Just 59% of American adults say they currently have a best friend, down from 75% in 1990, according to a nationally representative survey from the Survey Center on American Life. That’s a 16-point drop in what used to be one of the most reliable features of adult life. Having one person you’d call your best friend was, for most of the 20th century, close to a given. Now it’s something close to a coin flip.
The survey, based on a random sample of 2,019 U.S. adults interviewed through Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel with a margin of error of ±2.4 points, didn’t just measure best friends. It tracked the entire shape of American social circles, and nearly every measure moved in the same direction: down.
The Friend Group Itself Has Shrunk
It’s not only the “best friend” label that’s disappearing. The overall size of people’s close friend circles has collapsed too. In 1990, a third of Americans, 33%, said they had 10 or more close friends. By 2021 that had fallen to just 13%. Meanwhile, the share of adults with three or fewer close friends nearly doubled, from 27% to 49%, and the share reporting zero close friends at all jumped from 3% to 12%, a fourfold increase in one generation.
A more recent measure backs up that direction of travel. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults found 8% reported having no close friends at all, and only 38% had five or more, a meaningfully smaller circle than what the Survey Center’s 1990 baseline described. Different methodology, different year, same basic story: American adults are working with a smaller bench of people they’d call genuinely close.
Age Cuts the Trend in Different Directions
Not every group is losing friends at the same pace, and not every group is losing them for the same reason. The Survey Center’s data found younger adults were actually the most active friend-makers, with 56% saying they’d made a new friend in the past year, compared with just 41% of seniors. But Pew’s more recent numbers flip that story once a friendship is established: adults 65 and older were the most likely to report a robust circle of five or more close friends, at 49%, versus only 32% of adults under 30.
Put together, that suggests two different problems layered on top of each other. Older adults built deep friendships decades ago and are mostly maintaining them, even as they make fewer new ones. Younger adults are out there meeting people at a higher rate, but many of those connections aren’t sticking long enough, or getting deep enough, to become the kind of close friendship either survey is measuring. The “best friend” concept in particular, a single person you’d name above everyone else, seems to require a runway of years that a lot of adults simply aren’t getting anymore.
What’s Actually Behind the Drop
The Survey Center’s research points to structural life changes rather than a sudden dip in people’s desire for connection. More adults live alone than in 1990. More people work remotely or in jobs that don’t put them in daily contact with the same coworkers for years at a stretch. Marriage and parenthood, which used to come with built-in social infrastructure through school events and neighborhood ties, now happen later or not at all for a growing share of adults, which means the automatic friendship-generating machinery of adult life simply runs less often than it used to.
None of this means people value friendship less. Pew found 61% of Americans still consider close friendships extremely or very important to a fulfilling life, and among people who do have at least one close friend, 72% say they’re highly satisfied with those relationships. The problem isn’t that adults have stopped wanting a best friend. It’s that the everyday structures that used to manufacture one, close neighbors, long tenures at the same job, decades in the same town, have quietly stopped doing that work for a growing share of the country.
That’s a fixable gap, but it takes more deliberate effort than it used to. Where a best friend once emerged naturally from proximity, adults now often have to manufacture that proximity on purpose: joining a recurring class, committing to a standing weekly plan, or simply staying in touch with an old friend through the gaps that used to be filled by running into each other at the same coffee shop or the same school pickup line. The numbers suggest the default setting for adult friendship has changed. Whether any one person ends up with a best friend now depends less on circumstance and more on whether they go looking for one.
