According to a study published in the Journal PLOS Medicine, loneliness rivals the health risks of smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Coined at the peak of the Covid 19 pandemic, by a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Professor Daniel Cox, the term ‘friendship recession’ encapsulates the recent surge of people admitting to having a lack of close friendships. In fact, in a study by Cox, he reported a fivefold increase in American men saying that they had no close friends, from 3% to 15%.
While Cox’s study focused on the male population of America, female friendships were disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Over half of women said that they lost touch with some of their friends, according to research from an American Perspectives survey in 2021. As stated in an article by Tarra Bates-Duford (Ph.D, LMFT) in the online magazine Psych Central, the nature of female friendships is rooted more in face-to-face interaction, whereas male friendships tend to be more ‘side to side’, and are generally mediated through shared activities. Could this be a reason why women bore the brunt of the negative impact Covid had on our relationships?
Beyond the pandemic, the ‘friendship recession’ may seem inevitable, as society undergoes economic and technological changes. After listening to an episode of the podcast ‘Bobo’s Void’ titled ‘Social Media and the Death of Friendship’, I came across this fascinating concept. Texting on various social media apps has become our main source of social interaction and the predominant method for maintaining our friendships. Phone call conversations are being replaced by written WhatsApps, iMessages, DMs and emails. For a lot of people now, making phone calls is becoming a difficult and sometimes uncomfortable thing to do!
The premise of how we engage with one another has become reduced to a tiny notification on a tiny screen, which we find ourselves constantly towering over. When we interact in this way, subconsciously, I think we reduce each other to just that: tiny words on a tiny screen. The podcast demonstrated this with an example of a woman calling a friend during a potential break-up with her partner. Through the phone call, the friend can empathise; hearing the authentic tears and tremors of her voice.
But imagine that being a text message conversation nowadays, distilling the situation to a brief, emotionless message like ‘I think I might break up with Henry’ met with a reply like ‘Damn that’s crazy’. The example that was used emphasised to me that through conversations over text, we risk undermining the significance of what goes on in each other’s lives. If this is the paradigm in which the majority of our conversations take place, how can we expect our friendships to thrive?
While social media shapes the way we make and maintain our friendships, there are countless other aspects to the problem. One such aspect is our culture of workism; our identities have become entirely entangled with work. As we dedicate increasing amounts of time to work or school, our focus on our careers leaves us with less and less time and energy for nurturing our friendships.
Another aspect of this issue is how society has become convenience-oriented; driven by technological advancements. Life has become so convenient that we have lost ‘third spaces’. They’re those social surroundings that exist outside work and home; the communal places which fortify friendships: think Central Perk in Friends, or Luke’s diner in Gilmore Girls. Due to the constant back and forth between work and home, we have lost the need for our ‘third spaces’. Those simple, nostalgic experiences like going to a VHS shop to choose a film to rent for the evening, or a record shop to listen to a new album with other fans – have now become significantly more convenient – we can access almost everything from the click of a button.
A third aspect of this issue is the rising cost of living: just meeting up with a friend can feel like a financial burden. Hanging out at a coffee shop every day, like they did in Friends just isn’t financially attainable for most of us. This brings us back to our culture of workism where dedicating more of our time to work becomes a necessity to afford the rising cost of living.
The likelihood that we would turn to a close friend in times of crisis is diminishing. While ‘emotional labour’ was a phrase once reserved for the work of therapists and social workers, it is now often thrown around casually to describe us having to listen to our friend’s problems when we don’t feel like it. Additionally, as phrases like social ‘battery’ and ‘bandwidth’ have risen in use, I can’t help but wonder at how we have begun to talk about ourselves and our relationships as if we are talking about our devices.
Currently, we are also seeing a glamorisation of ‘low maintenance’ friendships (particularly on the internet). Coupled with a culture in our generation of not texting or calling each other back, this feeds into the issue of our rising loneliness. While yes, some of our friendships might need to be low maintenance due to practicalities, making this the standard will only exacerbate the ‘friendship recession’ and loneliness that we are seeing today. Friendship, inherently requiring effort and understanding, is not meant to be entirely effortless.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe having boundaries in friendships is important. But I think that when we get wrapped up in them, we risk losing the essence of what makes friendship so special: it’s one of the only non-transactional relationships we have, and in a society obsessed with romantic love, platonic love is often undervalued. So as we face this ‘friendship recession’, and our pace of life increases exponentially, I think that now more than ever, it is crucial that we hold onto our friendships and value them just as much as the other relationships in our lives.