My friendships exist in silos. Each hangout is a feverish one-on-one where we share fries and eye contact, confessions, rants, gossip, and mutual attempts at amateur therapy. This patchwork of get-togethers structures my week: a Wednesday happy hour with one friend, a Saturday-morning walk-and-talk with another, a Sunday coffee date with a third. It’s exhilarating—we genuinely want to know how each other’s moms are doing.
Some days, though, I feel strangely lonely. While my social life looks like a loose archipelago of individuals, other people seem to operate in warm, robust units. I’m jealous when I see a circle of friends that looks like a miniature community. Groups seem like the norm if you watch sitcoms or use social media or just eat brunch at a restaurant. I too want to be forever laughing with half a dozen pals in one of our apartments on a random weekday, or squeezed into a dive-bar booth together.
If friend groups seem ubiquitous, so does a quiet underclass of people like me, bemoaning their lack of them. “I get really sad about it sometimes,” the lifestyle influencer Carly Silverman admitted on TikTok. A slew of companies have popped up to manufacture group hangs—essentially matchmaking strangers who are seeking a circle of friends, not just one-on-one connections. The common assumption appears to be that people with friend groups live fuller lives, or that they must have some superior qualities that attract hordes of people. “Most people who are happy have a close-knit, supportive friend group (or the equivalent like supportive/sprawling family),” one X post informed me, as I scrolled alone in a park on a sunny day, surrounded by groups of friends crowded onto picnic blankets. “Most people who are unhappy don’t.”
That sort of assertion had led me to believe that my constellation of one-on-one hangouts represented a failure to establish a crucial piece of adulthood. But friend groups, it turns out, are not the norm—research on how adult friendships are organized suggests that being part of one is a matter of luck, circumstance, and personal characteristics, such as extroversion and openness. Friend groups are real, of course. It’s just that they’re not the one and only way to avoid feeling lonely. In fact, in reporting this article, I came to realize that my lack of a friend group wasn’t making me lonely—it was more that I felt lonely because I feared that I was missing out on something everyone else had.
Loneliness is a feeling, which can make the source of it hard to pin down. It can mean different things to different people, which is one reason the highly publicized “loneliness epidemic” may not be an epidemic at all. Public conversations about loneliness tend to collapse a distinction between feeling lonely and being socially isolated—the latter is an objective state that doesn’t inevitably mean a person feels the negative emotions of loneliness. By some measures, it’s not clear that Americans are more isolated than in the past; some research suggests that they have just as many friends as they’ve always had. In 2024, the American Friendship Project, a research initiative tracking national trends in friendship over time, reported that a majority of respondents to its surveys said that they had five or more friends, which is similar to reported friendship numbers from 1970 to 2015.
Still, social scientists consider the feeling of not belonging to a friend group to be a notable contributor to loneliness. One of the most popular research tools for assessing loneliness is the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which—among other questions—asks participants to indicate how often they “feel part of a group of friends.” Cigna used the scale for a 2018 survey, which found that “most Americans are considered lonely” and that less than a third of respondents “always” felt part of a group of friends, which might indicate that a lack of friend groups can be a factor in people’s loneliness. In this sense, sweeping surveys such as this might count people like me—someone who has close friends but lacks friend groups—among the lonely.
[Read: I’ve been left off my friends’ group chat]
People can experience different types of loneliness, Letitia Anne Peplau, the retired psychology professor who co-created the UCLA Loneliness Scale, told me. In the sociologist Robert Weiss’s 1973 book about loneliness, he distinguishes between “the loneliness of emotional isolation,” which he characterizes as “the absence of a close emotional attachment,” and “the loneliness of social isolation”—that is, “the absence of an engaging social network.” You might have a deeply meaningful relationship with your spouse, for example, and still feel lonely for lack of community. And the longing for a social network, he writes, “can be remedied only by access to such a network.”
