We Made Friendship Something People Have to Do Alone

One in twenty young people now says they have no close friends. Perhaps we have forgotten that friendship needs places, time and the chance to keep meeting.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881). Friendship often grows not because we set out to find it, but because we keep sharing the same tables, conversations and ordinary moments. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

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I came across a statistic this week that I have not been able to stop thinking about, so I thought I would write about it.

According to new research from the Institute for Public Policy Research, one in twenty young people in England now say they have no close friends at all. A decade ago, it was closer to one in a hundred.

That is an extraordinary change in a relatively short period of time.

The proportion of 16- to 21-year-olds with at least three close friends has also fallen, while researchers have found broader signs that young people feel increasingly disconnected from one another and from the society around them. The report was not based simply on statistics either. Researchers travelled around England and spoke to more than 150 young people about what growing up actually feels like today.

My first instinct was probably the obvious one.

Phones.

Social media. Gaming. Hours spent staring at screens instead of talking to the person sitting beside you. As a parent of teenagers, I find it an easy explanation to reach for, and I suspect there is at least some truth to it. Anyone who has watched a group of people sitting together while everyone checks their phones can understand why we worry about what technology might be doing to relationships.

Yet the more I read, the less convinced I became that this was simply a story about young people forgetting how to talk to one another.

Perhaps we have made friendship much harder than it used to be. Perhaps we have gradually dismantled many of the places where friendship happened and then told people that loneliness is something they need to solve for themselves.

We have made friendship something people have to do alone.