The "friendship recession" is making it harder for adults to find and maintain close relationships.

Midlife is often a period of significant upheavals in life; midlife loneliness tends to follow.

AI companions offer a form of connection that avoids conflict, delay, and disappointment.

Real friendships help us grow through learning patience, flexibility, and resilience.

I’ve completed a lot of research into friendship across the lifespan, and what has always been a given is that friendships are voluntary relationships between two people. That “chosen” nature of friendship has always made it something special. These relationships are built on mutuality, reciprocity, and genuine fondness for one another.

But today, the face of friendship doesn’t always look like it used to. As the friendship recession leaves people struggling to maintain close social connections, millions of people are now turning to AI friends for companionship, emotional support, and connection. These artificial intelligence companions can, in some ways, rival person-to-person friendships, but they also may pose unexpected hazards to the human relationships that sustain us in the real world (Yong et al., 2026).

AI Friends Are Always Up for the Adventure

Most of us have had to disappoint friends when we had to “cancel” or turn down an opportunity to get together or enjoy an adventure together. We’ve also all suffered the disappointment that comes when friends cancel on us. This is an early lesson that friendships teach us—that disappointment is part of relationships, and we learn how to manage those feelings without feeling the relationship is wrecked.

With AI companions, they are always ready to engage with us and never put us off or make us wait for an answer. They’ve been........

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