Fifteen percent of American men say they don’t have a single close friend — not one person they’d call in a crisis or talk to about something serious. That figure comes from the Survey Center on American Life’s American Perspectives Survey, and it’s five times higher than the 3 percent of men who said the same thing back in 1990. It isn’t just an older-guys problem, either. Among men under 30, more than one in four report having no close social connections at all, according to a companion analysis from the same research team — and newer, independent data suggests the isolation runs even deeper than a simple friend count can capture.
The Numbers Behind the “Friendship Recession”
The decline isn’t limited to the zero-friends extreme. In 1990, 55 percent of men said they had six or more close friends; today that’s down to 27 percent, according to the Survey Center’s research. Single men — unmarried and not in a relationship — are especially exposed: one in five report having no close friends whatsoever. And it’s not simply that men have swapped friends for a partner or a phone. Among men with three or fewer close friends, more than half say they feel lonely or isolated at least once a week.
It’s Sharpest Among Young Men
The generational split is where the data gets more specific. Young men’s willingness to lean on friends for personal problems dropped from 45 percent in 1990 to just 22 percent today, per the Survey Center’s figures — while reliance on parents for the same kind of support actually rose to 36 percent over the same period. That’s a real structural shift: friendship used to be where young men processed hard things, and increasingly it isn’t, with nothing fully replacing it.
A 2025 Snapshot Confirms the Gap, With a Twist
Gallup’s most recent international loneliness data, published in a May 2025 report, found that 25 percent of American men ages 15 to 34 report feeling lonely on a daily basis, compared with 18 percent of young American women — and compared with an OECD median of just 15 percent among young men in peer countries. Young American men in the same survey also reported higher stress (57 percent versus 48 percent) and worry (46 percent versus 37 percent) than their international counterparts. In other words, this isn’t a universal feature of being young — American men specifically are logging loneliness numbers well above their peers abroad.
Where the Picture Gets More Complicated
Not every recent dataset shows a widening gender gap. A Pew Research Center survey of 6,204 U.S. adults, fielded in September 2024, found that men and women are about equally likely to say they have at least one close friend — the real difference shows up in how often they’re in touch, with women more likely to text, call, or video chat with close friends regularly. Read next to the Survey Center and Gallup numbers, the fuller picture comes into focus: most men aren’t friendless, but a meaningful and apparently growing minority are landing at the extreme end — zero close friends, daily loneliness — even as the average man’s friend count looks roughly stable on paper.
What the Gap Actually Reflects
The consistent thread across all three sources isn’t the headline number so much as where the erosion is concentrated: at the bottom. Men aren’t uniformly losing friends the way a simple average would suggest — most still have someone. But the men who have nobody are a larger, more isolated, and apparently lonelier group than they were a generation ago, and young men are absorbing more of that shift than anyone else. That’s a narrower, harder problem to fix than “people need more friends” — it points specifically at the men who’ve fallen out of any social network at all, and at whatever used to catch them before it stopped.
