The Best and Worst Decade for Friendship
Your twenties feel like the peak of social life. You're surrounded by people at university, in flatshares, at work, and on nights out. Friendships form effortlessly — or at least they seem to. You share kitchens, hangovers, heartbreaks, and half-baked plans for the future. It feels like this abundance will last forever.
It won't.
What nobody tells you in your twenties is that this decade isn't just the golden age of friendship. It's also the decade where the foundation either gets laid — or doesn't. The choices you make about your social life now, often without realising you're making them, will echo through your thirties, forties, and beyond.
England's Community Life Survey 2024/25 found that 16 to 24 year-olds report the highest loneliness of any age group — 12% on the indirect measure and 9% saying they feel lonely often or always, against England-wide averages of 9% and 7%. That's not a typo. The generation surrounded by the most people is also the loneliest. And it's worth understanding why.
The Illusion of Effortless Connection
At university, friendship happens almost by accident. You live in halls with dozens of people your age. You attend the same lectures, drink in the same bars, and queue for the same questionable kebab at two in the morning. Sociologists have long held that three conditions are needed for close friendships to form: proximity, repeated and unplanned interactions, and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down. As Rebecca G. Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has put it, that is precisely why so many people meet their lifelong friends at university. It delivers all three on a silver platter.
But here's the catch: because friendship feels so effortless, you never learn how to do it intentionally. You never develop the muscle of reaching out, making plans, following up, and showing up consistently — because you never needed to.
Then graduation happens. And suddenly, everything changes.
The Post-University Scatter
A US study that followed students through their first semester at university found that around 41% of high-school best friendships had become more distant by the end of it (Oswald and Clark, 2003). A similar pattern repeats after graduation, often more dramatically. Your closest friends from halls and seminars scatter across the country. Some move to London. Some go home to save money. Some disappear abroad. The proximity that made your friendship work vanishes overnight.
You tell yourself you'll stay in touch. And you genuinely mean it. But the group chat slowly goes quiet. The plans to visit "soon" drift into next month, then next year, then a vague "we really should." Before you know it, people you once spoke to daily become people you haven't seen in eighteen months.
This isn't failure. It's structural. The conditions that made friendship easy no longer exist, and most of us haven't yet learned how to maintain connections without them.
Onward's 2021 report The Age of Alienation found the proportion of under-35s with just one close friend or none at all had trebled in a decade, from 7% to 22%. The friendship crisis isn't coming. For young adults, it's already here.
The Forces That Pull You Apart
Work Takes Over
Your mid-twenties often bring the first serious career push. Long hours, commutes, and the pressure to prove yourself leave little energy for socialising. Jeffrey Hall's research at the University of Kansas found that it takes roughly 50 hours of shared leisure time to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 to become a friend, and more than 200 hours before someone counts as a close friend. Those hours need to be spent genuinely connecting — joking, sharing, having proper conversations. Hours spent working alongside someone barely count.
When you're spending ten hours a day at work and commuting for another two, where exactly are those 200 hours supposed to come from?
Partners Change the Dynamic
Romantic relationships in your twenties can quietly redraw your social map. Couples often retreat into their own world, especially in the early stages. Friends who were once inseparable start declining invitations. "Sorry, can't make it — doing something with Jake." The group shrinks. The dynamic shifts.
This isn't malicious. It's natural. But if you don't notice it happening, you can reach your late twenties with a much smaller circle than you realise.
Social Media Creates a False Floor
A 2025 UK cohort study of 1,632 young adults found that social media use in itself was not linked to loneliness — but compulsive technology use, and using social media to try to improve your mental health, both were. You can be technically "connected" to hundreds of people online and lonelier for the way you are using it. Social media is brilliant at maintaining the illusion of friendship. It lets you see what everyone's up to, react to their stories, and feel like you're keeping in touch. But liking someone's holiday photo isn't the same as sitting across from them and asking how they're really doing.
The danger is that social media makes you feel socially satisfied without actually being socially nourished. You mistake the signal for the substance — and by the time you realise, the real connections have quietly faded. We explore this tension in depth in why texting isn't enough.
The Cost of Living Crisis
The financial pressure facing young adults in the UK is real and significant. ONS analysis during the cost of living crisis found adults aged 25 to 34 had the highest odds of financial vulnerability of any age group — more than twice those of people aged 75 and over. When you're choosing between a train ticket to visit a friend and next week's food shop, the friend loses. Socialising becomes a luxury — and friendships that depend on regular contact start to wither.
