I remember how much it hurt seeing that Facebook picture. All of their smiling faces. And I wasn’t invited. We all had met and gone out together that same night we all had our first adventure. But somehow, when it came time to have our next adventure, I was left behind.
Of course, I didn’t blame them. I blamed me. It was my first year at college and my first year away from home. When I saw people making friends, it felt like they were communicating in code, or speaking a language that I was not privy to. I was homeschooled all my life before going to college, and I moved around a lot. So I thought that’s why I always found it so hard.
But I didn’t know how common my story was. The number of people who have few or no close friends has risen dramatically in the past three decades.1 30 years ago, 3% of Americans said they had no close friends. In 2021, that was up to 12%. Almost half of Americans have fewer than three close friends.2 Authors like David Brooks in his Atlantic piece The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake, Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, Brad Wilcox and Lymon Stone in their piece The Happiness Recession and Dr. Jean Twenge, author of Generations, have sounded the alarm that Americans are becoming more and more miserable — with higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide — because we are becoming more and more disconnected from each other.34 This is a big problem, as loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 packs of cigarettes a day.5 Like myself, most people who are lonely for friendships probably think that they are the only ones standing on the outside “tap-tap-tapping on the glass” ala Dear Evan Hansen. But the reality is that more and more of us are going through it.
One day, after a really hard day, a counselor at my college asked how I was doing. I broke down and cried in front of him, and he took me into his office. That began a series of counseling sessions where he talked me through some of my difficulties. One of them being my loneliness for deep friendships. He told me to pick one or two people who I knew I would love to develop close relationships with and tell them that’s what I wanted from them. Then we should make a commitment to meet regularly to build that relationship. I was somewhat surprised to discover that it was easy to call to mind exactly who I would choose to reach out to for that. Some said yes; others said no. But those that said yes built into consistent friendships, and then other relationships started developing naturally, and I started investing in those as well.
Then, it happened: one afternoon, my senior year, I was laughing with my core group of friends in the front row of a class, and I realized that I was the guy I would have envied my first year at college. A year later, after graduating, I realized that I had enough friends that — if I wanted — I wouldn’t have to spend any day of the week alone. Three years later, I had a core group of friends that I started a podcast and online community with called The Overthinkers, which has lasted to this day.
It was at this time that people started calling me “naturally good” at building relationships. They didn’t believe me when I said that I wasn’t naturally good with people, that this was a skill. And after I convinced them, they would ask me to tell them how I did it. And because it was a skill, I could tell them.
Here’s the secret: I spend time in places where I’m going to regularly see the same people over and over again who I have things in common with. That’s places like church, my job, things that are related to my passions like film. I commit to being a part of those places over and over again. That way I get to know people well enough that I know which people I connect with well enough that I would like to be committed friends with them. Once I find those friends, I commit to spending regular time with them, weekly, if possible. It’s those regular meetings that make you able to trust each other and grow deeper and deeper, and truly bond in the way that satisfies our need for friendship and community.
While I was doing this, I started reading up on many of the articles and research I referenced at the beginning of the article, and realized how they validated what I’d been doing. The reason that so many relationships were breaking down in America was because of a breakdown of spaces where people could regularly see each other and “pre-vet” each other for close friendships. People moved away from their extended families, and then their nuclear families. They stopped going to church. They stopped staying at the same job for longer than three years. As a result, we stop having places to discover which of the masses of strangers we meet might be that person we connect with. That’s why spouses who meet on dating apps are the most likely to break up6 compared to those who meet in church or school.
There’s also one more piece that’s particularly true for men — but is also true for everyone: having a project to work on. It’s a commonly-noticed phenomenon — often pointed out with a chuckle — that women bond by looking at each other and talking about their feelings, whereas men bond standing side-by-side working on a project together.7 Hence how men bonded by hunting, playing golf, playing video games, or starting a podcast — as women often joke about. But all of us are made to be part of the project of building The Kingdom of Heaven in preparation for Christ’s return. We are meant to find people in our lives, not just to share our lives with, but to share a mission with. Finding a mission and then finding people to join you on that mission is a great way to build community as well.
