Everyone says they have no friends. Where did all our friends go?

A 2009 sociological study found that we replace about half our close friends every seven years. Kat Vellos, in We Should Get Together: The Secret to Cultivating Better Friendships, suggests a number of reasons why this happens. We live busy lives, with our jobs and families, which means that health or self-care becomes our first priority once we’re done with our responsibilities; changing financial statuses create strains on relationships; and simply, adult life can be exhausting. (My teenaged son peeked over the top of my laptop while I was working on this piece, saw a line about friendships being important from a practical standpoint, and said, “This has to be an adult piece. Making practical friends? Please.”)

But why do we keep hemorrhaging friends?

I can tell you this one. Turns out, adult life isn’t exactly conducive to friendship.

Think about it — childhood friendships usually happen in ready-made clusters: Classmates. Camp bunkmates. The baseball team. The kids down the block. The girls who were in drama with you for three months in tenth grade until you all imprinted on each other. But when adulthood hits, you scatter. People go to seminary or college. They get married and move elsewhere. They’re busy at work or with kids, and they’re all in different life stages. I have some friends who are welcoming their first children. Others are single and traveling the world. I’m making bar mitzvahs and checking out high schools, and some of my friends are marrying off their kids. It’s not like we’re all going to bump into each other at school orientations and PTA.

Suddenly, the people you saw every day are the people you have to actively make time for.

To quote Mel Robbins in The Let Them Theory, by the time we hit our twenties, “Friendship changes from a group sport to an individual one.”

Our lives are markedly different than they were 100 or 200 years ago. People are able to travel long distances and move to other countries without sacrificing their relationships… but they’re often sacrificed all the same.

When Sara, a 30-year-old mother of two, first moved to Lakewood as a newlywed, she felt painfully alone. In her prior home, she had a thriving social circle and a name there that opened doors for her. But in Lakewood, she was another face in the crowd. She’d always had a thriving social group, and it was hard to have to start from scratch in a place where she was a no-name. “I felt so self-conscious, like everyone was looking at me and judging me because I didn’t fit in,” she recalls.

During the week, she was fine. She’d go out with friends and talk to her sisters. But on Shabbos, she felt that loneliness like a gaping loss in her life. “I would watch everyone else go walking with friends or sit in driveways and supervise their kids playing together, and I felt so left out.”

Some single women find themselves continually making new friends. They don’t necessarily lose the friends that they make, but as their friends get married and have children, the friends join new circles in the same stage of life. “And I get it,” says Basya, who is in her late thirties. “But it can be painful when they don’t want to share good news with me about their husbands or their kids. There’s this gap between us, and it only gets wider.”

A University of Kansas study found it takes spending 200 hours together to create a close friendship. That’s about six weeks of school. In camp, it’s less than half a month. In adulthood, 200 hours would take two years of a weekly two-hour coffee date. A half hour at the Shabbos Park? Eight years to clinch the friendship. (Fewer if your kids figure out your game and leverage it into extra park time.) But that’s a significant investment of time and energy that you don’t usually have or need to invest in other things.

If you want to make new friends, you’re going to have to work for them.

Who has time for all that — and do you even want it?

“When you’re young, friends are a priority,” says Dr. Halana Rothbort, MD, a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist based in Cedarhurst, New York. “But when you get married, you’re prioritizing marriage and then children. There’s a period of twenty to thirty years when you’re wrapped up in your family.”

Friendships still matter then, but they’re often driven by the practical. “You want your children to have friends or to be part of a community. You need to organize carpools, know where to send your kids for camp, arrange play dates. Your friendships aren’t centered around what you want, but around what your family needs.”

“I divide the friends I have today into three categories,” says Sara. “There are the friends of my youth, who I don’t really talk to that frequently, but we have a very strong foundational friendship.” When they do get together or catch up, the relationship continues right where it left off.

“Then there are the friends I made in young adulthood, who I’m not close to geographically, but I’m close to them emotionally.” Sara was single for the first half of her twenties, and these were the friends who went through the ups and downs of early adulthood together.

Her third category are friends of convenience: neighbors, work friends, and other class mothers. “They’re great to schmooze with and stand with at events, but we both know we’re not going to keep in touch in any genuine capacity if that link disappears,” she says.

Sure, you’re a strong, independent woman now, but you think that’ll keep you forever?

This busyness doesn’t last forever, Dr. Rothbort says. Eventually, you hit the empty-nest stage, when “you’re busy with your kids and your grandkids, but you also have time for friends again.” Many women are married, sure, but it’s not healthy to expect one person to meet every emotional, practical, and social need. Besides, your husband might be good for a visit to Costco (especially the one near Lowe’s, am I right?), but do you really want him walking into a high-end clothing store with you and checking out some of those prices?

