A couple years ago, my wife and I were arguing. I feel a lot of antipathy towards parenting, which leads to a lot of arguments. At one point during this particular fight, she wanted to say that I needed to make friends with other dads. If I did, I’d have other men to talk to, commiserate with, and complain to, rather than trying to bottle these feelings up on my own and have them boil over at home around her and our two boys. But in the heat of the argument, what she actually said was, “You don’t even have any friends!”
“I have a lot of friends!” I shot back.
“Yeah, but every one of them is at least five hours away!” she responded.
“… Okay, that’s… accurate…” was my own meek reply.
It’s true. I feel incredibly lucky to have nine guys whom I consider my close friends. We could show up unannounced at each other’s door and be welcomed in and invited to stay. We can travel together and talk about anything. But I’m lucky to see a single one of them even once a year, because my wife was right–they all live at least five hours away by car or plane.
I realized I did need to make some friends in San Diego, but I wasn’t sure how. I actually see a lot of people on a daily basis, but as a business owner, they’re mostly employees, customers, or strangers at the coffee shop or gym. As a 30-something guy with a business and a family, where would I go, or what would I do, just to meet someone who could become a new friend?
I started thinking about the problem all the time. This was 2022, when the problems of loneliness and social isolation seemed to be on everyone’s mind. COVID and the lockdowns had only accelerated trends happening for years. The number of friends we all have and the time we spend with them has been declining steadily for 30 years. Today, 34 million Americans are unsatisfied with the number of friends they have. Half of all Americans have only three or fewer close friends (someone you could share something personal with). One out of every five single men has zero close friends. Each of these depressing statistics represents an enormous rise compared to 30 years ago.
What’s to blame? A number of things. Our tendency as Americans to relocate frequently for school and work. The isolating effect of smartphones, earbuds, and the omnipresent internet. The way we’ve designed our cities and towns around cars and distance. The decline of community places. The rise of remote work. All the small, immeasurable ways we’ve forgotten how to make connections and just hang out. We’ve inadvertently built ourselves a society in which most of us are physically close to hundreds of people every day, but know none of them.
And yet research suggests that people value friendship above all, even over love and marriage. And not having enough friends shortens our lives in the same way as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, and increases the risk of disease, depression, anxiety, and dementia. Nearly all of us want more friends. So how can the problem be getting worse, and more importantly, why haven’t we solved this problem yet?
The decline of friendships and the rise of social isolation is The Problem, but as I talked to men and women about times they’ve felt they needed more friends and what they did about it, I started cataloging at all the little problems that make The Problem worse. Two themes emerged.
First, men in particular simply seem averse to putting in any effort into meeting people and making new friends, even when they feel they need to. If they played a sport, they would join a local league, and if a woman in their life (usually a girlfriend or wife) introduced them to new friends, they were grateful, but if they had neither a sport nor a woman, they told me they simply continued being alone.
Second, I catalogued 29 distinct points between the moment two strangers meet and the moment they both would consider the other a “close friend” in which the awkwardness of the moment, or the mere potential for awkwardness, can cause the two simply to break contact. For example, a number of men told me they had had the experience of meeting another guy at a professional conference or similar event, getting along and feeling they could be friends, but then they simply didn’t ask for a phone number or email address because, “it just felt awkward.”
My idea for a solution formed and grew over the course of a year. Eliminate the awkwardness. Eliminate the effort. I named my idea Covalish (a covalent bond is when atoms connect to form a molecule; friendships can feel as strong as that). In late 2023 I started testing the idea. It worked. People let me know when they were available and I scheduled meetups–just show up at this place at this time, meet this person, and have a conversation around these questions. I met people, and I introduced people to other people. It worked. So I took everyone’s feedback, built out the app, got more feedback, revised the app, and now the work is to grow.
My goal this year is to help create 1,000 new friendships in San Diego.
