In This Article
Friendship recession. The well-documented decline in close adult friendships across the US and UK over the past three decades. The Survey Center on American Life found the share of Americans reporting no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2021.
Where the term comes from
The phrasing entered mainstream commentary through Daniel Cox of the Survey Center on American Life (American Enterprise Institute) in 2021 and was amplified by The Atlantic. The underlying data trend goes back further, with the 1985 General Social Survey serving as the most-cited baseline against which more recent surveys are compared.
How it shows up in real life
An adult moves cities for a job. They have warm acquaintances and one or two old friends they text monthly. They have nobody in town who would notice within forty-eight hours if they went silent. The friendship recession is not the absence of acquaintances. It is the absence of the people who would notice.
Common misuses
The term is sometimes flattened into a general loneliness statistic. It is more specific than that. The recession describes close friendships measured by Yes-No questions (do you have close friends, how many, can you call one in a crisis), not networks of weak ties or family. Family contact has held more steady. Acquaintance counts have actually grown. What has shrunk is the middle tier: the chosen, ongoing, non-romantic, non-family relationships of mutual investment.
