Adult friendships don’t usually have some big blow-up before they end. They just get compressed. The texts get shorter, the calls get rescheduled, and one day you look up and realize the people you’d call in an actual emergency is a much shorter list than you thought.
The CDC puts about 1 in 3 U.S. adults in the lonely column. A 2024 Pew Research survey found 1 in 5 Americans reports no close friends at all, which is double what it was in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, a Bumble survey found 60% of adults say they want new friends — and 52% hadn’t made a single one in the past year. The numbers are moving in the wrong direction and social media hasn’t helped.
Psychiatrist and relationship expert Dr. Laura Dabney told Newsweek that the problem isn’t quantity. “People kind of count the number of friends they have and assume the less friends they have, the more lonely they are,” she said. “But what I’ve found…it’s the closeness of the relationships. If they’re lacking the closeness, the depth, the intimacy, then that’s what causes loneliness.” A contact list and a support system are two different things.
A Relationship Expert Says Loneliness Isn’t About Having Fewer Friends
Around 30, the infrastructure disappears. School handed everyone proximity and free time automatically—the conditions psychologists identify as essential to forming close bonds. Adult life offers neither. Friendships don’t usually collapse over one thing. Careers get demanding, kids arrive, parents need attention, and the friendship slowly drops to the bottom of the priority list. Unlike family, it’s optional, so it’s the first thing to go.
Dabney’s solution to this is intentionality. Sounds obvious, right? Until you realize most people do the opposite. “A lot of people make the mistake of waiting for the relationship to get close before they reach out,” she said, “but really reaching out is the start of closeness.” A friendship dies when both people wait for it to feel warm enough to justify a text. The bar gets higher over time, and eventually neither person clears it.
And some of them should. Not every friendship that’s drifted deserves resuscitation. Dabney has a test. Have a real conversation, more than once if needed. “If you’ve done that a couple times, you’ve put in the effort, and it’s not been any significant change to move closer,” she said, “that’s probably a sign it’s time to move on.”
A contact list full of people who don’t know what’s going on in your life is a decent description of the problem. You don’t need more people. You just need better ones.