Navigating the Friendship Recession

“Friendship isn’t a big thing. It’s a million little things.”

In my post “Repairing Damage in Retirement,” I relayed that friends are one of the five balls of life that we try (often unsuccessfully) to juggle. There’s been a decline in the number of close friends people have as a broader trend. And this trend affected me, too.

What are close friends?

Robin Dunbar, an emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology from Oxford, used concentric circles to describe some benchmarks (in multiples of 3) for the number and types of friends that people can generally handle based on human nature.

These circles describe the following types of friends and their number:

• Intimate relationships. 1.5. This is a weird number but represents the average. For men, it’s generally the romantic partner. For women, it’s often the romantic partner and a “BFF” (an initialism of the phrase “best friends forever”, referring to a closest friend).

• Support group: 5. People who would drop anything to help you in crisis and whom you would involve in your biggest life decisions.

• Confidantes: 15. People with whom you might discuss life, challenges and opportunities.

• Good friends: 50. People whom you might see at big weekend barbeques, birthday parties, or other more regular social gatherings.

• Friends: 150. I like to call this the “weddings and funerals” crowd.

• Acquaintances: 500. For me, this is like the “Facebook friends” crowd.

• Known names: 1,500. For me, this is like the “LInkedIn contacts” crowd.

These benchmarks are rough and have some fluidity as the inner circles require more energy than the outer circles. For example, people may choose to have one or two more people in their support group (“the 5”) but then get constrained to maintain a smaller circle of confidantes (“the 15”).

The “Friendship Recession”

Much is being written about how we are in a Friendship Recession. Wikipedia defines “friendship recession” as a term used to describe the decline in the number of close friends people have in the United States and Canada, which began in the late 20th century. Statistics demonstrate the broader trend, showing a sharp drop in the number of close friends people report having between 1990 and 2021. Coincidentally, this period coincides almost exactly with my pre-retirement working life (1990 to 2018).

The alarming part of this statistic is that people reporting having NO close friendships quadrupled from 3% to 12%. In other words, close to 1 in 8 people report having no close friends!

The survey also indicated in a footnote an issue with the definition of “close friend.”

The definition of “close friend” is subjective and open to interpretation. The results are in keeping with previous work on the social networks. The American National Social Network Survey conducted in 2020 found that 17 percent of Americans had no close social ties, defined as someone the respondent had talked to in the past six months about an important personal matter.

In this context, we don’t know how survey respondents correlated “close friend” to the concept of intimate relationships, support group, or confidantes. However, I realized when looking at these numbers myself, I didn’t know how I would answer this question.

Why was enumerating close friends hard?

While I have always had friends, I believe that I allowed many close friendships to atrophy.  Why?

• We moved around a lot. Since going away to college and starting a career in Silicon Valley, Marsha and I have moved 8 times (from Menlo Park to San Mateo, to Emerald Hills, to Newcastle, to Los Altos (3 different houses), to Seattle, and to Portland). Each time we changed venues, we lost some contact with old friends and had to invest in making new friends. We have some old friends whom we have a long history with. We can pick up where we left off just as if no time had passed, even though we almost never really talk anymore.

• Career prioritization / “workism”. Culturally, I perhaps didn’t have good examples of men having friends. My dad worked all the time and didn’t really “hang out with the guys” playing sports, watching sports, or even just socializing for non-work reasons. I suppose I fell into similar habits by example, albeit not at all as severely! I did have many “workplace friendly” relationships where we might have good conversations at work or at work-related events, but often these friendships were less likely to continue outside of work. Still, I am grateful for the “work friends” I did make over the years, but I didn’t always do the best job at keeping in contact.

• Mental exhaustion. I mentioned before how I was really an introvert who played an extrovert at work! Using the analogy of a “social battery,” my social battery would drain throughout the day at work, appearing as an extrovert, and then I would leave work fully depleted. Recharging for me was being alone, watching sci-fi movies as a passive observer. I could not be an active participant with the world around me. It took too much from me. 

• Pure time constraints. Our time was taken up by working, as well as with family activities. Raising kids in the modern day just involves a lot of music recitals, sporting events, and driving around in general. There were interactions with other adults at all the kid stuff for sure, but I likely didn’t make the right investments because of mental exhaustion (above) to make close friends.

The good news is that I didn’t fall into the statistics of people who couldn’t talk through important life issues, as I have a very supportive “intimate relationship” with Marsha. The great thing here is that Marsha took on a strong support role in her life for both me and our kids. She helped me regulate myself, and she was rock solid, virtually forcing me to take career breaks when burning out. She was adamant that I use my time off during career breaks for myself rather than to use the time to just help her around the house. If there were an Oscar for “Best Supporting Actor” in the world of relationships, Marsha would be a repeat winner.

