There could come a pitiless morning, around 2026, when you wake up alone. Your friends and family have become distant or absent; the once warm companionship of the internet offers cold comfort. In the bleak realism of social segmentation, you will have become a “regretful loner” - melancholy, solitary and disconnected from the outside world.
Sound depressing, even apocalyptic? Well, it could be the future. If government forecasts are right, about 20 years from now, two out of five households will be single occupancy. And there is evidence the situation is already deteriorating. According to a report, Social Isolation in America, published in the American Sociological Review in 2006, the average American today has only two close friends. Twenty-five per cent of those surveyed said they do not have anyone to talk with about important things.
And yet, while some are declaring a crisis in our ability to make friends, others are saying exactly the opposite. For example, MSN’s Anatomy of Friendship Report, published last November, suggests that the average Briton has 54 friends - a spectacular rise of 64 per cent since 2003.
So what is happening to friendship? Why the contradictory evidence? Are we better or worse at the relationship without which, Aristotle said, no one would choose to live, even if they had every other good thing in life?
Some of the confusion might stem from the way that friendship has traditionally been studied. The most celebrated technique revolves around what is called social capital. According to Professor Robert Putnam, one of the leading advocates of the concept, social capital expresses the value of social networks, including the benefits they bring to individuals and society at large. To put a figure on it, Putnam and others study everything from church-going to support for political parties. Membership is what counts - for when it involves the signing of registers and the paying of fees, it can be counted. When Putnam first studied social capital he concluded it was in sharp decline, hence the melancholic title of his book, Bowling Alone.
But the problem with social capital is that the associations that bring people together might have little or nothing to do with friendship - as anyone who was forced to go to the Cub Scouts or Brownies, and hated it, will know. Rather, friendship emerges when people establish meaningful, dependable connections with others. In other words, social capital might miss it altogether.
Professor Ray Pahl and Liz Spencer have addressed this dilemma head on. In their book, Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today, the authors explain how friendship might be studied, with all its nuances and ambivalence. They recognise that in casual use, the word “friend” can describe a wide variety of relationships. For researchers, it is therefore important to ask people to unpack the nature of their friendships one by one.
When this is done a very different snapshot of modern friendship emerges. People are still embedded in circles of commitment - what Pahl and Spencer call “personal communities”. And these relationships are subtle and complex, a mesh of family and friends, or a suffusion of the two.
“In the modern world, people have different repertoires of friends,” says Pahl. “Some people have a basic repertoire, where their friendships are light-hearted, fun relationships... By contrast, other people have broad repertoires, with many different kinds of friends playing a range of important roles in their lives. Not only this, some people make most of their significant relationships at one stage in their lives, while others add to a growing core at each stage of the life course.”
Pahl and Spencer agree that modern relationships can become scarred by the way people live, from the desire for freedom to the pressures of work. But on the whole they are optimistic. For example, their study shows that although personal communities can consist of closely bonded sets of individuals, that does not mean they ignore the rest of society. Through a complex set of crosscutting allegiances, such friendships can contribute to social cohesion.
Another way to understand what is going on with friendship is to ask what it is. Aristotle distinguished between two main types. The first depends on doing or enjoying something together - this might be work or sport, pop music or politics. However, the downside is that if the connection ceases for some reason, then the friendship tends to flounder too.
The second type of friendship is different because it does not rely on a mutual interest. Rather, it stems from loving the person simply for who they are. It is, according to Aristotle, the kind of relationship in which the friends see each other as “another self”, so intimate is the connection.
But this kind of “soulmateship” is not easy to find. Socrates, as reported in Plato’s dialogue Lysis, admitted that he longed for it more than all the gold of the King Darius. He argued that close friendship is difficult, that spending time together, and growing in trust, honesty and intimacy, is costly in terms of character and commitment.
And this is where perhaps a modern way of life lets us down. Take the recent YouGov research commissioned in November last year. This was on the side of those who suggest we are losing friends - and it blamed urban living, with its transitory, mobile way of life. In London, for example, more than two-fifths of people reported drifting away from their close friends. Their lifestyle and work brings them within the orbit of many amiable people, but they are good only as acquaintances - they leave you stranded when it comes to real intimacy.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Professor Lynn Smith-Lovin of Duke University, co-author of the American Sociological Review report, admits that more research is needed to shed light on what is causing this kind of collapse. But she believes there are several key factors at work. One is the ease with which people can up sticks, causing friends and family to scatter over wide geographical areas. This fosters broader, shallower networks as opposed to deep bonds. Alternatively, as people spend more time at work, they spend less time on activities that cultivate closer relationships. New technologies such as the internet do not seem to be filling the emotional gap here either: online talk that is not face to face tends to revolve around shared interests, not personal troubles.
Another emerging problem with cyberspace is the potential for rejection. Dr David Holmes and his colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University studied the traffic on social-networking websites like MySpace, with some disturbing results. The problems relate not to headline-grabbing ills such as stalkers and paedophiles, but rather the widespread abuse of online friendship. Holmes estimates that up to 40 per cent of the information displayed in MySpace profiles - the personal information that people use to choose who to befriend - is fabricated. “Friendship becomes like a computer game: people are being ditched, just for fun,” Holmes says.
The more encouraging evidence from Holmes’s research is that after such experiences, many return to the internet more committed to honesty. “People’s relationship with the technology continuously evolves in waves, though the trend at the moment is definitely one of disillusionment,” he says.
The lesson to draw from this is that the impact of technology is ambivalent. For friendship can also be well served by it, too. Take a study on text messages carried out by Christian Licoppe of France Telecom: according to a forecast by US research company Gartner Dataquest 1.2 trillion text messages were sent in 2006, worldwide. Licoppe found that they function in two opposite ways depending on the prior relationship between the sender and receiver. A close relationship leads to frequent texting - full of codes, allusions and references that would be missed by an outsider. He calls this “reassurance communication”. It maintains a sense of intimacy even though the friends may be large distances apart.
Conversely, the texts - and, by extension, the e-mails and instant messages - of people who do not know each other well cannot be as subtle. So while they are a convenient form of communication when it comes, say, to arranging meetings and establishing first contact, they are a clumsy form of communication if attempts are made to use them to develop closer relationships. The danger is when people are not all playing by the same rules. What is a game to some people is then a relationship gamble to others, and they may very well get hurt.
So what is the current state of friendship? The truth probably lies somewhere between amity’s optimists and the prophets of doom. The statistics of the former group, if exaggerated, underline just how important friendship is. Meanwhile, the warnings of the latter, if alarming, remind us not to put friendship at risk. And that has always been a challenge. After all, it was not in the age of the internet, but more than 2,300 years ago, that Aristotle wrote: “The desire for friendship comes quickly. Friendship does not.”
Mark Vernon is the author of “The Philosophy of Friendship” (Palgrave Macmillan).
