Is the friendship recession why making friends feels harder than dating in your 20s?

Being in your 20s today feels like one big contradiction. On one hand, you can open an app on your phone and have a date lined up by the weekend. On the other, finding someone to text after you've had a bad Tuesday can somehow feel almost impossible.

We've become surprisingly good at meeting potential romantic partners. Dating apps introduce us to strangers, algorithms recommend people with similar interests, and social media makes it easy to slide into someone's DMs. Friendship, on the other hand, comes with almost no script. Nobody teaches you how to ask another adult, "Do you want to be friends?" without feeling like you've been transported back to primary school.

Somewhere between graduating, starting work, moving cities, and trying to keep up with life, friendship quietly became harder than romance. In fact, so many people are feeling this shift that experts have started calling it a "friendship recession"—a time when we're more digitally connected than ever, yet increasingly struggling to build and maintain close platonic relationships.

People surround us, yet we feel more alone 

Naturally, we're not the first generation to believe we're the busiest, but Gen Z and younger millennials have inherited a particularly fragmented version of adulthood. Hybrid work means fewer office friendships. Remote jobs eliminate the casual coffee runs that once turned colleagues into confidants. Cities are more transient than ever, with people constantly relocating for work or education.

As a result, many of us spend entire weeks interacting with dozens of people without actually connecting with any of them. We're not antisocial, we're simply stuck in a cycle of interactions that never last long enough to become real relationships.

Dating has structure. Friendship doesn’t 

Think about it. Dating comes with expectations. You ask someone out. You grab dinner. You text afterwards. If things go well, you meet again. There is a socially accepted progression. Friendship doesn't offer anything like this.

You might chat with someone you met at Pilates every Saturday for three months and still never exchange numbers. You can sit beside the same colleagues every day and somehow never move beyond work deadlines. We keep waiting for friendship to "naturally happen", even though adulthood rarely creates those opportunities anymore.

We confuse being connected with being close 

Instagram Stories can make it feel as though you're keeping up with everyone. You know who got engaged, who started running, who moved to Goa, and who is currently obsessed with matcha.

But having updates isn't the same as knowing someone. We reply with a heart emoji, send a "cute!!", maybe share a meme every few weeks, and convince ourselves we're keeping the friendship alive. In reality, we're maintaining visibility, not intimacy.

Everyone is protecting themselves

Making new friends requires vulnerability, and these days, vulnerability can feel surprisingly expensive. After disappointing friendships, ghosting, flaky plans, and one-sided effort, many people have quietly stopped trying.

We tell ourselves things like, "If they wanted to hang out, they'd ask." "They're probably too busy." "I don't want to seem desperate." So both people end up waiting for the other to make the first move. The result? Two people who probably would've become great friends never get past liking each other's Instagram Stories.

Adult friendship requires something we're all running out of: time

When we were younger, friendship happened because life happened together. School meant seeing the same people five days a week. University gave us lectures, hostel corridors, late-night food runs, and group assignments.

Adulthood is different. Friendship now competes with work deadlines, family obligations, gym sessions, side hustles, dating, therapy, and the increasingly ambitious goal of getting eight hours of sleep. The people we genuinely like often become the people we promise to meet "next month."

We've romanticised independence

Somewhere along the way, being self-sufficient became aspirational. We're encouraged to dine solo, travel solo, heal ourselves, and become our own biggest supporter. While independence is valuable, it has also convinced many people that needing community somehow signals weakness.

It doesn't. Humans have always depended on one another. We simply forgot that friendships aren't distractions from adulthood; they're part of surviving it.

The strongest friendships are built in ordinary moments

The friendships that last aren't always formed through dramatic life events. They're built through repeatedly choosing someone. Checking in after work. Sending the TikTok that reminded you of them. Inviting them for coffee even when your social battery is low. Remembering their coffee order. Showing up after months of silence without making it awkward. These moments seem insignificant until you realise they're the foundation of almost every meaningful friendship you've ever had.

Maybe friendship needs to become intentional again

Perhaps the biggest misconception about adulthood is the belief that friendship should remain effortless. It made sense when we were children because our lives naturally overlapped. It doesn't make sense anymore.

If dating deserves calendars, planning, and emotional investment, perhaps friendship does too. Maybe it's time to stop waiting for a "friendship meet-cute" and start treating platonic relationships with the same care we reserve for romantic ones. Because the next great love story of your life may not be romantic at all. It might simply be the friend who answers your voice note at 1 am, remembers your coffee order without asking, and makes an unfamiliar city feel like home.

Lead image: Pexels 

Also read: Do your friends really need to be friends with each other?

Also read: Three's a crowd? Here's how to make friendship trios actually work