How Covid group chats became the saving grace of the pandemic

Things my friends have sent over group chats recently: Vaccine updates. Job leads. “Top Gun” GIFs. “Mean Girls” GIFs. Videos of them singing Backstreet Boys songs in ridiculous hats. Hot gossip. Birthday wishes. Links to their writing and projects. Bernie Sanders memes. Requests for useful contact information. Jokes in bad taste. A pic of one friend’s new puppy. Ethical judgments. Bagel flavor judgments (blueberry: absolutely not).

In ordinary times, the group chat would be a gift. In pandemic times, it’s a lifeline.

Our dinner parties and weekends together and nights at the pub have vanished. Most of us are not in the same pandemic pod or even the same state — and while we used to bridge the distance with occasional visits, we now haven’t seen one another for a year. As I have written elsewhere, as hard as so many pandemic losses have been, losing direct access to friends has been one of the hardest and most exhausting. Without their presence, I feel adrift — less sure of what is happening to them, but also less sure of what is happening to me.

The group chat is the next best thing. We’re just lucky the technology was ready for this moment. How did people get through the influenza epidemic without the ability to instantly send a collective of loved ones texts and photos on their pocket computers? I have no idea.

One of the most useful group chats I’m in is a tight-knit set of women that includes my spouse and a few of her longtime friends (including, full disclosure, MSNBC’s own Stephanie Ruhle) — all professionals, all parents and mostly here in Washington, D.C., where I now find myself living. Over this last pandemic year, I’ve moved to a new city, watched my first baby grow from an infant to a toddler and my stepsons tackle remote high school and a bizarro first year of college, left my full-time job and held a tiny Covid-19 wedding. It has been a year of immense personal and professional change. Through it all, I’ve had recourse to these women’s advice, banter and unhinged rants on my ever-present phone.

Stephanie mentioned in a recent podcast discussion with the group that she finds women friends like these to be a good check on bad ideas. But I have found my group-chat friends more often to be a source of reassurance. Right now, no one feels they are doing enough; people are depressed and stressed out and lonely and in some cases grieving, often while both working day jobs and spending umpteen hours caring for other family members. What they most need is someone to tell them to be kind to themselves and that their job is simply to get through this dark period. That, and maybe an inappropriate GIF and a TV recommendation.

The encouragement of the group chat comes with certain implicit understandings. Privacy and loyalty are assumed — what happens in the group is meant to stay there. At the same time, we all know the entire conversation lives on everyone’s phones, intact and screenshottable. As my former colleague Astead Herndon said on Twitter last month: “the key to every group chat is mutually assured destruction. if you’re the only one dropping tea, you’re at risk. if one person is a little too silent, they gotta go.”

That’s funny, but it gets at something real: The group chat demands shared principles. Heidi Cruz found this out the hard way last month, when someone in her group chat snitched on her to the media for trying to rally neighbors to flee with her family to the Ritz-Carlton in Cancún after Texas’ catastrophic winter storm. The problem was that her husband, Sen. Ted Cruz, caught heading out on this luxurious vacation as his constituents literally froze to death, had blamed the trip on their young daughters and implied that he had flown to Mexico only to drop them off. His wife’s texts punctured that story.

Heidi Cruz must have thought she knew the hearts of the people on her text chain. But, in at least one case, she was wrong. The leaker presumably weighed group chat etiquette against the temptation to bust a politician deserting his post and made the choice that made the headlines. One wonders what became of the group after that — recriminations? A purge? Or tumbleweeds?

In my ladies’ group chat, we have already discussed who is most loyal (probably Hilary) and who is most likely to bust us for hypocrisy (Kara, obviously). You can probably guess who’s who in your groups, as well. But looking for snitches is not the point. The group chat runs on trust. It takes care of you, and you take care of it.

If you have not relied on a group chat to get you through the pandemic, good news — it’s not too late to start. This vaccine rollout is going to take months, and if there’s any social medium that’s compatible with a mask and a restricted pod, it’s this one.

Text the people you miss, and get that ball rolling. You have nothing to lose but your solitude — and, should you jet off to the beach in a crisis, your alibi.