The pandemic has been a destroyer of worlds. Now we have started emerging from our foxholes, taking account of the damage and cleaning things up.

A lot has been written in the last few weeks on the toll the pandemic has taken on our friendships. In what’s also been called the great pandemic friendship reckoning, post lockdowns people have clocked the asymmetry of certain friendships (“you weren’t checking in on me, and I was always checking in on you”, etc) or that some friendships have become stale and catching up doesn’t fill you with joy, or things have changed and you have changed. No one is the same person they were two years ago.

Right now, a certain emotional Marie Kondo-ing is going on – and it can feel painful. Throw out enough friendships in this process and it may feel as if there’s not many people left.

The pandemic also destroyed weak ties – the friendships, acquaintances and pleasant interactions that occurred as a byproduct of our daily lives. It might have been the barista you saw every day, or the security guard you talked to several times a day at your office, or the other parents at the school gate. It’s also our colleagues – people we don’t select to spend time with but often end up physically with for longer periods than our families. Or we did, before.

While it can feel like some old friendships are disintegrating before our eyes, now is the time to rebuild the weak ties in our lives. A weak tie won’t replace your childhood best friend, but strong weak ties can improve wellbeing and a sense of being connected with wider communities.

Stanford professor Mark Granovetter explored the strength of weak ties in a groundbreaking sociology paper in 1973.

Granovetter found that acquaintances were more likely to tell you about opportunities in work or life, because everyone in your close pool of friends and family has access to the same information. A weak tie brings in news and connections from further afield, introduces you to people that you might one day marry or hear about a job from. Weak ties expand our social networks but they also make us feel connected to a broader world.

Many of us are now in the early stages of the process of reconnecting with entire areas of our lives that have lain dormant for two years. This also includes reconnecting with colleagues. Colleagues is a bland, functional word, but the term can be elastic enough to cover people we’d get a coffee for, people we’d take a bullet for, and people we were happy to have a break from for two years.

Colleagues are not really celebrated much in the annals of friendship – but God, I’ve really missed mine. Being with colleagues in real time makes work better – not just the experience of work, but the actual material product of your work is usually always better with face-to-face collaboration. A great colleague can develop into a great friendship, and in the last two years many of us haven’t had that important relationship in our lives.

As anyone knows who has tried to do Friday night knock-off drinks on Zoom, your colleagues online are not the same as your colleagues in the pub or the break room. There’s no connective tissue in the relationship any more, the encounter feels as flat as the screen.

Banter, office gossip, the serendipity of a conversation with someone from another team in the elevator or the cross-pollination of ideas that leads to something great or fun has been missing for two years now – and although we have been productive working from home, a definite spark is gone.

In How’s Work, a podcast by Esther Perel on the workplace, the psychologist did an episode on a newsroom that worked remotely.

It was unexpectedly sad and moving. These journalists were covering the biggest story of their lives from their bedrooms and were not getting the support from each other that is so necessary to process and execute aspects of the job.

Said one journalist, “Such a big part of being a journalist are those moments of walking across the newsroom and sparking conversations … The collaboration is so much harder to do when we’re so far away.”

Now some are returning to the office. Adjusting will take a while. The great pandemic friendship reckoning is chewing through the social landscape, and workplaces are no different. Many of these previously vibrant work friendships are on ice. Or people have left (without a leaving do, without ceremony, a card, or … anything). New people have started – in fact they started so long ago they are no longer new.

But all this is also exciting. It feels like renewal. Our weak ties are waiting for us – all we have to do is connect.