Laura Eramian of Dalhousie University was the lead author on a study looking at the experiences of 21 Atlantic Canadians who identified as having no or very few friends.
“There really was no single profile of a person who identified as having fewer no friends. We had participants ranging from their late teens up to their seventies, probably the majority of these people were in their twenties and thirties,” she said.
Eramian says two main themes emerged from the interviews.
“Some people did emphasize that really kind of abject loneliness and suffering on account of living without friends. On the other hand, some of them really emphasize that idea that, ‘I can do whatever I want, and there aren’t any sorts of commitments that I have and, my time is my own and I can pursue my own hobbies or interests or, or what have you, which was unexpected.”
“We recruited friendless rather than lonely people, right? If we had recruited lonely people, we would’ve missed this opportunity to learn about this other kind of narrative behind what it means to live without friends.”
Eramian said people interviewed in the study often spoke about autonomy and self-reliance.
“The sidebar was kind of always, ‘I’d prefer to have friends, but you know, in the absence of some really good ones, I’d prefer my own company,'” she said.
Eramian said there was a stigma felt by people without friends.
“People would say, ‘oh, you know, people look down on people like me. People think there’s something wrong with us. They think that we’re misanthropic and we hate everybody. Or we’re lonely cat ladies. Someone referenced Oscar the Grouch, things like that. They had very sort of clear and overwhelmingly negative types of ideas about how they were seen.”
Eramian says that if we want to create a society that enables friendship, it is not useful to look to individuals and tell them to go and make friends.
“Friendship is just like any other social relationship. It can be either enabled or constrained by the broader ways that our society is organized. And some of the things that our participants reported indicate that it’s not really about them and their choices, it’s about the larger things that they’re subject to that might prevent them from being able to go out and make friends,” she said.
“For example, if you’re not making a lot of money, it’s hard to say like, go and meet people for dinner. It costs money obviously to go out and eat or to go to a sports event. Maybe there’s tickets involved or something like that. So we would ask, are there enough free and inclusive public spaces where people can gather at no cost, where it would be possible to make and sustain friendships.”
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