Yet most friendships in the U.S. are unlikely to be the kind that involve regular, in-person hangouts with a wider group. According to the American Friendship Project, few people live with their friends, and nearly half live in a different city or state than their friends. Respondents, these data suggest, are not typically living in a Seinfeld-ian endless hang. “Friend groups seem to be increasingly rare—particularly because more people than ever leave their hometowns for college, and then leave college for hinterlands, forcing them to spread out,” Jaimie Krems, a professor and the director of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research, told me. “And yet, we study adult friendship so little, we don’t have a great handle on the extent to which this is true, for whom, and the impact.”
What some research does show is that certain personalities are more likely to seek out a crew: people who are extraverted, agreeable, and otherwise emotionally secure. Introverts, meanwhile, are more likely to cultivate friendships with fewer, but also closer, friends, because they “are very risk averse,” Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist who studies social bonds, told me. “When they go and knock on Jemima’s door in the middle of the night and say, ‘My world has fallen apart. Can you do something for me?’ they want to be absolutely certain that Jemima is going to say yes.”
The way people organize their friendships, researchers have found, tends to break down along gendered lines. In general, men seem more likely to form loose groups, while women seem more likely to have deeper, one-on-one relationships. “What matters for women’s friendships is who you are as an individual, not what you are, whether it’s what you do, or what ‘club’ you belong to,” Dunbar said. “Whereas for men’s friendships, what’s important is what ‘club’ you belong to, not who you are as an individual.”
Those who are lamenting the absence of a huge friend group should consider that the average number of close friends a person has is “very conspicuously five,” Dunbar said. The eponymous “Dunbar’s number” is his theory that there is a limit to the number of relationships a person can keep up, given the size of the human brain, and that this limit is consistent—though he’s not sure how many people have organized these five close relationships into a single circle, versus how many have created what he calls a “hub-and-spokes version” of mostly one-on-one friendships.
If friend groups aren’t required to abate loneliness, and apparently aren’t the standard, the question is why so many people still seem to want them. Some people, friendship researchers told me, could be mourning a version of friendship that exists predominantly on social media and TV. “As a general rule,” Peplau said, “feeling that we are not doing as well as others can increase our current level of distress.” This sense of FOMO is not exclusive to social-media scrollers. In the 1960s, Weiss, the sociologist, published research on married couples who moved to the Boston area from another state. The men established relationships through work, but the wives had “newcomer blues.” They wanted a version of what their husbands had, Weiss later wrote: “access to a network of women with whom they might establish and then discuss issues of common concern.”
[Read: The myth of a loneliness epidemic]
That said, Peplau pointed out that it’s worth distinguishing between a brief pang of loneliness that comes from lingering on an influencer’s post about partying all night with their best friends and a calcified, recurring feeling of loneliness. That transient discomfort is not in the same category as feeling an aching sense of exclusion and disconnection.
Although people without friend groups aren’t automatically more lonely, having access to one can certainly help alleviate loneliness. Group friendships can offer benefits that some individual friendships cannot, social scientists told me. Dunbar cited research on social networks that suggests people in interconnected friend groups are more likely to be generous to one another, possibly out of fear of being outed as miserly to an entire group. If two people in a friend group have a conflict, in other words, the group may have enough structural support to withstand splintering. A friendship duo doesn’t always have those reinforcements.
Dunbar did tell me, though, that if you have been holding out hope for a friend group, then as long as you’re still alive, it is never too late. “There’s nothing to stop a group forming, coming together, and gelling really well at any stage,” he said. “It might be in your 80s; it might be in your 30s.” The pod, and the Sunday-night dinners, and the group trips: All of this is always possible—you might just have to engineer it. I still think it would be fun to have a friend group. But I also treasure the fact that I have versions of Dunbar’s example of close friendship: When I knock on a friend’s door in the middle of the night, I know they’ll let me in for gossip, mutual therapy, and to catch up on each other’s moms.
