BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY’S EDITORIAL TEAM

Something has shifted over the past three decades in how Americans relate to each other. In 1990, about three percent of Americans said they had no close friends. Today, that number sits somewhere between 12 and 20 percent, depending on who you ask. Jaimie Krems, an associate professor of psychology at UCLA and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Friendship Research, has a name for it: a friendship recession.

“It is painful. It is horrific. The No. 1 antidote to loneliness is friendship,” Krems said. “So we absolutely need to know how friendship works, how people make friends and keep friends.”

Saul Martinez is doing his part to find out. The owner of Cafe Con Arte in downtown Pasco, Washington, started hosting speed-friending nights after his niece moved to town and struggled to meet people. The format borrows from speed-dating: strangers rotate through short conversations at two-person tables, warmed up by ice-breaker questions. What’s a trivial hill you’re willing to die on? Where are you from?

Loneliness has become a structural problem

The friendship recession is not purely a social phenomenon. It tracks alongside some of the biggest structural changes in daily life. Remote work eliminated the casual proximity of office hallways, where friendships used to form almost by accident. Now you can order groceries, work, and scroll through hundreds of faces online without ever speaking to anyone. Social media fills in the gaps with something that looks like a connection but mostly isn’t.

“Honestly, it’s easy to isolate, even unintentionally,” said Ava Robertshaw, who attended the Pasco event. “You can get your groceries delivered, and you can work from home, and you can network and be on social media to feel this sense of connection. But I don’t feel like it actually meets the human need for connection.”

The health stakes are real. Studies show that people with strong friendships live longer and report higher life satisfaction than those who are socially isolated. The flip side is equally stark: chronic loneliness carries roughly the same health risk as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

“Friendship is the silver bullet,” Krems said. “In terms of importance, very few phenomena can do all that friendship can do for us.”

What actually builds lasting adult friendships

Speed-friending events are multiplying across the country as one response to this gap, but Krems is careful about what they can realistically deliver. “I would not be hugely surprised if speed-friending doesn’t always work,” she said. “What I really think does work are low-stakes, repeated interactions with people you’re similar to.”

The essentials, she says, are time and consistent contact, but vulnerability is what tips an acquaintance into an actual friend. She also points to the Benjamin Franklin Effect, a principle from psychology which holds that doing a favor for someone tends to make you view them more warmly. In other words, the exchange of small help-giving is part of how bonds form, not just a byproduct of them.

“There is something about time. There is something about contact. There is something about vulnerability,” Krems said. “But we also need that piece of helping with favors and gift giving.”

The two-hour event might not be the point

Even if a single speed-friending night rarely produces a best friend, participants tend to leave with something. Daniel Madrigal made an actual friend at an earlier Cafe Con Arte event. “We just started talking, and I thought it was a normal conversation. Just normal. And then afterward they were like, ‘Hey, we should totally hang out again,’” he said. They made plans to meet up soon after.

“Finding one good friend or acquaintance here is really the hope, right? You don’t expect to walk away with 17 new friends,” Martinez said.

For Shintell Izquierdo, who attended on a recent Thursday night, the value was harder to quantify. “It was very good for my soul and to be able to meet new people and be able to have conversations I don’t think I would’ve had otherwise if I wouldn’t have come out,” she said.

Robertshaw put it plainly: “You’re socializing with other adults for the sake of socializing. There’s no destination besides just connection. It filled my social bucket.”

Speed-friending may be more spark than lasting flame, but in a country where roughly one in five adults now has no close friends, even a spark has value. “The magic of friendship is something that we should prioritize,” Krems said. These events are not promising lifelong bonds. They are offering something simpler: a room full of strangers who all showed up, which turns out to be its own kind of beginning.

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