Loneliness despite a full calendar

There is a widespread and disorienting experience that is become more and more widespread, and that is feeing lonely despite having a social life. It’s the opposite of having nobody to call, or sitting alone on weekends. It’s something underneath that, which is hard to name and even harder to understand.

The gap between real connection and the actual experience is becoming a more prevalent issue of adult loneliness. Lonely people usually have nobody to call, or empty weekends, and the fact that this isn’t happening to you adds another layer of shame to the issue. It makes you feel like there is something wrong with you specifically. 

But there isn’t something wrong with you. It is a genuine problem, and fortunately it has a solution. It starts with understanding the problem itself. 

How common this actually is

Researchers have drawn a distinction between two types of loneliness: Social loneliness, where people aren’t in contact with others, and emotional loneliness, where there is not enough depth in the existing connections. The Harvard Making Caring Common project found that 29% of adults aged 30 to 44 report frequent loneliness. The Cigna/Evernorth survey found that 57% of Americans describe themselves as lonely, and when you look at who that includes, it is not a population of people sitting at home. 

Being secretly lonely despite having a social life is a problem many adults are having. It is a problem that involves depth and quality of existing connections. 

Why surface level friendships develop so easily

The mechanism that develops surface level friendships is the structure, as most adult social contact is occurring in contexts that discourage deep connections, such as group settings, work environments and brief windows at the beginning or end of something else. In these scenarios, there are unwritten rules about how personal it is appropriate to get, which discourage deeper connections. 

The context these conversations are a part of don’t create the environment for something deeper, as nobody knows how to move it forward. You keep talking with the same people about the same surface level topics for years, and never really progress to anything meaningful. 

This is what emotional loneliness is. 

What actually moves things towards depth

The depth ladder

Depth in friendship follows a usual sequence. It begins with the events and other surrounding matters, then develops into opinions and preferences. Then it progresses into analysis and interpretation, which then progresses into current struggles and uncertainty. The final level involves history, values identity, which are where the real depth is. 

Most adult friendships don’t make it past the second level. It’s difficult to, as it involves somebody taking the plunge and going first to the lower levels. In order to make a change, that person has to be you.

You don’t need to confess something or engineer a serious moment, but use a serious observation where a vague one could have worked. ‘Honestly this year has been a bit much’, instead of ‘yeah, busy but good.’ ‘What is actually going on with you lately?’ instead of ‘how are things?’. As you go deeper and ask the deeper, the other person is more likely to also go reciprocate and go deeper, gradually forming a deeper connection. 

One on one contact is different to group contact

Group settings tend to push towards a common surface level topic, and people are largely going to be unhappy with the person who tries to make it serious. Groups will create a dynamic where it is forced to stay at a surface level. You can spend hours with people you genuinely like, and end up feeling alone because you never had any deep conversations with those people.

One on one contact is different, because the pressure to keep the conversation surface level is no longer there, there is no judgement and people are much more willing to go deep. 

If most of your social contact occurs in groups, its worth trying to change that. Find people who you have some warmth with, and start finding ways to be with them one on one. You’ll find that the same person you’ve known for years in the same group suddenly becomes a different person once you see them on their own. 

Frequency builds depth

Psychologist Jefferey Hall’s research shows that it takes around 200 hours of time together to develop a close friendship. This comes from repeated contact over a period of time. It can be:

• A regular walk or coffee
• A short message that references something specific from the last conversation 
• Showing up for someone when they are going through something

The goal is to create conditions where these happen naturally, by regularly being in low-stakes contact with the same people over time. 

The Audit

If you are secretly lonely despite having a social life, the most useful question to sit with is this: of the people you see regularly, how many of them actually know what is going on in your life? What you’re finding hard, what you’re uncertain about, what you would be unwilling to say in a group setting.

If the answer is nobody, then you’ve located the problem. Identifying this is more useful than it may seem because it puts you in a position to do something about it, rather than wondering why you feel the way you do. 

There’s more to this than three strategies

The three strategies above will genuinely move things forward. But if you’ve been dealing with the issue of loneliness for a while, or if you’re returning to this after previous attempts that didn’t work, there are deeper layers to this problem that a blog post doesn’t have room for.

I spent a long time researching this and I ended up writing a complete guide. I didn’t plan for it to be long, but ended up writing something over 10,000 words long, deciding that depth was what the topic needed.

The guide covers, among other things:

• • How to build depth in a relationship, including scripts to initiate the first contact

• • What to do when you have tried and failed before, and how to not let that stop you

• • How to show up for someone when they are going through good and bad times (which is key to a long lasting friendship)

• • A maintenance system for ensuring you can keep the friendships you have spent a long time trying to create

It’s available here on Gumroad for $24 and covers the whole problem with direct and actionable steps.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it normal to have no close friends as an adult?

Completely normal, and more common than most people realise. Research consistently shows that adult friendlessness is a widespread experience. The AEI Survey Centre found that 17% of American adults have no close friends at all; broader loneliness surveys put the figure for frequent loneliness somewhere between 29% and 57% depending on how the question is framed. You are not an outlier.

How do you make friends as an adult without it seeming desperate?

Specificity is the most important thing, as vague requests can sound needy and desperate. Always make sure to include days, times and places when making plans with others.

Why is making friends as an adult so much harder than when you were younger?

Because the usual structures, like school, where sharing a classroom with other people made it easy for you to make friends, no longer exist in your life. This means that you need to relearn how to do these things yourself, without the built-in structures.

What do you do when you’ve tried making friends and it hasn’t worked?

If you’ve only been trying for a short while, say, a few months, I’d first recommend just keeping at it. Friendships usually take longer than a few months to form, so waiting can be a good first step. It’s also worth thinking about how often you are seeing these people. If it’s irregular (less than three times a month), then it’s very unlikely that a friendship will be formed in that time.

How long does it actually take to make friends as an adult?

Research by psychologist Jeffrey Hall suggests it takes roughly fifty hours of time together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, and around two hundred hours for a close friendship. It may sound like a lot, but if you meet with somebody weekly, that timeframe becomes a lot more manageable.

The Social Rebuild publishes honest writing about friendship and loneliness. It takes my personal experiences and in depth research from valid institutions to help guide people to creating connections in their lives again.