Why Hanging Out is So Hard in the Modern World: my keynote for The Great Friendship Project

I became an expert on this subject by accident.

It all began with a proposal. Or a planned one, at least. To my girlfriend, Naomi.

I’d got as far as shopping for a ring.

Off I went to Hatton Garden, Phillipa and Hope – my former flatmates of almost a decade – in tow. Searching for the perfect garland of gold and gem.

After what felt like eight hundred shops, three thousand rings, and a few lightyears later, we finally sat down for a glass of wine.

‘So come on,’ says Phil, ‘Tell us then, who are you thinking for Best Man?’

And my mind went completely blank. ‘It’s the booze,’ I thought, ‘It must be…’

So that night, home alone in the flat I shared with Naomi, I drew up a list of guys that I might consider as Best Man.

And when I looked down the roll call of candidates, I was shocked. I worked with half of these men, and we had little contact outside of that…. The others I hadn’t spoken to, in some cases, for two even three years.

‘OH MY GOD,’ I thought, ‘WHERE HAVE ALL MY FRIENDS GONE?’

Panicking now, I Googled the phrase: ‘getting married, no best man.’ And I expected to see the internet shrug, but there were 995 million results. Many of them posts on wedding website forums, from stricken grooms to be. Like this one:

‘I have what people would consider a successful life. I have a job, a house and a beautiful partner. We’re getting married after six years together, but I got thinking about a best man. All of a sudden it hit me that I have no real close friends. I just got smacked in the face by loneliness.’

This problem, it seemed, was much bigger than me. And it was much broader than men: the data was undeniable there was a loneliness epidemic, and it seemed to be affecting everybody…

Yet loneliness wasn’t meant to look like me. I was in my early 30s, energetic, outgoing, quick to buy my round. What was going on?! I made it my mission to get to the bottom of the so-called ‘friendship recession’ – and yes: to find myself a Best Man.

?So, what did I learn?

I discovered that the research bears out so much of what I had been observing in my own life. Broadly, the ‘friendship recession’ is caused by the confluence of three main phenomena:

1)??? Supply: there are less opportunities for adults to socialise than there have ever been.

2)??? Demand: we are less likely to take up these opportunities when they are available.

3)??? Skills: friendship relies on a set of soft skills that can be lacking in modern culture.

?They certainly were with me…

Let’s begin with the first challenge, supply…

I want you to think of the times in your life when friend making was easiest. Where were you? What age were you? What were you doing?

For me, the halcyon days of friendship were school and then university.

What do these environments have in common?

They are habitats designed for repeated, unplanned interactions with people who share important things in common. And the best part? They take no work! All I had to do was show-up and… there everyone was!

There is a temptation to overly romanticize friendship, to see our deep love for our best friends and then backwards rationalize this to the moments of meeting – it was a joining of minds! A miracle of syncing souls! It must have been!

But the truth is much more prosaic.

There is this fascinating study by Mady Segal, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland. She wanted to predict who from a group of police cadets would become friends.

She discovered the secret to their friendships was last names.

It wasn’t about last names, per se, but rather the implications of last names. Cadets were seated alphabetically, and Carltons and Cassidys were likely to sit next to each other.

When each cadet was asked to nominate someone else in the academy as a close friend, a whopping 90 percent of cadets listed someone they sat beside.

My point is this: we end up being friends with people who are near us a lot. Friendship is basically Stockholm Syndrome.

That was a joke. (Sort of.) But the broader takeaway is that if we want friends, we need to regularly be in locations and situations where friend making is likely to happen.

And I realised, that as I left school and university – as I became a “proper grown-up” – I had lost those habitats. And I am not alone…

Let’s talk about the sociologist Ray Oldenburg. He came up with the concept of ‘third places.’ A place, somewhere between home and work, where people gather to socialise.

?He showed that these ‘third spaces’ – parks, libraries, churches, rotary clubs and so on – have been in decline for decades.

?And this really matters, because without this social scaffolding, it’s suddenly on us all as individuals to facilitate our social world. Friendship stops being a side-effect of living – and becomes a task.

?An analogy might be drawn with our modern sedentary lifestyle. We used to stay thin and lithe just be being in the world, by going about our business. It just happened.

?Now, if we want to stay fit it takes a lot more effort. We need to have a plan, go to the gym, to think about our diet. And how many times have you not made it to the gym? How many times have you got back late from work and popped in a ready meal?

?To summarise the work of another American sociologist, Eric Klinenberg, a decline in ‘social infrastructure’ means that we are all more vulnerable to loneliness. And that’s especially true if you happen to be poor…

?If I think about how I have ‘re-wilded’ my life with new social habitats, with the ‘third spaces’ I spend time in now – the local Cross Fit gym in Surbiton where I live, the London improv comedy community, my local pub – they are all places where I have to pay to be there.

?I am lucky enough to have the money to do these things, but what if you don’t?

?‘We once recognised the role social infrastructure played in making a good society. But something happened with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 80s,’ Eric Klinenberg told me.

?‘We said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if we let the market provide these things?’ What’s happened is that the market has succeeded magnificently for the most affluent people. Meanwhile the masses have been abandoned. Our social infrastructure has been shut, run down, or sold-off.’