Tova, a grandmother now in her sixties, found that what she looked for in a friendship changed over the years. “When my kids were little, I desperately needed adult companionship, and I had different priorities. I wanted my friends to have kids the same age as mine and to live locally and send to the same schools. It just made it easier to be around them and do things together.”

Today, she doesn’t consider many of those women friends, though they still live locally. “I’m much more discerning now. I don’t have a lot of friends now, and while I still look for women at the same stage of life as me, the quality of the friendship and my friends’ middos are more important to me.”

I asked my mother if she found that she didn’t need friends anymore now that she has four charming, brilliant adult daughters to hang out with. She just laughed at me.

Older people will narrow down their friendships to a select few, and studies have shown that they’re often more forgiving and positive with these chosen few to maximize the friendship, says Katherine Fiori, a professor of psychology at Adelphi University, in an interview with the BBC. She explains this newfound flexibility: “As people age, their perspective on the future changes — they have less time to live, essentially.”

Time to make our own playdates, girls

So it isn’t just me. Friendship is hard work, and I’ve already got way too many 1099s. But my retirement is still a long way off — right now, I’m loaded down with serial writing, teaching, and editing. How do I make friends before we qualify for social security?

Confidence is key, Dr. Rothbort says, as is making the first move. “You need to initiate, because if you’re going to wait around for other people to, you’ll be waiting for a long time.”

But it’s never a good idea to put all your eggs into one basket. “Most people are receptive, but not all. And that’s normal. Not everyone is going to like you,” Dr. Rothbort continues. “It’s very painful, but you can expect a certain amount of rejection. But there are other fish in the sea.” She recommends inviting multiple people to spend time with you instead of counting on only one friend.

Dr. Rothbort’s other key advice is to set the entry bar very low. When the burden of friendship is more significant than the benefits, it’s difficult to maintain it.

As frum Jews, we tend to do much of our weekly socializing at Shabbos meals. That’s two-plus hours of quality time to plug into the 200! But inviting someone for a Shabbos meal is work — there’s the meal planning, taking into account someone else’s dislikes and allergies, the shopping, and the cooking. There are only so many individual deli rollettes that I can wrap before I’m ready to take the Shabbos off.

Dr. Rothbort suggests inviting friends over on Shabbos afternoon. “If you ask them to come over on Shabbos at six, or whatever, they know it’s not a meal. It’s not Shalosh Seudos. And you don’t set out a spread for them. You find something in the pantry and put it out — some veggies or nuts or chips and salsa. Then you’re talking. You’re having a good time. And you don’t have to pay for it.”

And when it comes to get-togethers, think easy. Not everyone will want to go to a museum or go to a yoga class with you because that’s an investment in time, money, and effort. The public humiliation of trying the scorpion pose for the first time is a reason to dodge a friend, not join in. But the park is easy. A walk is easy. Dr. Rothbort once organized a beach day and invited along a bunch of women she knew. “The beach is great because it’s super cheap and it’s open-access,” she explains. “You don’t have to have any talent to go to the beach. You just put your chair down.”

Answering a call won’t kill you (but ignoring it might kill the friendship)

If you want a close friendship, you need to get together as often as possible, as well as speak often, says Anna Goldfarb in Modern Friendship. When a friend calls or texts, you need to make an effort to respond.

Dr. Rothbort adds that one simple way to maintain close friendships is to pick up the phone. “You get a call and you’re busy. But if you consider this person a really good friend, perhaps you should answer,” she suggests. Sometimes, answering is just telling them that you’re busy and you’ll call them back in a couple of minutes. “The fact that you answered instead of throwing it to voicemail is an indicator that this is a good friend,” Dr. Rothbort says.

Answering texts quickly instead of leaving them for a day or two is another indicator. As much as I am always reluctant to respond to messages that come during work, when I mentally catalog which messages I do answer, I discover that I have this hierarchy of friendship, too. My best friends (and favorite sisters/-in-law) often get immediate responses, even when I’m in the middle of something. Acquaintances will get answers that evening or the next day.

(I made the mistake of sharing this tidbit with a friend while I was working on this piece, and now I am scrambling whenever she texts. Don’t tell your friends about this. Pretend you never saw this. Honestly, I’m pretty sure I never wrote any of this. Please don’t hold it against me when I don’t answer right away, friends. I just didn’t see my phone that time. Haven’t seen it in weeks, honestly.)

Saying “you should” is basically friendship poison

Being a good friend isn’t always about casual outings and Shabbos afternoon schmoozes. At times, you will be a confidante or witness to their struggles. When you do give advice in these situations, Mrs. Goldfarb recommends offering an out by saying, “Feel free to ignore anything I say that’s unhelpful.” She cautions against using the word should in any context, and asking the friend if they want you to check in on them. Often, all a friend really wants is some validation.

