Imagine you just landed your dream job. Who’s the first person you call? Now imagine you just found out your spouse is having an affair. Who’s the first person you call?
If you’re like 12% of American adults, you may not be able to name anyone at all. In her article The Friendship Recession, Carolyn Bruckmann points to a startling shift: the share of U.S. adults who report having no close friends has quadrupled since 1990.
That matters because friendship isn’t just a nice-to-have. Across 38 studies of adult friendship, researchers found a consistent, positive association between close friendships and overall wellbeing. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have shown that supportive social networks give people the resources they need to navigate depression, anxiety, loneliness, substance misuse, and a long list of other physical and mental health difficulties. Friendship doesn’t just feel good. It protects us, steadies us, and — in its deepest forms — helps heal us.
In my practice, the question of friendship — and how to build a more supportive network — comes up constantly, with men and women alike. One exercise I often use is asking clients to map their friendships onto three concentric circles:
- Innermost circle: Crisis friends (ride-or-dies)
- Middle circle: Good friends (vacation friends)
- Outermost circle: Acquaintances (convenient friends)
Convenient friends
These are the people in your immediate orbit — the coworker in the next cubicle, the parent beside you in the school pickup line. Conversations tend to stay on the surface: venting about work, trading weekend plans, getting through the day. Convenient friends are easy and accessible, and that’s also their ceiling.
Vacation friends
These are the people you could spend a few days alone with — and actually enjoy it. It’s comfortable to be unfiltered around them: a ratty T-shirt as pajamas, plans made on the fly, that bout of food poisoning where you need an emergency detour to the nearest bathroom. With vacation friends, you can move easily between laughter and something more meaningful. You can talk about the mid-tier hard things: difficult in-laws, the promotion you didn’t get, the fight you had with your kid this week.
Crisis friends (aka ride-or-dies)
These are the people you can be completely vulnerable with. You can say you’re worried your marriage is ending. You can admit your child was just diagnosed with a learning disability and you’re scared. You can confess the moments you’re most ashamed of. They stay. They don’t flinch. They don’t turn away.
We need all three kinds of friends. Life naturally moves between ease and hardship, and each kind of friendship serves a different purpose. Our lighter, spontaneous friendships help us enjoy being alive. Our deeper, more contemplative friendships help us make sense of the hard parts. As adults, convenient friends are usually the easiest to come by — but it’s the crisis friends who truly buffer loneliness.
Which raises the real question: at a stage of life when time is scarce, how do we actually build the deeper friendships that sustain us?
Start by noticing who has potential
After my clients map their existing friendships, I ask them to list the traits they’d want in a friend they could really trust. The words I hear again and again: trustworthy, nonjudgmental, reliable, kind. Then I ask them to name the people in their lives who already fit most of those words. Those are the people with potential — and more often than not, they’re already sitting in the “vacation friend” circle. Those are the ones worth investing in.
How to grow a vacation friend into a crisis friend
- Prioritize one-on-one time. Choose settings that invite real conversation — a coffee, a long walk, a drive, a quiet dinner. Group hangs are fun, but depth is almost always built two people at a time.
- Create shared experiences. Go into the city, catch a game, finally see that musical you’ve both been meaning to see. Shared memories become the scaffolding of closeness.
- Name the friendship. Be honest about wanting a deeper connection. I call this a friendship proposal. Like dating, it means being explicit about what you’re hoping for. It may not feel “cool” or “chill,” but it’s genuine, and it’s brave. I have yet to meet a client whose friend reacted to a friendship proposal with anything but warmth. Nobody hates hearing that someone wants to be closer to them.
- Risk vulnerability. Challenge yourself to share something ten percent deeper than you normally would. Instead of “my kid was a nightmare this week,” try: “When my kid acts like this, it makes me feel really insecure about my parenting.” Then notice what happens. More often than not, vulnerability invites vulnerability. When you go deeper, the people who can meet you there will.
Pick one vacation friend this month and start investing. Suggest the coffee. Share the ten-percent-truer thing. And when the moment feels right — make the proposal. You may be surprised how ready the other person was to be asked.
References:
1. Pezirkianidis, C., Galanaki, E., Raftopoulou, G., Moraitou, D., & Stalikas, A. (2023). Adult friendship and wellbeing: A systematic review with practical implications. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1059057. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1059057
2. Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2013). Social contagion theory: examining dynamic social networks and human behavior. Statistics in Medicine, 32, 556–577. https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.5408