Let’s turn now to the second cause of the friendship recession…

Having the opportunities to meet and mix with others is only part of the equation. We also need to be willing and able to take them – and this is increasingly not the case. Why?

The most fundamental limiting factor in our friendships is time. This has been born out again in the again in the data…

?Such as work by the evolutionary anthropologist and GOAT of friendship research Dr Robin Dubar. He’s the guy who came up with the theory that we all - on average - can maintain a maximum of 150 friends at any one time – colloquially known as ‘Dunbar’s Number.’?

?His theory doesn’t claim thar we have 150 friends of the same level of closeness, instead it suggests that beneath that number of 150 is series of other numbers. All of us, he’s demonstrated, have the same social network structure: we sit at the centre of a series of expanding circles of friendship with a distinctive scaling ratio, each fanning out, increasing in size by a factor of 3 as it does.

?The inner most layer is made-up of our 5 closest friends, then there’s a layer of 15, and then another layer of 50, up to the figure of 150.

Here’s the thing: all our friendships have an unavoidable ‘decay rate.’ If you want to keep someone in your inner circle of five, you’d better be in contact with them once a week. It’s once a month for the circle of 15, once every six months for the 50, and one a year for the 150.

?‘If someone is contacted less often than the defining rate for more than a few months,’ Dunbar explains, ‘Emotional closeness will inexorably decline.’

?You can’t cheat time with friendships – use it or lose it.

But time is something that gets scarcer and scarcer as you grow into proper adulthood, especially when all the big scary stuff arrives - marriage, kids, careers. Often, it’s our friends that are the first thing we push off the to do list. It certainly was with me.

Yet the idea that we are too busy for friendships is only a half-truth. Yes – we spend a lot of time with our spouse, with our families. Yes – many people work long hours and then face long commutes.

But what is really eating into the leisure time we used to spend with friends – and this is born out repeatedly by time use surveys - is TV and phone usage… We have privatised our leisure time and we have done so because our values have changed.

?Do you not recognise this? It's not always visceral, in your face. It's more like a strange odour that we've learned to live with.

?A narcissism - or at least a fetish for convenience - which leads to pulling back from (or not engaging in) community, work groups, friends, family - and eventually to loneliness.

?Which bring me finally, then, to the third factor: skills

We generally don’t think of it in these terms, but friendships are built by some simple soft skills.

When I was researching my book, I spoke to a guy I know - Steve – who’s got tonnes of friends. I asked him what his secret was… ‘“My mates call me the Sherpa,” he said, “because I organise everything. But if I didn’t do that, I’d never see them.”’

?Be the Sherpa: that would become my new motto.

Be the one who… organises the pub visit, who sends the check-in text, who goes first. But going first requires us to be brave, it requires us to persevere when people are crap – it’s a skill.

And what about intimacy? The feeling of being know by (and knowing) another. Intimacy - I learned the hard way - requires vulnerability. It requires I disclose my inner world to you and for you to then reciprocate in kind.

?And how might I get you to be vulnerable with me? Well, you’d have to feel safe doing that. Creating that space – that permission – requires that I listen well, and not just speak. It asks me to be curious, and not judgemental. These are skills.

And say we spark a friendship and then manage to deepen it over time. How might we maintain it over years rather than months? How might we help it endure as we both change? How might we cope with the imperfections of human behaviour and the vagaries of availability we’ll have for one another? We are going to need empathy, and tolerance, and forgiveness. ?

We are not born with these skills; they must be learned. But does the world, dominated by tech – that we consume, locked away in the solitude of our own homes - support the development of these capacities? I’m not sure it does.

But I don’t want to end on a negative note

There are many trends that make friendship difficult in the modern world. But as individuals, there are so many small things we can do to make a big difference. On my own quest to re-boot my social life, I set myself three simple rules:

1)??? Show up, when asked.

2)??? Go first, when not.

3)??? Keep going, even when it’s hard.

But there are other small gestures we can all make, to establish a healthier ecology of connection…

?In the queue at the coffee shop? Take your ear pods out. Chat to the barista.

Having a conversation with someone? Be present, ask good questions – make that person feel the warmth of your attention.

?Send that birthday card. Make that phone call. Organise that meet-up. Say thank you. Smile. Remember people’s name.

Life is a flood of moments. And we can change the culture gesture by gesture, to be more connected: fatter with friendship.

Let me finish where I began: my Best Man quest. You might be wondering, OK, big guy, did you find one? Well, I am delighted to say I solved my friendship problem by doing many of things I have spoken about this evening.

I eventually proposed to Naomi, and we got married, but stood with me by the celebrant as Naomi walked up the aisle was not a Best Man but two Best Women – Phillippa and Hope. Whom I took with me to Hatton Garden way back when, before my quest even began.

I hope you don’t feel cheated. The things is… along the way I realised that this was about something a lot bigger than finding someone to fill a role. To tick a box. To abide by a tradition I didn’t particularly believe in.

?This was about confronting who I was; and how I had ended up where I had: thirty-three years old and lonely.

The uncomfortable truth was, it wasn’t about finding a best man at all. It was about becoming a better man. A man more able to provide friendship. And therefore, a man more worthy of receiving it from others.

All I can promise you, is that I have done my best.

You can book me to speak - please send me a DM. Find out more about my work and my book about friendship - Billy No Mates - on www.maxdickins.com