"Adults Prioritize West Elm Furniture, Not Friendship."

The sheer reality is that a lot of Americans don't actually prioritize friendship as adults.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “friendship recession,” it’s most associated with a guy named Dan Cox, and subsequently more associated with men than women. There’s been a lot of discussion, from nuanced to hand-wringing to superficial, about the state of friendships in America and beyond over the last five or so years. The normal culprits in this discussion are:

• Screen time

• COVID

• Neighbors don’t interact

• Convenience of modern life, but also…

• … busyness of modern life

• Etc.

That’s definitely a huge part of the picture, but it’s not the entire picture. I’ve written a ton about friendships in the past three years. I won’t link everything for you, because that would be utter overkill, but I’ll give you two that probably matter somewhat to this discussion first:

• A semi-comprehensive guide to modern friendship

• This moment in male friendships

Now let’s go to some other sources. First up, we have Richard Reeves (Reeve?) promoting a book about masculinity and discussing this “friendship recession:”

Now we’ve also got

Anne Helen Petersen

writing an article about — hey, you’d be happier living closer to friends, so why don’t you? Within said article, she gets to the root of the core issue:

1.) We’re Not Socialized to Prioritize Friendship

Not over career, not over partners, especially not over parenting — even though proximity to intimate friendship can make all of those things a whole lot easier. As Rhaina Cohen points out, “many of those who place a friendship at the center of their life find that their most significant relationship is incomprehensible to others.” (If you haven’t read Cohen’s piece on putting friendship at the center of life, it’s a must). This is the big one, I think — nothing in our lives, not our parents or mentors or even our other friends validate prioritizing friendship to the extent of an actual move, let alone something as seemingly radical as buying a house together.

Some people might look at the question of “Why don’t you move closer to your friends?” and answer: “I don’t know if I have any who actually merit moving closer.” Friendships fade or never get off the ground, not because someone’s an unlikeable person, but because no one (not you, not your friends, and especially not dudes) is encouraged past, oh, age 21 to put in the work to sustain this sort of friendship.

That’s really the essence of the whole thing. If you found 100 people and asked them, “Hey, most of your friends seem to be near Boston. Why don’t you move there?,” you’d get a certain amount of responses, which would be clustered around: