Casual conversations and relationships are very important to older adults

(CNN) – In May, Vincent Keenan traveled from Chicago to Charlottesville, Virginia to attend a wedding; his first trip out of town since the start of the pandemic.
“Hi!” He yelled to customers at a gas station he’d stopped at on the way to the airport. “How’s your day going?” He said he asked the Transportation Security Administration official who checked his ID.

“Isn’t that wonderful?” She exclaimed to the wedding guests, most of whom were strangers.

“Everywhere I went I would have conversations with people I didn’t know,” said Keenan, 65, who retired in December as executive director of the Illinois Academy of Family Physicians. “Even though they just growled at me, it was a great day.”

It wasn’t just close friends Keenan missed during the 15 months he stayed home and tried to avoid COVID-19. There were also dozens of casual acquaintances and people he met at social events, restaurants, church, and other venues.

These relationships with people we barely know or only know superficially are called “weak ties,” a large, amorphous group that may include your neighbors, your pharmacist, members of your reading group, or fellow volunteers at a school. nearby school.

Like Keenan, who admitted he is an unapologetic extrovert, many older adults are gladly renewing these connections after losing touch during the pandemic.

Casual relationships have multiple benefits, according to the researchers who have studied them. These bonds can foster a sense of belonging, provide positive energy surges, motivate us to participate in activities, and expose us to new information and opportunities, all without the emotional problems that often accompany close relationships with family and friends.

Numerous studies have found that older adults with a wide range of “weak” and “close” ties enjoy greater physical and psychological well-being and live longer than people with narrower and less diverse social networks. In addition, older adults with broad and diverse social networks have more opportunities to develop new relationships when their dearest friends or family they move or die.

“Feeling connected to other people, not just those closest to you, turns out to be incredibly important,” says Gillian Sandstrom, senior lecturer in the department of psychology at the University of Essex in England.

Sandstrom’s research showed that the people who talk to more acquaintances every day they tend to be happier than those with fewer such interactions. Even talking to strangers makes people feel less alone and more confident, she found.

Claire Lomax, 76, from Oakland, California, is single and has spent her entire life conversing with strangers. One of her greatest pleasures in recent years was volunteering with the Oakland Police Department, where she asked patrol officers about their families or what was happening at the police station.

“I never wanted to have a man of my own, but I like being around them,” he explained. “So I got mine without any complications, and I felt recognized and appreciated,” Lomax said. Since being fully vaccinated, she has once again volunteered in person at police stations, which is a deep source of satisfaction for her.

Even people who describe themselves as introverts benefit from the positivity that casual interactions can bring.

“In fact, people are more likely to have purely positive experiences with weak ties” because there are no emotional complications, says Katherine Fiori, director of the department of psychology at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York.

Lynn Eggers, 75, a retired psychologist living in Minneapolis, loved going to coffee shops and the gym before COVID-19 hit. “In both places, you can be in a group and alone,” he said. “You can choose to talk to someone or not. But you feel part of the community.”

At a nearby light rail station, Eggers struck up conversations with strangers: two police officers telling him how they had grown up in Somalia, a working-class Texan whose daughter had won a scholarship to Harvard University, a young Vietnamese woman whose parents were worried if he would abandon his culture.

When Eggers stopped taking public transport for fear of COVID-19, he missed “getting these glimpses of other ways of seeing the world.” Instead, she started chatting with neighbors on daily walks around her neighborhood, another way to feel connected.

Many people may have found that neighbors, mail carriers and delivery men became more important during the pandemic simply because they were around when others weren’t, said Karen Fingerman, a professor of human ecology at the University of Texas at Austin. When the restrictions of the pandemic disappear, “the key is to get back out into everyday life” and reconnect with a variety of people and activities, he recommended.

Helen Bartos, 69, a retired clinical psychologist, lives in a condo community in Rochester, New York. “With the covid, a whole group of people began to meet in the open air,” he said. “We would take out chairs and drinks, put on masks and sit down to talk. It was a very strong bond. All of these people are neighbors; now I would call some of them friends.”

Ellie Mixter-Keller, 66, of Milwaukee, turned to social gatherings sponsored by the Meetup activity group six years ago after a divorce turned her life upside down. “It was my salvation. It exposed me to a lot of new people that I didn’t have to go out with or invite to dinner with,” he said. Now that she is fully vaccinated, she is busy almost every night of the week attending Meetup events and informal gatherings organized by the people she has met.

In some cases, differing opinions about virus vaccines have made casual interactions difficult. Patty Beemer, 61, of Hermosa Beach, California, used to go swing dancing two to three times a week before the pandemic. “It was about 20 seconds of chattering and then dancing” before all those events were canceled, he said.

However, in recent months, the swing dancing community in and around Los Angeles has split, with some events requiring proof of vaccination and others open to everyone.

“Before, everyone would dance with everyone, without really thinking about it. Now, I don’t know if it’s going to be like this. I’m not sure how much they will mix,” Beemer said. “And that sense of shared humanity, which is so meaningful to all of us, can be harder to find.”

– Kaiser Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on health issues. Along with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the top three operational programs of the Kaiser Family Foundation. KFF is a non-profit organization that provides health information to the nation.