The religious aspect of meaning and purpose can’t be missed as well. As Dr. Jonathan Haidt discussed in The Anxious Generation, communities are held together by beliefs and practices around worshiping shared transcendent values. This allows us to have something in common greater than ourselves which makes us feel we have our ultimate selves in common — our meta-story that we’re all a part of together. With the dissolution of church, we are rapidly losing that. With the dissolution of a common culture based on movies and TV, being replaced by the ever-more-customizable personalized narratives of the algorithm-based internet, we are rapidly losing anything in common to bond over as a community.
This ties into the final aspect of community: keeping it. I got good at making friends but was always in a tug of war with keeping them. Keeping community is harder than getting it, because life pulls us in so many different directions. Work pulls us one way. Friendships another. Family another. Our hobbies another. Romantic pursuits another. Our dreams another. You can make commitments to your friends — and I have — but if multiple commitments pull you in multiple directions over a long period of time, things will start falling through the cracks. The only way I found to solve this was to combine these different sides of myself into my community. Combine my dreams, my hobbies, and my work with my friends. Then these things — rather than pull me away from others — pull me closer to all of them at once. This is one reason why religious people also have the most stable marriages and communities in general: they have a community that reinforces that commitment on multiple levels.8
The good news is that you can choose to have these things in your life. This was how The Overthinkers podcast and community were born. I met Nathan Clarkson, who became my Overthinkers co-host because I regularly attended a small group for Christians in media in New York City. That connected me with people I got to collaborate with on a short film, which took me to a Christian film festival, where I met Nathan. When we saw how much we connected we launched a podcast called The Overthinkers, which meant weekly meetings, and then additional weekly hangouts for movies between us and mutual friends we all vibed with. From there, we started an online Overthinkers group for fans of the podcast where we committed to posting semi-daily on fun topics, one that has continued to grow to this day.
Loneliness is one of the worst feelings. And it’s easy to feel like, if you’re alone, there’s something wrong with you. But the thing is, for most of human history, building relationships was a lot easier than it is now. You were born into a family, a community, a social network, where everyone knew each other and you saw the same people regularly. That “pre-screening” process was already done for you. Now, it’s something you have to choose to do. It’s a skill, and something you have to choose because you value it.
And having a community is worth valuing. Because you need it. And you’re worth valuing.
Notes:
1 Catherine Pearson, “How Many Friends Do You Really Need?,” The New York Times, May 7, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/07/well/live/adult-friendships-number.html.
2 Ben Cost, “Americans Have Fewer Friends than Ever Before: Study,” New York Post, July 27, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/07/27/americans-have-fewer-friends-than-ever-before-study/.
3 David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” The Atlantic, March 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/.
4 W. Bradford Wilcox, and Lyman Stone, “The Sex Recession Is Making Young Americans Unhappy,” The Atlantic, April 4, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/happiness-recession-causing-sex-depression/586405/.
5 Sarah Johnson, “WHO Declares Loneliness a ‘Global Public Health Concern’,” The Guardian, November 16, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/nov/16/who-declares-loneliness-a-global-public-health-concern#:~:text=The%20World%20Health%20Organization%20.
6 Sami Quadri, “Couples Who Meet on Dating Apps Are More Likely to Get Divorced, Study,” Yahoo News, October 31, 2021, https://au.news.yahoo.com/couples-meet-dating-apps-more-094710893.html.
7 Audrey Nelson, “Why You Stand Side-By-Side or Face-To-Face,” Psychology Today, April 27, 2014, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/he-speaks-she-speaks/201404/why-you-stand-side-by-side-or-face-to-face.
8 Joseph Holmes, “The Data-Backed Case for Marriage,” ChristianityToday, February 13, 2024, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2024/february-web-only/data-backed-case-for-marriage-brad-wilcox-get-married-revie.html.
