Weak connections known as ‘bridge ties’ cross the boundaries that normally structure our lives. We must restore this connective tissue
T
he first time a woman I’ll call Shoshana went toBrandi Carlile’s music festival, she arrived alone. She had just been through another unsuccessful round of IVF. During one of the songs, about motherhood, she began to cry in the middle of the crowd. Then two women she had never met stepped closer and wordlessly wrapped their arms around her until her breathing slowed.
“That’s when I realized,” Shoshana told me in an interview, “this place isn’t just about music.”
Over the next five days, Shoshana would meet dozens of people she would never otherwise have crossed paths with – women from different parts of the world with different life stories. She was doing something most of us are never taught to do: she was connecting to what I call a social pipeline, a loosely connected group of weak ties.
