourism organization.Q & A
Limit screen time
I allow myself a 30-minute Covid-19
update from a reliable news source
every day, but other than that I work
hard to add calm to my life. As some-
one who has studied human nature
for 25 years, I wasn’t completely
shocked to see that “Contagion” [a 2011
film about a lethal airborne virus] was re-
cently trending as the top film on Apple’s
iTunes, but we need to recognize that the
things we watch have the power to pour
gasoline on our anxiety. We have to make
the choice to step awayfrom screens—now
more than ever. Feelings of boredom are
better for us than spending the whole day
online driving ourselves to panic.Reading and listening to audiobooks
I have a stack of books in my house, and I’m
reading fiction that is beautiful, lyrical, posi-
tive and about the human spirit. There’s
plenty of nonfiction too. I’ve just finished
“Untamed” by Glennon Doyle and “The Art
of Gathering” by Priya Parker. I’m a big
walker, and I’ve been listening to the Cormo-
ran Strike novels by Robert Galbraith [a
pseudonym of J.K. Rowling].Respecting my children’s independence
I have a 20-year-old daughter who has had
to pack up her stuff and leave college as a
result of the pandemic. I know that she’s
feeling a lot of grief, loss and fear at the mo-
ment, so I want to be there for her in theHow Author Brené
Brown Is Relieving
Stress During the Crisis
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