Something has been quietly disappearing from adult life: the close friend. In the United States, the share of adults with no close friends at all has risen from just 3% in 1990 to around 17% today. The average number of close friends people report has fallen too, from 2.94 in 1990 to 2.23 in recent years, and time spent with friends has dropped by more than a third since the early 2010s. Researchers and journalists have started calling it, simply, the friendship recession.

The story is not identical for everyone. Men have been hit hardest: the share with no close friends rose fivefold, from 3% to 15%, since 1990. Women's numbers rose too, but less sharply, from around 2% to 10%. Curiously, surveys find women report feeling lonely slightly more often than men, even though men have fewer friends to turn to, they simply lean on the friends they do have less for real emotional support.

Ask people why, and the same suspects come up again and again: remote work removing the office as a place to bump into people, phones and social media replacing real contact with something thinner, and the slow disappearance of cheap "third places", the cafés, pubs, clubs and community halls where friendships used to form almost by accident. Gen Z, despite growing up permanently online, reports the highest loneliness of any generation.

The proposed fixes are, depending on your view, either sensible or faintly absurd. A wave of friendship-matching apps now let adults "swipe for pals" the way they once swiped for dates. In 2023 the US Surgeon General issued a formal warning that chronic loneliness carries a health risk comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, which is either an overstatement or the most convincing reason yet to actually call an old friend back.