The Friendship Paradox
Americans are afflicted by an “epidemic of loneliness,” according to the surgeon general and dozens of researchers. The phrase conjures a nation of friendless hermits who have no one to invite to their birthday parties. But according to a pair of new surveys, American loneliness is more complex than that. The typical American, it seems, texts a bunch of people “we should get together!” before watching TikTok alone on the couch and then passing out. That is, Americans have friends. We just never really see them.
For a study published in July, Natalie Pennington, a communications professor at Colorado State University, and her co-authors surveyed nearly 6,000 American adults about their friendships. The researchers found that Americans reported having an average of about four or five friends, which is similar to past estimates. Very few respondents—less than 4 percent—reported having no friends.
Although most of the respondents were satisfied with the number of friends they had, more than 40 percent felt they were not as emotionally close to their friends as they’d like to be, and a similar number wished they had more time to spend with their friends. Americans feel “that longingness there,” as Pennington put it to me—“a struggle to figure out how to communicate and connect and make time for” friendship.
Pennington’s research fits with past findings that Americans now spend less than three hours a week with friends, compared with more than six hours a decade ago. Instead, we’re spending ever more time alone. These days, “the number of people we can develop some kind of connection to seems boundless, but the opportunities to develop deep, meaningful, even transformative relationships are much more difficult,” Daniel Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, told me.
[Read: Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out]
This difficulty arises, in part, from a shortage of free time. In 2021, older Millennials—those ages 35 to 44, a demographic that’s likely to have young kids—had 16 fewer minutes of leisure time each day than similarly aged adults did in 2003, according to Bloomberg’s Justin Fox. They’ve reallocated those minutes to sleep, work, and child care. I relate to this: When I was pregnant, I paid to join two different social groups that were supposed to help me make mom friends. Neither group has physically met up in months. We all live far away from one another, and, well, we’re busy moms!
Another big hurdle is the time and effort it takes to schedule a gathering. In recent decades, participation in groups that allow friends to meet up easily—such as unions, civic clubs, and religious congregations—has dwindled. “One of the really great things about these institutions is they regularize contact,” Cox told me. “You’re there at the same time or for the same kind of meetings … with shared values and expectations for behavior. So it really takes a lot of the work off the plate of the individual.”
A slew of books and apps aim to help people tend to their friendships, but these tools all have the same limitation: They put the onus on each individual to initiate and maintain contact. Each person has to send messages and sync up schedules and find the brunch spot that will accommodate everyone’s food allergies. You can’t just show up on a Sunday and find a few hundred of your friends in the same building.
These days, “we have a lot of friends that tend to only share a common history with us, not with each other,” Anna Goldfarb, the author of Modern Friendship, told me. You have one friend you know from work and one friend you know from a previous job, but they don’t know each other. To see them both would require two separate brunch dates when you’re not sure you even have time for one. “We have to come up with individual reasons for each friendship to keep it active,” Goldfarb said.
Because modern friendship requires so much active scheduling of individual friend-dates, people with more resources are now better able to maintain friendships than disadvantaged people. A survey of 6,500 American adults released last month by Cox and one of his colleagues found that college-educated Americans were more likely than those with a high-school degree to host friends and neighbors at their home at least once a month.
[Read: Why dining rooms are disappearing from American homes]
Although everyone these days is pressed for time and less likely to be civically involved, the college educated live near the kinds of places where they’re likely to see the same set of people repeatedly. Cox found that college graduates have greater access to public libraries, parks, coffee shops, and other “third places” than people without college degrees do, and people who had more access to these kinds of spaces—a.k.a. wealthier people—also tended to have more friends. People with money and regular work hours can see friends at Orangetheory or their local bar, Cox said, whereas those who work long days, multiple jobs, or erratic schedules might not be able to. Americans without college degrees are also now less likely to attend religious services, thus losing an opportunity to be around friends for free, than those with a degree. And hoping to simply run into friends in the neighborhood is a long shot: Only a quarter of Americans say most or all of their close friends live in their neighborhood or nearby.
Maintaining friendships in this atomized new world might require ratcheting down expectations. For parents with young kids, a weekly brunch with friends may well be impossible. Instead, Goldfarb suggests getting closer to your friends by taking an interest in things they care about, and asking to hang out for small, specific amounts of time. If you’re friends with a new parent, that is, don’t invite them to a bar 30 minutes away. Ask if you can bring over fresh fruit and chat for 20 minutes. “We need our friends to see us,” Goldfarb said. “We need our friends to take all our roles into account.”