Is anyone else going through realizing that with the isolation of working motherhood + Covid + having to live far from friends, they’ve let their friendships become social media friendships? How do I fix this and reconnect with people?

We moved to a suburb and had my one and only kid in 2017. It was very socially isolating to be a new mom in a town 45 minutes away from my core group of friends and I wasn’t prepared for how I would navigate the world socially when 2 of my closest friends moved away entirely when my son was just 6 months old. It was so hard to get out and meet people in my new area when I was still in the thick of pumping, breastfeeding, and lack of sleep all while working 40-55 hours a week.

I felt like I was only just coming out of social rut in late 2019 / early 2020 - I had joined a local board, was connecting more with local moms, my one close friend left started coming to me more and I felt like I could travel to meet with her more. Then Covid hit. We bubbled with one local family (my son’s best friend) who we became close to but we’ve had to since move from where we were because we got priced out and couldn’t afford our suburb anymore + my spouse lost his job and our condo fees were getting outlandish to the point where we were worried that if we didn’t sell, we’d never attract a buyer.

Now I’ve been in my new town even further away (90 minutes) from my largest cluster of friends and acquaintances. The only plus is that I’m a little closer to two good friends, but the one who is 40 minutes away is downright agoraphobic and germaphobic post-Covid (no judgement) and struggles to meet up with me and the other is a 3 hour train ride away. I’m trying to meet people, but folks are a little standoffish. Other than a few playdates and seeing my son’s friends parents at school events and extracurriculars, I’m feeling pretty lonely.

All of my friendships essentially exist online and on texts now. A lot of them have turned into us just sending each other IG posts and then talking about the posts. But half of those people are planning to leave Meta now or have already left because of all the bullshit.

Has anyone had their social life get this bad? Were you able to fix it? Any advice on where to start? We all hated Zoom for a long time but I’m tempted to ask folks to start connecting there again. Or maybe over emails? What’s making it feel even more of a lost cause is that I tried to look up my local libraries book group, tried to join a local nonprofit as a volunteer and tried to go to on Meetup.com but all of the meetings and meetups? They all switched to Zoom during the pandemic and never switched back over.