Why Is It Getting Harder to Make and Keep Friends?
Why Is It Getting Harder to Make and Keep Friends?
Friendship used to feel easier.
When we were younger, making friends often felt easier and more natural. We went to school together, lived near one another, played sports, worked together, or simply spent enough time in the same places for relationships to develop naturally.
As adults, that changes. Work, relationships, children, family responsibilities, and distance begin competing for our time. Seeing a friend may require comparing calendars and planning weeks in advance. And when life gets busy, friendships can gradually move further down the list.
What’s interesting is that friendship doesn’t seem to have become less important to us. In fact, recent research suggests the opposite. A 2025 national survey found that 95% of adults considered friendships essential to a happy and healthy life. At the same time, adults reported having fewer close friends and seeing their friends less often in person than they did five years earlier.
So why is something we value so much becoming harder to maintain?
We Have Fewer Opportunities for Friendship to Happen Naturally
Think about how many friendships begin when we’re young. You sit next to someone in class. You see the same parents at your child’s school. You spend every day with a coworker. You live down the hall from someone in college.
You don’t necessarily decide to become friends. You simply keep seeing each other.
Adulthood often takes away some of that built-in repetition. We may spend much of our day working, commuting, taking care of family, or at home. Even when we meet someone we like, there may not be another natural opportunity to see that person again.
That’s one reason making friends as an adult can feel surprisingly difficult. Meeting people isn’t necessarily the same as having enough time with someone for a friendship to develop.
We’re Spending Less Time With Friends
This isn’t just a feeling. A recent study examining how Americans spent their time between 2003 and 2024 found that time with friends declined by more than half. The researchers found something else interesting: Friday nights used to stand out as a particularly social part of the week. That pattern has largely disappeared.
Other research examining American time-use data has also found increases in social isolation and decreases in time spent with friends and other people outside the household. Importantly, some of these changes were already underway before the pandemic.
We still communicate, of course. We text. We send each other pictures. We comment on posts. We follow what’s happening in one another’s lives. But keeping up with someone isn’t always the same as spending time with them.
Technology Keeps Us Connected—but It Can Also Create an Illusion of Closeness
Technology isn’t necessarily bad for friendship. It can help us maintain relationships across cities, countries, and busy schedules. But there is a difference between contact and connection.
You might know where an old friend went on vacation, what their children look like, and what they had for dinner without having had a meaningful conversation with them in months.
Recent research reflects this complicated relationship. Adults report relying more on texting and social media to maintain friendships, while many also say that texting can replace more meaningful conversations and make friendships feel less genuine.
Sometimes we know more about one another’s lives while actually talking to one another less.
Friendships Can Quietly Become a Lower Priority
Romantic relationships and family obligations often come with expectations. If your child needs you, you make time. If your spouse needs something, you respond. If there’s a deadline at work, you get it done.
Friendships are different. A good friend often understands when you’re busy. You can cancel dinner. You can say, “Let’s get together soon.” Months can pass, and neither person necessarily feels that anything happened.
That flexibility is part of what makes friendship wonderful. But it can also make friendship easy to neglect.
Many friendships don’t end because of an argument or betrayal. They slowly fade because neither person has enough time left over for the relationship.
Making New Friends Requires Something We Have Less of: Time
There’s another reason adult friendship can be difficult. Close friendships generally don’t develop from one great conversation. They develop through repeated contact, shared experiences, trust, and gradually becoming more comfortable with one another.
As children and young adults, much of that happens automatically. As adults, we often have to create those opportunities ourselves.
Joining a class once probably won’t create a close friendship. Regularly seeing the same people at a class, gym, volunteer organization, neighborhood gathering, religious community, sports league, or children’s activity might.
The important ingredient isn’t simply meeting more people. It’s having opportunities to see some of the same people repeatedly.
Loneliness Isn’t Necessarily About Being Alone
It’s also possible to have people around you and still feel lonely. APA’s 2025 Stress in America survey found that about half of American adults reported experiencing signs of emotional disconnection at least some of the time: 54% reported feeling isolated, 50% left out, and 50% lacking companionship.
That distinction matters. Loneliness isn’t simply a head count of how many people are in our lives. We can have coworkers, family, hundreds of online connections, and people we occasionally socialize with—and still miss having someone we feel genuinely close to.
Research on adult friendship supports this distinction. A systematic review found that the quality of friendships, socializing with friends, and efforts to maintain friendships are all associated with well-being.
Friendship Requires More Intention Than It Used To
Perhaps one of the biggest changes in adult friendship is that we can no longer rely on circumstances to do all the work for us. We may have to be the person who sends the text. We may have to suggest getting together again after someone cancels. We may have to put something on the calendar instead of saying, “We should get together sometime.”
And making new friends may require repeatedly showing up somewhere even when we don’t immediately connect with anyone. That can feel awkward. It can also involve the possibility that someone doesn’t reciprocate our interest.
But friendship has always required a certain amount of vulnerability.
A Final Thought
Most of us know that our relationships matter. But knowing that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re giving them enough room in our lives.
Work will always give us another task. There will always be something that needs to be done at home. Our phones will always give us something else to look at. Friendship is easier to postpone because there usually isn’t a deadline.
Maybe that’s part of the problem.
If friendship is important to us, perhaps we shouldn’t wait until we feel lonely to make time for it.
Sources & Further Reading
American Psychological Association — Stress in America 2025: A Crisis of Connection https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/stress-in-america/2025
AARP — The Friendship Study https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/social-leisure/relationships/friendship-study-2025/
Socius — The End of Friday Nights with Friends https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231261478215
Frontiers in Psychology — Adult Friendship and Wellbeing: A Systematic Review https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1059057