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Adults lost friendship's built-in structure
The numbers
The figures come from the American Perspectives Survey, which also found that the share of people with ten or more close friends fell from roughly a third to about one in eight. The American Psychological Association reports that more than half of US adults feel isolated, left out, or lacking companionship often or some of the time.
How school did it
School and college handled friendship automatically. Several hours a day with the same people meant repeated encounters, shared experiences, and bonding, with no effort required.
What adulthood removes
Adult life takes that structure away. Work fills many hours a day, but many people at work aren't looking for friends, and the camaraderie there often doesn't grow into the deep, emotionally satisfying kind. The proximity has to be created, and so does the time.
Without proximity doing the work, friendship takes conscious choice and effort, and most people aren't putting that in. Friendships tend to decline after school or college unless both people invest on purpose.
Why do neighbors become friends so easily?
In the late 1940s, Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back studied Westgate, an MIT housing complex for married students. Residents were far more likely to be friends with the people next door than with those living a few doors down, and people whose apartments sat near stairwells had more friends in the complex. Residents had been assigned apartments largely at random, so the pattern came from physical layout alone. The findings were published in their 1950 book Social Pressures in Informal Groups.
Why does loneliness show up in health research?
Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues pooled 148 studies in a 2010 meta-analysis published in PLOS Medicine. Across more than 300,000 participants, those with stronger social relationships had about a 50 percent greater likelihood of survival over the follow-up period. The authors compared the size of that effect to well-known risk factors such as smoking. The studies followed participants for an average of 7.5 years.
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