- There are some studies that suggest, for example,
that being without a close friend, being lonely,
is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
It's quite hard to measure friendships.
What's the quality of that friendship?
What's the quantity?
When people say they have
a certain number of friends, what does that mean?
Does it mean how many friends they have on Facebook?
It is difficult to get at this quantitatively,
and also people I think are a bit reluctant
to admit sometimes to not having friends.
Loneliness is in some ways quite a stigmatized condition,
and so actually getting people to admit to loneliness is
something that social scientists really struggle with.
I think a big question now is
whether we are facing a 'friendship recession.'
That's the term that Daniel Cox,
a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,
has used to describe this rise in a number of people
who lack a certain number of close friends,
who have fewer people to turn to in times of crisis.
You need a shoulder to cry on,
or at least someone to have a conversation with.
That's less and less likely to be a friend now.
And as society changes in all kinds of ways,
technologically, economically, then I think it's important
that we pay attention to what is very often
an underappreciated human relationship-
which is the friendship.
Friendships come in all shapes and sizes,
and are also formed
in very different ways and in very different places.
One way we form friends is just by being at the same school
as somebody, by growing up in the same place.
Another way is through the situations
you find yourself in, through work.
They're also friends that you form through activities
that are chosen, so through a volunteer activity
or a sport, athletics.
The fourth is online friendships.
Those are friendships that are formed through a screen
or over the internet in one kind or another,
without necessarily ever physically meeting that person.
Across human history,
there's always been a tribal size,
I think to friendship groups,
which is somewhere in the teens, say between 12
and 15 perhaps is a reasonable number to think about.
And then there are close friends.
Some people of course have no close friends,
but most people have at least a close friend.
And most people would say that the ideal number
of close friends to have is somewhere
around the three or four number.
Friendship was something that the ancient philosophers
used to take very seriously.
If you go back to Aristotle, for example,
in some ways seen as the ideal relationship,
and one of the reasons why friendship is,
I think so important and so idealized is
'cause it's a relationship of genuine and radical equality,
and one in which you're not in the friendship
in order to get something out of it for yourself.
There's no sense of dependency.
There's no sense of exchange.
It's not a transactional relationship in any way.
And in most other occasions,
relationships do contain some kind of transaction,
some kind of "what's in this for me?"
But the definition of a friendship is a relationship
where there is nothing in it for you
other than the relationship.
We've seen a decline in lots of traditional institutions
including the family, people marrying later
if they do marry, obviously,
in areas like religion, in some cases the the labor market.
And so, what that means is there's more of a need
for people to have social relationships,
connections outside of those institutions.
That's where friends are hugely important.
But during the same period,
we've seen a real decline in the number of people
who say that they have a number of close friends.
There are a number of factors that could be getting
in the way of forming friendships,
particularly in 21st-century U.S.
Number one is geographical mobility.
People moving away from their homes,
moving to big cities or career opportunities
which necessarily stretches their friendship network.
Parents are spending quite a bit more time on parenting,
on looking after their kids, which squeezes
out the time that they might have had
for friendships before.
There's also a lot of emphasis on work and careers,
what some scholars call 'workism,'
which is a sense that your identity is so what wrapped up
in your work that you don't have as much energy
and time left over for friends.
And then lastly, I'd point to the breakdown of relationships
as marriages break up or couples separate
that can be really fracturing of friendship groups
that have been formed as a couple.
Once they break up the friendship groups
very often get shattered as well.
There are a few downsides to being without friends.
One is lack of access to opportunities.
It turns out that many people get a lot of jobs
and opportunities and chances to go and do things
through their friends-
so friends do act as a communications information channel.
But there are some quite profound effects on health, too:
Mental health, and even physical health.
It's not exactly clear what the causal relationships are,
what's going on, but it is clear that having friends
is protective of your health in various ways.
And so it's not just that being without friends
can make you isolated in a sort of economic
or a social sense, but it can also make you sad.
And being sad it turns out is also bad in terms
of your physical as well as emotional health.
Today, 15% of young men say
that they don't have a close friend.
That was just 3% back in the 1990s.
And so, we're seeing a fivefold increase
in the number of men have no close friends.
Back in 1990, almost half of young men, 45%
said that if they had to turn to someone
in a time of trouble, it would be to a close friend.
But now that's dropped to about 22%.
And in fact, there are more men, about 36%
who say that they would go to their parents.
And so that's a quite a radical transformation
in the social networks
that we've seen, particularly of young men.
The pandemic has been a sort of stress test
for our friendship networks.
Interestingly there,
we see that it's women who've been most affected:
with more than half of women saying they've lost touch
with at least some of their friends.
I think that's because female friendships are more based
on physical relationships on face-to-face time,
whereas male friendships tend to be more mediated
perhaps through activities or technology.
We don't know for sure, but that gender gap is suggestive
of the fact that women's friendships are more in need
of more regular physical contact than male friendships are,
which is maybe why women's friendships are born
the brunt of the impact of COVID
on those friendship networks.
There's obviously a dystopian version
of how these trends could continue, which is
a world of essentially atomized individuals without friends,
isolated, sad, lonely, perhaps in ill health.
I think that's why we have to pay real attention
to these trends, and to recognize that friendship
is incredibly important for human flourishing,
and that people want to make friends.
We are wired to want to be social creatures
and to be friends-
but that it might be harder
for us to do so in certain circumstances.
Circumstances where we're under too much pressure,
where we're too segregated, where the opportunities
to cultivate friendship are not there.
A key lesson that we learn is
that friendships don't form themselves.
Friendship is not a flower that just blooms all on its own.
It's more like a woodworking project that you have
to carve out and continue to work on.
One of the necessary steps to making a friend
is to admitting that you want to make a friend,
to being open to that.
That requires a certain vulnerability.
It requires you, in some ways, to reveal a need, a desire.
And I think as we get older, there's sometimes a sense
of shame that comes along with not having enough friends
and actually saying, "I need a friend,"
is maybe one of the hardest sentences
that any human being can utter.
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