A few years ago, I had just moved into a house.

As relatively recent graduates, my husband and I had struggled with the banks to secure a mortgage – and worse still, I had a humanities background that didn’t exactly guarantee employment.

But after approaching several banks, we managed to persuade a kind loan officer to say yes. Suddenly, we found ourselves settled in the suburbs, with 190 square meters, two children and a garden trampoline.

One summer evening, while the children were asleep, we sat out on the terrace in the sunshine. We had eaten well, lit candles and were drinking wine. It sounds like the perfect evening, doesn’t it?

On paper, we had realised our dream. The problem was, it didn’t feel that way. I had a strange sense that something was missing, even though I adore my family.

What was missing were friends.

And although I felt lonely, I wasn’t alone. Studies show that many of us have experienced loneliness.

This essay was published as part of a collaboration between Insights, The Conversation’s longform series, and Videnskab.dk.

I research friendship and, over the past few years, I’ve immersed myself in everything from scientific studies to literary texts on the subject.

It is especially literature that has given me a new perspective – both professionally and personally – on what friends are, and what friendship can be.

Hungry for friendship

In other words, I have what romantic movies and popular culture tell us is important: a partner, children, a job and a mortgage.

But it isn’t quite enough.

And it made me wonder whether the life path many of us – myself included – are following might, in fact, contain some built-in flaws.

Does this path leave too little room for the relationships defined by choice and equality? The relationships that aren’t about starting a family, but about friends?

We are raised to follow a particular social script in life. One in which career, marriage and children take centre stage and where friendship is assigned a less important role.

Many of us leave behind youth – when friendship often plays a central part – in favour of the so-called serious romantic relationship of adulthood. More broadly, some people tend to treat friendship as a kind of optional icing on the cake rather than the dough that holds it all together.

But what if this script doesn’t make us happy? What if we are depriving ourselves of something essential? Renowned feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan wrote about the widespread unhappiness of women in the 1960s in her groundbreaking book The Feminine Mystique.

Among its core arguments is this: women who stay at home and care for children are bound to be unhappy due to wider social structures that hold them down. A challenge she labelled “the problem with no name”.

Certainly, an element of being tired of caring for others and not being at the centre of one’s own life played an important role in my own feelings of sadness and yearning. But it couldn’t account for everything: I had a job, and things to do outside the home – contrary to many women in the 1960s. I had things I wanted to do. Friedan’s analysis didn’t entirely capture the problem.

And so, you may recognise the feeling of being hungry for friendship, even if you don’t live in the suburbs, play house day to day, or identify as female.

Perhaps you’ve structured your life very differently from mine, and yet still found yourself wondering where your friends went.

Indeed, when do our friends slip out of our lives?

It is particularly in midlife that finding time for friends can become difficult.

American psychologists Willard Hartup and Nan Stevens have found that we spend less than 10% of our waking time with friends during the years when work and family take up most of our time and energy.

Another study, also from the US points in the same direction: more than 40% of adult participants said they wished they were emotionally closer to their friends and would like to spend more time in their company.

In concrete terms, we now spend less than three hours a week with friends, compared with six hours a decade ago. A halving, plain and simple.

This trend goes hand in hand with a broader societal shift: fewer people are members of political parties, affiliation with religious........

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