No matter who you are, where you are, or what you are, the past year has been decidedly tough on all of us. Not only that, but I’d argue it’s been devastatingly tough on many friendships. It certainly was for me. I’d been best friends with “Susan” for thirty years, give or take a few time outs. We’d gotten to know each other working in the financial department of a large ski resort and we’d go cross country skiing at least three times a week on our lunch breaks. We enjoyed the outdoors, adventure, intellectual things. I was a good best friend. I watched her two-year-old daughter for three days when her son was born and I babysat for a week when she and her husband went on a weeklong vacation. I would housesit her cat and I would walk her dog. I was there for all her kid’s big events, birthdays, school plays, graduations. I would counsel her, and she would counsel me. And when the time eventually came, we supported each other through our divorces. She and her daughter stayed with me for a month when she went through hers. When she didn’t know how to move on with her life, I encouraged her to go back and get her CPA certificate, which she did, and I helped her find her first job when she qualified. She was my Maid of Honor when I remarried. We were tight! But we had problems. She was raised in a wealthy old St. Louis family and status was bred into her. She had a compulsion to be with the right people, almost a networking sort of thing and when she became a mother, she fostered friendships to get her kids into the right daycare, the right schools, the right clubs, the right circle of friends. In her quest to take helicopter motherhood to new heights, I’d get caught in her blades. She hurt my feelings numerous times throughout the years, saying something mocking about me in front of others…, you know, something that’s supposed to come off as funny, but has a biting, taunting edge to it. She simply was brash and lacked a filter. I had a long fuse…” Susan was just being Susan.” I understood her. I forgave her. And truth be told, because I didn’t have children of my own, I liked being a peripheral part of that life.

I know a thirty-year friendship will have moments that aren’t ideal, but there were red flags in ours. One of the biggest ones was when I was going through my divorce and I ended up in the hospital fighting for my life with a septic joint/staph infection caused by a mountain biking accident. Susan showed up at the hospital, but I remember to this day, she didn’t show up like other friends did.

The years, as did our friendship ebbed and flowed, but then the kids grew up, I grew up, and then Covid hit. Susan was extremely concerned about the virus and had ordered special antibacterial neck gators even before the virus had hit U.S. shores. In March, I did something that Susan felt was unsafe. My husband and I went “skinning” (hiking on skis) up a local ski area. She’d told me that this ski area had been closed for skinning because it had been so popular during the Covid lockdown that management didn’t feel it was safe. A few days later, we were driving by and it looked like they had reopened it. The runs were being groomed and there were numerous cars parked in the parking lot and people putting their skins on, grinning from ear to ear. We thought they had decided to open for a day, and to play it safe, we went to an upper parking lot to avoid any contact with people. After being cooped up for a week, we had a fabulous morning, but when I told Susan about it, she went ballistic, chastising and scolding me like a child. She simply wouldn’t take my word for it that the ski area looked open and that’s why we went. That’s what broke our friendship…after several emails attempting to explain myself, I realized that my definition of a friend is someone who trusts my word and my integrity. Susan simply wasn’t willing to do that and we haven’t seen each other for almost a year now. She’s attempted to reconnect, but I decided that thirty years is a really good number. I wish her well, I honor all the lessons each of us has gained from it, but our friendship has run its course and it’s time to leave a void where a new friend or friends can eventually fill that space.

As part of this learning, healing process, I’ve spent quite a bit of time reflecting on Susan and my other friends as we’ve navigated this difficult year in our own ways. One thing I keep coming back to is the Enneagram, a system of personality typing that describes patterns in how people interpret the world and manage their emotions. The Enneagram has 9 different personality types, but what intrigues me are the three basic “instincts” that any personality type can be innately drawn to. We have all three of these instincts, but there is one that will be a driving force behind our personality and motivations. The first instinct is Self Preservation. This person values safety, provision and comfort above all else. The focus is to survive by reserving, gaining, or needing resources. A Self-Preservation oriented person is motivated by being safe and protected. The second instinct is Sexual: This person values experience as the most important inclination (and it isn’t necessarily related to sex at all.) The focus is to have deeply intense, novel and meaningful experiences above all else. The sexual person is motivated by action and stimulation. The third instinct is Social. This person values the social experience and how they fit into that hierarchy above all else. Community and their contribution to it is their driving motivation. The social person is motivated by connection to others.

Thinking about these three instincts makes me understand why people we know are behaving so differently in this pandemic. In particular, a Self-Preservationist would be highly stressed going anywhere that has even the most remote possibility of exposing them to Covid. They are the ones with the gloves, the double masks, the cartloads of toilet paper. They’re the ones who would probably be willing to lie that they’re a caregiver on the Covid vaccination form if it meant they could a jab a few steps ahead of their peers. They are hoarders during a time of crisis and simply don’t care if their grabbing one more pack of toilet paper means you, a socialist, goes without. You, a Socialist who values community can’t understand why a Self-Preservationist has the nerve to take the last pack of toilet paper when she already has six in her cart! And neither the Self Preservationist nor the Socialist can understand why the Sexualist would get on a plane and fly to Bermuda when it’s a pandemic for God’s Sake!… but they’ve been pent up for months and they’ll go completely mad without a change of scenery. Thinking of the enneagram and the three instincts has given me a lot more compassion to my fellow human. No, I don’t support those who refuse to wear masks, and I do believe we should all get vaccinated, but other than that, we all must decide our own ways of dealing with this crisis in a way that keeps our own sanity. I’m particularly sensitive to my Self Preservationist friends because I think this pandemic has instilled much more fear in them than others, but it’s been so long now that those who thrive on social connections and experiences are really suffering as well.

My friend Sue (definitely a Self-Preservationist), hasn’t been to a grocery store since early March, 2020. She orders via Instacart, brings the groceries into the garage with her mask on, disinfects everything, then puts the cold items in the garage fridge, leaves the non-perishables on the garage floor for three days and after that, brings everything inside. You’ve got to love her. If everyone was like Sue, we would have stopped this virus in its tracks last April! But as the Enneagram teaches, we’re not all like Sue and the Sexualists and Socialists among us would have died an early death living that way. I’m a Sexualist and if I can get my outdoor yahoos by going skinning and staying 50 feet away from another Sexualist doing the same, so be it. At least I’m not hopping on an airplane, and if I am, at least I’ll be wearing a mask. Bottom line, it helps to understand each other’s fears and motivations and to be less judgmental while we’re all navigating uncharted territory in the best way we know how. If you lost a friendship during Covid, was it a friendship that was already past its sell by date, or… are you simply a different Enneagram instinct and you don’t quite speak the same language at the moment? It’s worth knowing which it is.