I'm in my mid-fifties, and I'm not short on friends. I'm short on friends nearby. The people I've known longest are a few time zones away, or a long drive, and there's nobody I just run into on a Tuesday.
There's Daveo. There's KK, the guy who came up with the word robplosion. A few friends from high school, and some folks I picked up along the way. I've also got my partner Sandra at home, a lot of people who'd say hi to me at the grocery store, and a pile of contacts from twenty-odd years of business in three countries.
It's easy to read that as being broken in some special way. It turns out it mostly makes me ordinary.
So, to the question: is it normal to have no close friends as an adult? It's common, and it's getting more common, especially for men. In a 2021 survey by the Survey Center on American Life, 12% of American adults said they had no close friends at all. In a 1990 Gallup poll the same report cites, that number was 3%. Common isn't the same as fine, though. I'll get to that.
The numbers that made me feel less weird
That same report had another number that stuck to me. When asked whether they'd received emotional support from a friend in the past week, 41% of women said yes. For men it was 21%.
That's half. And I'd bet a lot of the 21% are counting a guy who said "that sucks, man" over a beer.
I'm not saying this to blame men, or to say it's all society's fault so nothing's on me. Some of it is on me. But it helped to know I'm not the only grown man sitting in a kitchen wondering where everybody went.
How I ended up here
I've been thinking about this a lot, so here's the honest version, not the flattering one.
I moved. A lot. Vancouver, then Shanghai for work, then years in Indonesia running a dive operation, then back home to Québec. Every move I told myself I'd keep in touch. Every move the circle got smaller.
The dive centre years had their own kind of friendship. You make fair-weather friends on an island. Single-serving friends. They're there for a week or a season, you share some great days, then they fly home and the next group lands. It's fun, and it's real while it lasts, but it doesn't add up to anyone who knows you. Some of that is just geography. Some of it is that I'm bad at the maintenance part of friendship, the dull texting and the remembering birthdays.
Then there's the autism, which I didn't know about for 50 years. I could do social. I could do it well, even. But I was doing it on manual, working out every exchange in real time, and it costs. After the event I'd go home empty and not want to see anyone for a week. People read that as "not interested". Sometimes I read it that way too. (I go deeper on that in I can run a room, but my close friends are far away.)
But the big one is that I leave before I get left. When somebody starts getting close, something in me starts looking for the exit. I'll find a flaw in them, or decide they're only being polite, or just go quiet. It feels like protection. Mostly I'm doing the rejecting first so nobody gets to do it to me. I wrote about that pattern in why I leave before I can be left.
Put those together and you get a guy with friends all over the map and nobody down the road.
Is it actually a problem, or just how I'm built?
Both, probably. I don't buy the line that everyone needs a huge circle. Plenty of autistic people, and plenty of people who aren't, are happier with one or two people and a lot of quiet. I like quiet. My best days are often very small.
But I can tell the difference between solitude and loneliness in my own body. Solitude is me in the woods with a camera, happy. Loneliness is me scrolling at night with a feeling in my chest like I forgot something important. I've had plenty of both.
And when depression has come for me, being alone made it worse every time. It didn't start it, but it fed it. The WHO's depression fact sheet lists staying connected to friends and family among the basic self-care steps, right next to sleep and moving your body.
So no, I don't think I'm meant to be best friends with half of La Petite-Nation. But I do think distance is a risk for someone with my history.
What I'm trying (and I haven't cracked it)
I'll be straight. I don't have a tidy ending for this. I'm not writing from the other side.
What I'm trying right now:
- Fewer people, more often. Seeing the same face five times beats meeting fifty new ones.
- Doing things beside people instead of facing them. A shared task takes the pressure off the talking.
- Catching myself when I start building the case against someone. That's usually the exit reflex, not real information.
- Saying a little more of the true stuff, a little earlier, and seeing what happens.
The practical side has its own post: making friends after 50.
And if the loneliness is sitting on top of something heavier, low mood that won't lift, thoughts that scare you, please don't wait for a friend to show up first. A doctor, a CLSC, a support line, a group. Those count. Some of them got me through stretches when nobody was close by.