The Socializing That’s Replacing Friend Time
· The Atlantic
What is your favorite way to spend an evening? Perhaps, hearing this question, you’d picture a big, steaming plate of spaghetti from a beloved neighborhood restaurant. Maybe you’d imagine going dancing with friends, shimmying off the stress of a long week. Or you’d belt along with a crowd of perfect strangers at a concert, play Frisbee in the park, or stroll aimlessly with a cone of sprinkled soft serve.
Yet last year, when more than 2,000 survey participants answered this open-ended query, many of them described a very different kind of scene: a night at home, cozied up with family. When researchers analyzed the long answers, they found that 43 percent of respondents mentioned time with family or a romantic partner—the most common activity, tied with watching a TV show. For Jeffrey A. Hall, a University of Kansas communication professor and a co-leader of the project, this was heartening. He knew, of course, that the average American is staying in more now compared with past decades, and hanging with friends less. But he was reminded: Time at home is not necessarily time alone. He read description after description of people relaxing together, catching up on their days, curling up for a movie, or cooking a good meal. Honestly, he thought that all sounded pretty nice.
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Granted, these were depictions of an ideal evening; the survey didn’t measure how people were actually spending their hours. But some studies suggest that, although alone time is increasing in the United States, family time may be as well. Over the past handful of decades, on average, parents have started spending more time with young kids; romantic partners have become more intertwined; more grown children are maintaining close relationships with their parents; and more grandparents are actively involved in caring for their grandkids. And many Americans seem to love the idea of kinship. In a 2023 Pew poll, nine out of 10 participants named “spending time with family” to be either very important or the most important priority for them—far outranking every other category, including religious faith, physical activity, nature, career, and community.
Socializing at home, in sweatpants rather than heels, is socializing nonetheless. In some ways, Americans are living through a golden age of family time. But many of them are also losing a different kind of connection—one that’s important in its own right.
For early Americans, family tended to be the nucleus of social life. Relatives commonly worked together, on farms or in small businesses, and helped one another raise children. But with industrialization, more people were able to separate socializing from labor—and to travel beyond their village, meet new people, and actively choose their companions. Some historians argue that “pure friendship”—the kind of relationship opted into solely for its own sake—largely didn’t exist until then. It was a modern invention.
Today’s family-forward age is, obviously, very different from that of the 18th century. The average family is much smaller, with fewer siblings or cousins who might feel like peers; time together might be less chaotic and labor-intensive, more quiet and cushy. (If tilling soil was once the quintessential shared activity, now the standard looks more like streaming Netflix and ordering in.) And yet, in a certain sense, Americans today also seem to be homebound together by a kind of necessity. When participants said they were unsatisfied with how frequently they saw friends, Hall and his colleagues asked what was getting in the way. Nearly 40 percent said, “I don’t have enough money.” A third said they were too busy or tired, and a third reported not having enough time. (Respondents could pick more than one answer.) Hall’s sense is that two realities can be true at once: A lot of people love being with their family members. They might also feel like other kinds of socializing are slipping out of reach.
This shift could be happening for a number of reasons. One is the skyrocketing cost of living. The price of housing, in particular, has been rising for years; if your home is taking up a major share of your budget, you might want to take full advantage of it—and cut back on other expenses. Affluent Americans tend to have bigger houses and more land than they used to, the Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey told me, making staying at home extra tempting (and the home itself extra expensive). Working-class Americans, meanwhile, might be spending so much on rent that they can’t afford to meet friends at restaurants or bars. More and more low-wage workers have unreliable schedules too, which makes planning outings difficult. When public resources (parks, playgrounds, transit systems) aren’t well used, they may get less investment, which can lead to neglect—which, in turn, can make those resources less accessible or appealing. Sharkey calls this “the privatization of our daily lives and the disinvestment in collective life.”
Many people also have to spend time with family—for caregiving purposes. More American adults are providing care for their aging relatives, some at the same time that they’re still caring for younger children. And parents today tend to do a lot of hanging out with their kids, rather than letting them run around independently. Moms do the bulk of that child care, but fathers and grandparents are pitching in more than in the past. To be clear, they’re not all gritting their teeth; multiple studies have found that parents and children describe time together as positive for their well-being, Melissa Milkie, a University of Toronto sociologist, told me. Still, with only so many hours in a day, friendship can get sidelined.
