The Friend-Group Fallacy

My friendships exist in silos. Each hangout is a feverish one-on-one where we share fries and eye contact, confessions, rants, gossip, and mutual attempts at amateur therapy. This patchwork of get-togethers structures my week: a Wednesday happy hour with one friend, a Saturday-morning walk-and-talk with another, a Sunday coffee date with a third. It’s exhilarating—we genuinely want to know how each other’s moms are doing.

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People can experience different types of loneliness, Letitia Anne Peplau, the retired psychology professor who co-created the UCLA Loneliness Scale, told me. In the sociologist Robert Weiss’s 1973 book about loneliness, he distinguishes between “the loneliness of emotional isolation,” which he characterizes as “the absence of a close emotional attachment,” and “the loneliness of social isolation”—that is, “the absence of an engaging social network.” You might have a deeply meaningful relationship with your spouse, for example, and still feel lonely for lack of community. And the longing for a social network, he writes, “can be remedied only by access to such a network.”

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