Pandemic may leave scars on relationships

In some cases, COVID-19 has created rifts between family members, friends

The email subject line “They’re coming for your grandbabies” told Steve Joordens he was in for another week of head and heartache.

During the pandemic, Joordens has been in a dispute with a family member who is a staunch anti-vaxxer and antimasker. Over time, he’s watched their positions on COVID-19 conspiracy theories grow more extreme.

“Every time I see an email from them in my inbox, I start to feel like I’m in for about four or five days of being really messed up,” Joordens said. “Because I know I’m not going to be able to resist replying.” And so the tug of war begins. The pandemic has altered every aspect of life and, in some cases, has created a rift in families and relationships, especially when one person is known for their pandemic policing while the other refuses to follow public health guidelines.

We’ve come a long way since “We’re all in this together”; it was supposed to be a social contract that we all took on, with some taking it as a personal job to remind friends and family of the importance of pandemic restrictions.

Now, with Canada having one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and a staged reopening promising a return to normality, they must contemplate relinquishing that responsibility and mending the relationships that have been affected.

Joordens, a psychology professor at University of Toronto Scarborough, would attempt to sway his relative by sending back factual information debunking the dubious claims, which would only cause his relative

to double down and send more links from fringe websites and questionable sources.

“At some point I’m just like, stop sending links,” Joordens recalls. “The crazy thing is we’re both still trying to reach each other. Throughout all this, we’re living in different realities but neither of us is willing to give up.”

These positions often come with very real health implications. In Joordens’s case, his relative has power of attorney for his mother in New Brunswick, who has severe dementia. They refuse to allow her to get vaccinated.

His worry is that if his mother were to get very sick while unvaccinated, he would be unable to visit her on her deathbed.

He says the conflict with his relative over their refusal to believe in vaccines or masks has been the most stressful aspect of living through the pandemic, far more than the fear of actually getting infected.

He’s reached the point where he no longer tries to change their beliefs, but is now trying to salvage what he can from their relationship.

“I’ve told them in countless emails, can we not just have emails where we talk about anything but this? And we just can’t seem to do it.”

At times, he says he feels like he lost his mother to dementia as she sometimes no longer recognizes him. Now it’s almost like he’s losing another family member to a different psychological disease, he said.

“It’s doing a very similar thing, which is taking (them) away,” Joordens said.

The Star spoke with several people who said they’ve experienced similar issues with family, but did not want to speak on the record out of fear of making the situation worse. One woman said her son has cut off communication over her insistence that he wear a mask and refused to call her on Mother’s Day.

Tanya Guilbault, a teacher in Edmonton, hasn’t run into issues with immediate family, but says she has lost friends over their anti-mask and antivaccine positions. When she confronted one good friend online about her anti-vaccine beliefs, it was the last conversation they had.

“She just kind of dropped me as a friend,” Guilbault said. “She cleaned out her whole Facebook, anyone who challenged her was out. And that made me really sad.”

She has noticed how people are deeply defensive of their positions and react quite viscerally when confronted.

“We can’t have a conversation,” she said. “It’s always quite aggressive and defensive … You’re ending up in a heated, really emotional, time-consuming (situation) … it’s a lot easier to just ignore it.”

But Guilbault is not the type to stand on the sidelines and said she doesn’t regret confronting friends whose beliefs she sees as dangerous, even if it means losing touch. Still, she hopes to eventually hang up the pandemic policing badge as we move toward normality.

“I just realized I can challenge, challenge, challenge, but there’s a point where you just have to say something that brings you together and bridges that. Because you don’t really want to lose relationships over this,” she said.

“We’re all gonna come out of this, and we’re going to have to find each other again … I’m bridging that now,” she added.

Guilbault said sparring with friends over issues like masks and vaccines while experiencing all the other challenges of living through a pandemic has been “very disheartening and it does take a toll.” But she said it’s been worth it.

“We’re living history. I want to look back and feel like I was part of the solution. I don’t want to be like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember I protested and I did this and I spat on that person.’ I want to remember this as yeah, I helped humanity get through this.”

Joordens, whose research as a professor overlaps with what he’s experiencing with his relative, said it’s not enough for someone opposed to vaccines to simply avoid immunization. They need to get other people on their side — hence why they won’t stop sending him links.

“It’s not just that this becomes a dispute … for the people who get entrenched, it really becomes a cause.”

Once much of the world is immunized, Joordens is hoping for something like the Y2K effect — the kind of anti-climactic event that happened when the world didn’t descend into chaos when the clocks struck midnight at the end of 1999.

“Nothing happens. It just sort of dissipates. I worry that won’t be the case … if you have those sorts of nasty interactions over a long period of time. I think it is going to colour relationships,” Joordens said.