Why Your 20s Matter More Than You Think
Here's the thing about this decade: the habits you form in your twenties tend to stick. If you learn to prioritise friendship now — to treat it as something that requires effort, not just something that happens — you'll carry that skill forward.
But if you spend your twenties letting friendships coast on autopilot, you'll arrive in your thirties wondering what happened. As we explore in why making friends after 30 feels so hard, the structural barriers only get steeper from here. The proximity disappears. The unplanned interactions stop. And if you haven't built the habit of being intentional about your social life, the decline can feel sudden and irreversible.
Your twenties are the decade where you have the most social capital and the most social opportunity. The question is whether you spend it wisely.
How to Be Intentional About Friendship in Your 20s
Stop Assuming It'll Just Happen
The single biggest shift you can make is moving from passive to active. Friendship in your twenties doesn't need to be effortless — it needs to be intentional. That means being the person who makes the plan, sends the text, books the table, and follows through.
It feels awkward at first. We're socialised to believe that friendship should be spontaneous, that trying too hard is somehow desperate. Forget that. The people who have thriving social lives in their thirties and forties are the ones who learned to make the effort in their twenties.
Invest Beyond Your Immediate Circle
University friends are wonderful. But if they're your only friends, you're putting all your social eggs in one very fragile basket. Build connections through work, hobbies, sports clubs, community groups, or shared meals. The more diverse your social network, the more resilient it becomes when life inevitably shuffles the deck.
Try this: commit to one social activity per month that's outside your usual circle. A supper club, a running group, a book club, a volunteering shift. It doesn't have to be dramatic — just different. Over a year, that's twelve chances to meet people you'd never otherwise cross paths with.
Show Up Consistently
The mere exposure effect — the psychological principle that repeated contact breeds familiarity and liking — doesn't stop working after university. It just requires more deliberate effort. The friend you see once a year will always feel slightly distant. The one you see monthly will feel like family.
Regularity matters more than intensity. A quiet coffee every few weeks builds more closeness than one epic night out every six months. As we discuss in the power of showing up, it is consistency that carries a friendship through.
Put the Phone Down and Be Present
When you are with friends, be with them. Not half-scrolling, not checking notifications, not composing an Instagram story about how great this is. An hour of genuine, phone-free conversation will do more for a friendship than a month of WhatsApp exchanges — and you already know that from your own experience, without needing a study to tell you.
Have the Real Conversations
Your twenties are messy. You're figuring out careers, relationships, identity, finances, and the terrifying question of what you actually want from life. Most people your age are going through the same thing — but almost nobody talks about it honestly.
Be the person who does. Ask your friends how they're really doing. Share your own uncertainties. Relationships deepen when people are willing to move past surface-level chat, and someone has to go first. Your friendships will be stronger for it.
The Friends You Make Now Could Be the Friends You Keep Forever
There's a beautiful paradox about friendships formed in your twenties. They're often built in the most chaotic, uncertain, transitional period of your life — and yet they can become the most enduring relationships you'll ever have. The people who saw you at your most unsure, your most adventurous, your most ridiculous — those people know you in a way that later friends rarely will.
But only if you put in the work to keep them.
The twenties friendships that survive don't survive by accident. They survive because someone kept texting, someone kept showing up, and someone kept saying "when are we actually going to do this?" until it happened.
At Dinners With Friends, we see plenty of twenty-somethings who've moved to a new city, left university behind, or simply realised that their social life needs more than a group chat and good intentions. Our regular community dinners give you the proximity and repetition that makes friendship possible — no awkward networking, no forced fun, just good food and genuine conversation.
Your Social Future Starts Now
Your twenties won't last forever. Neither will the easy, abundant social environment that comes with them. The question isn't whether your friendships will be tested by distance, careers, partners, and life — they will. The question is whether you've built them strongly enough, and intentionally enough, to survive it.
Don't wait until your thirties to realise that friendship requires effort. Start now. Be the one who makes the plan. Be the one who shows up. Be the one who has the real conversation instead of the easy one.
The friends you invest in today are the people who'll still be sitting across the table from you in twenty years — laughing at the same stories, knowing you better than almost anyone, and reminding you that you were never meant to do this alone.