Cut the lip service and pitch in

And more important than advice, much of the time, is tangible help. When a friend is sitting shivah or has been in the hospital — or, in more positive but also stressful situations, is making a simchah or has just had a baby — it’s tempting to offer help with, “Just let me know if you need anything!” But that puts the burden on the friend, who’s already overwhelmed, to reach out.

When’s the last time you responded to an offer like that with, “Actually, I really do need my dry cleaning picked up,” or “Hi, you offered some help yesterday, and my kids are really struggling to get their homework done alone.” Mrs. Goldfarb suggests offering something that a friend can quickly say yes or no to, and not to offer anything that the other person wouldn’t reasonably do for you. Otherwise, you can create resentments and power imbalances.

I like to offer to do carpools for friends in need. The ubiquitous MealTrains are another great way to give something real and also build your social circles. I once had a friend mention Shani,* a close friend of mine whom she didn’t know well. “You know the thing about her?” the friend said. “Her name is on every MealTrain, whether or not she’s friendly with the person.” Shani also makes a point of dropping by kiddushim of people she’s only tangentially associated with to wish them a mazel tov. While Shani isn’t necessarily a social butterfly, almost everyone seems to know her name and like her.

It’s time to get our acts together

A friend texted me this week to invite me to the annual sidewalk sale. This sale is a big deal, for some reason, because roughly half the people I’ve spoken to this week have asked me breathlessly, “Did you go to the sidewalk sale?” At least one of them doesn’t even live in the state.

I declined. I had a feature to write, after all. “I just wrote a whole paragraph about how I’m a bad friend,” I told her, and made sure to punctuate it with a “LOL” to convey carefree wryness instead of grim realism.

She countered with, “What’s the definition of a friend?” She defined a friend as someone you feel safe and comfortable with, someone you can trust who will have your back.

She didn’t add, “And makes sure to plaster your text messages across Family First,” though I think that was implied.

But maybe she’s right. Maybe once we make them, that’s how we keep them — with a strong backbone of trust, of comfort, of someone you can grow alongside.

Because friendships aren’t just about finding nonfamilial companions in our lives. They change us even after we believe we’re too old to change, can affect our quality of life and our decision-making. And even when friendships sputter or fade away, they still leave behind an imprint throughout adulthood: never truly inconsequential, never truly nonessential.

What fades away

Sometimes, I still think about Estee, one of my best friends from high school. Estee and I would write stories during class and pass them back and forth. With Estee’s feedback, I learned how to refine my writing, to make it clearer and more engaging. She moved to Chicago right after high school, and when I returned from seminary, I flew there to visit her. She flew in for my wedding, and every month or so, we’d check in with hour-long conversations. After Hurricane Sandy, I remember driving out to the elusive spot in the middle of a distant road where there was enough phone service to give her a call and tell her I was okay.

And then… nothing. Maybe we missed each other’s calls a few too many times, I don’t know. I can’t tell you exactly how we lost touch. But I wish that I’d maintained the friendship, that I knew more about her life than what I hear thirdhand from others.

Today, I live in the neighborhood where she lived when we were in high school, and I take my kids out to the grassy park that I first traipsed with her, behind her house. And every time, I wonder about her, about these connections we build that can define who we become and how we see each other. Does she even know that I became a writer? Does she know that the imprint of all those high school moments had such an impact on the entire trajectory of my life?

Hey, Estee, if you’re reading this (and squinting at the writer’s name, which is definitely not the one you remember)… want to catch up sometime?

Does this count as making the first move? Ff

Three of a kind

When it comes to types of friends, a 2016 study by Janice McCabe breaks people into three categories.

There are the tight-knitters, whom we’d call cliquey when we were kids. They have their chevreh, and almost everyone within it would count all the others as friends. These tend to crop up when it comes to people who have something in common that isn’t shared with others around them. For example, when Gila* first got divorced, she felt alone. But soon, other divorced women in the community reached out to her, and they became a tight-knit community of their own. They often did Shabbos meals together potluck-style and look after each other like family.

McCabe’s second category is compartmentalizers. They have small clusters of two to four friends. The compartmentalizer’s friends will know the others in their cluster, but not the other clusters. Maybe she has a group of high school friends, a group of friends with the same career, a group of friends with kids the same age, and a group of shul friends — but they’re all strangers to each other until a round of Jewish geography at her 50th birthday party.

Finally, there are the samplers. Samplers might make a friend or two from a variety of places, but these friends are totally unconnected to each other. Interestingly, in her study, samplers reported loneliness and a lack of social support despite having a wide range of friends.

Samplers are often introverts who cherry-pick friends carefully. Often, samplers will find other samplers, and they can build close and meaningful friendships with each other. Because they both aren’t locked into groups, there’s more potential for a strong one-on-one friendship. For more selective older women, in particular, those samplers can provide consistent companionship after the loss of a spouse.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 957)