An occasional night out with friends, for a parent, might feel untenable when a babysitter costs $30 an hour. Even getting out with the kids is hard. Let’s say you live in New York, and you and your partner want to go with your two children to see a movie in a theater. You could pay about $20 a ticket for a total of $80, not counting the price of the subway or a couple of tubs of popcorn. Or you could stay home, tear open a bag of chips, and pay $3 to stream a movie together.
Hall’s study suggests that many people are embracing that kind of snug evening—that their values may be changing along with their schedules and finances. Much of the time, in coverage about Americans staying home, the portrait feels both apocalyptic (everyone is ceaselessly doomscrolling, glassy-eyed and alone) and judgy (people can’t be bothered to nurture their friendships). A different conclusion could be that people are resilient. “We make sense of the social conditions that we find ourselves in,” Hall said. His team found that both family and friend time were associated with higher life satisfaction and less loneliness. Facing real constraints on your routine, you can idealize the life you actually lead.
That said, plenty of people don’t have loved ones at home. A society that reveres the nuclear family is one that might fail to look after many of its members: those who live far from their relatives, or who have lost them or never felt accepted by them, or who don’t have a partner or kids, by choice or by chance. Unmarried people report feeling lonely at much higher rates, on average, than married ones do. And an analysis of time-use data from 1965 to 2018 found that solitary leisure time had increased by 118 minutes a day for unmarried people who lived alone—but by only 40 minutes for everyone else.
Even for people who do live with family, decentering friendship—and the outside world—has real consequences. Milkie’s research suggests that for many people, shared time in the home involves a lot of parallel play: sitting in the same room but doing your own thing. Studies have found that people tend to enjoy that type of side-by-side, passive companionship more than total solitude. Yet she and Hall both told me that this kind of engagement isn’t likely to boost well-being as much as actually sharing an activity.
Hall’s participants had painted such lovely portraits of their restful dream evenings, but the reality of home life isn’t necessarily so rosy. In a 2024 study, Sharkey analyzed people’s participation in work, school, dining, leisure, sports, and religious or spiritual life from 2003 to 2022. He found that over that period, people spent roughly the same amount of time on those activities—but the share of time they spent doing them at home significantly increased. (This shift began long before COVID.) When those activities occurred at home, they were associated with lower levels of happiness and perceived by the individuals as less meaningful. That remained true, though less so, even when family or friends were around.
Breaking out of that private sphere can get harder and harder the less you do it. Examining the habits of individuals, psychologists have long observed a pattern, Hall said: When people get accustomed to loneliness, they may start declining social engagements. They aren’t just less motivated; they actually begin to discount the value of that connection. “Maybe they say to somebody who might invite them, I’m just not feeling up to it right now,” he told me. “Or maybe they’d say yes, and then the time comes and they go, You know, I just don’t think I can stand it.” He’s worried that the same could happen on a much broader level. If friendship starts losing cultural cachet, more Americans may deprioritize it.
Family might help make up for some of that lost connection. But it’s not a perfect substitute for the particular joys of friendship. The French philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie spends every evening with his two best friends, including holidays; he’s written a book about structuring his life and identity around those relationships. But he doesn’t love when people refer to such bonds as “chosen family.” The implication is that friendships are inherently more casual—that they can be elevated only when put in a bracket that’s taken more seriously. In fact, he said, the two categories are qualitatively different. He thinks the nuclear unit can cause people to turn inward—to embrace an ideology of “my home, my family, my land.” When you go out to meet friends, on the other hand, you’re in a position of receptivity: potentially hearing new ideas, having new experiences, maybe connecting with people who are quite different from you.
I don’t know if the line between friends and family is always quite so stark. But there may be something to the idea that friendship requires openness: to other people, and also to a distinct kind of growth. After all, friends have no legal contract or blood tie binding them; they simply commit to experiencing the world together. “Pure friendship” is based on the tenuous ties of affection and curiosity, and it depends on overcoming solipsism. That’s why it’s so special—and also why, when it’s not protected, it’s so easily lost.