I also definitely had a set of “confidantes,” whom I could discuss life, challenges, and opportunities with. We would run every Sunday and just talk about jobs, marriage, kids, health, and other subjects. Only after I moved away did I really appreciate how I didn’t have anything like this anymore, and I took an interview with Fatherly about this group. They are a great group of guys.

Still, as we moved yet again to a new city to retire, we broke our day-to-day routines that took time to nurture and develop. I realized then the need to put even more intentionality into my own friendship circles to better juggle the balls of life.

What next?

I believe any knee-jerk reactions would not be effective, as I recognize that friendships are not about one big thing but about a million little things. As such, I have been trying to “turn the knobs” here to make small but intentional adjustments.

Last year during Mental Health Awareness Month, I was asked by a local Portland friend, Reggie, to contribute to his YouTube channel #MHAM-One Minute for Mental Health, and I decided to speak on this topic of these small adjustments.

(original video on YouTube here)

Here was a basic description for some of the small adjustments I have been making:

1. Regularity. We're all busy, so it's been important to find some reason or cadence for regular touches. With my old running group from Silicon Valley, we’ve been exchanging Wordle scores every day. Wordle provides an excuse to text regularly about other stuff in our lives. I found this to be a successful low barrier, easy daily habit with a group of close friends that was contending with bridging physical distance.  Based on this experience, I ended up replicating this habit with other friend groups, too. Based on a recommendation from our younger daughter, I’ve also become a fan of “The Pattern”, which is a horoscope app that provides commentary, not only on predicted friendship patterns but also about what might be going on in friends’ lives. While I don’t know what to think about horoscopes, this app is so well done and provides some interesting conversation fodder for text threads with friends. And then, with a group here in Portland, we get together every week for beers on Thursday afternoons. I have set up a biweekly Facetime with a friend in California, a monthly “shoot the shit” with a former work friend, and a monthly Teams call with an old college friend on the East Coast, too. Just to say “Let’s do this again.” is not enough. I am grateful for the people that are willing to commit along with me to ongoing friendship habits. I appreciate the reciprocal intentionality. 

2, Vulnerability. We have to let our conversations go beyond work, games, news, and weather. To work on this in relationships, I realized that much of this is about being more vulnerable with myself and to acknowledge my own feelings and needs. (More reading here and here). This exploration is a big part of why I am doing this Substack. I recognize here that men have problems with these topics, and it’s hard to bring them up in natural conversation. Some of the ability to be vulnerable comes with the regularity just mentioned. During our beer groups, one of the guys brought up that his wife wanted to seek marriage counseling. He would not have called us up to have a meeting about this one topic, but the barrier was lower given that we were already together to sit, drink beers, and talk anyway! So, I think vulnerability comes with exploration and it comes with regularity. It also comes with trust, comfort and a safe space to share.

3. Confrontation. Sometimes, we have to learn how to confront each other when necessary to provide the best support. One of my favorite questions came from our older daughter, which is “do you need sympathy, support, or solutions?” Sometimes, it’s easy for guys to say “Yeah! That sucks balls, man!” (sympathy), and it’s also easy for guys to get into solutions-mode. Of course, not everyone wants confrontation and some would rather just kick back and have a beer. The problem is that, sometimes, the right kind of support requires confrontation to help people understand when they might benefit from taking on a different world view. For example, I had a friend facing a gray divorce who didn’t think his wife should get half. While there was sympathy that they were going through this, I chose to confront his world view. Personally, I appreciate having people in my life willing to challenge me and to be challenged on perspectives, even when one of us doesn’t want to hear it. Satya Nadella of Microsoft is famous for the growth mindset, which is to value being a “Learn-It-All” rather than a “Know-It-All.” Needless to say, my friend hasn’t gotten back to me since then, but I feel he needed to be challenged. I can be brutally honest (a little too brutal). My kids think I have undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder (more on this later). Still, finding the right ways to do confrontation requires some finesse, and I have been working on this. I have tried to use the “ask questions” and “tell stories” method of confrontation more than direct “Dude, I don’t think you’re being right about this” approach).

4. Prioritization. This one word may seem a little harsh, I know. To give time to someone or something, is a gift. Time is limited for all of us. And like everything that is cherished or limited in nature, we need to be discerning. Shedding light on the nature of friendships is one reason why I like the Dunbar circles, as they help to highlight what levels of time and energy that we and our friends are capable of devoting to each other. Investments in some connections leave less time for others. Sometimes saying “no” to even super great people is OK, and being said no to is also OK. It’s just the result of all of our limitations of time and energy. Maintaining close friendships requires that people say “no” to others from time-to-time.

I still have a lot of adjustments to do here in my own life, so by no means am I a “master” in this domain. There remain some relationships that I want to find the right ways to invest more in.

I hope you join me in taking the journey to get more intentional about building closer friendships. I believe that friendships are important ingredients for balance in our lives.