For Asmat people in Indonesian Papua – hunter gatherers who live in and around approximately 220 village settlements in the mangrove swamps of Papua’s coastal and lowland southwest – the spatio-temporal organisation of social co-presence is a key problematic of everyday life. In a social world in which kin groups often disperse themselves across the riverine environment in which they live, and centralised gathering is a socially remarkable exception rather than the norm, the physical act of being together with others is intensely resonant. The COVID-19 pandemic has globalised this concern, as people the world over explicitly work on the arrangement of who is together, where, and when, and rethink the implications of peoples’ togetherness in space and time. Far away from Melanesia, in settings such as central London, people whose daily lives once involved being thrown together with others in ways that may not have immediately appeared socially significant – on the street, on public transport, in the supermarket – now find themselves being asked to reconsider how to be together with, or separate from others in light of co-presence’s newfound salience and risk. In particular, in ‘Western’ settings, new ideas about ‘social distance’ often cut across existing practices of kin togetherness. As people try to manage new forms of physical separation, being with others against this background engenders a newfound intensity of feeling.