Actually, hell is other people

Aug. 16, 2006 | Earlier this summer, I spent a week vacationing with some of my oldest and dearest friends, suffering most of the time from paranoia after one of them pronounced me "addicted to worrying" and another accused me of being relentlessly negative (I responded to her T-shirt, printed with the question "What Would Nature Do?" by asserting that nature is a whole lot more violent than Jesus). I resented being known so thoroughly and longed to be surrounded by intimacy lite: acquaintances and cocktail party banter buddies from whom I'm distant enough to ensure a conflict-free interaction, as opposed to friends who have compiled empirical evidence about my character defects over the years.

While I was busy questioning the benefits of intimacy, three sociologists from Duke and the University of Arizona were releasing a study called "Social Isolation in America." The researchers found that Americans have one-third as many close friends as they did 20 years ago, and nearly three times as many said they don't have a single confidante. This, by the way, is how close friends are defined in the study: people with whom one discusses important matters, though one person listed "getting a haircut" as an important matter. I count myself lucky to have more than the study's average number of friends and confidantes. In fact, I am a serial confessor and discuss important matters with anyone who'll listen; by the haircut standard, my postman Ronnie is a close friend. But like many other Americans these days, I find close friendships maddening and admit to the occasional onset of good old-fashioned misanthropy, a subscription to Sartre's observation that hell is other people.

The study, a random sampling of 1,467 adults, sparked a short-lived whirlwind of media activity examining the crisis in American camaraderie, pointing the finger at sprawl and technology and work to explain it. But when I went out searching for the friendless, I found that overwhelmingly they blamed no one but themselves. They are what I'd call voluntarily lonely. Some people seemed almost proud to say they could call no one a friend, proud of the fortitude that loneliness requires. My dad once told me that friends are people you can do nothing with, but these days, people seem to prefer doing nothing by themselves. Are they choosing loneliness because friendship is so much work and real friends are hard to find and make and keep?

I didn't need to go far to find one of the voluntarily lonely, just down the block where my neighbor Stephen Cohen lives. Cohen had plenty of pals back in 2001, when he worked on Wall Street as a computer consultant, meaning he had disposable income and regular business hours and could spend evenings and weekends partying. "It was always about staying up late and being up on popular culture," he says. Then he got serious. Turned 30. Got his pilot's license. And he found as he outgrew his job that he outgrew his friends, too. "When I started to go to bed early, it was incompatible with that lifestyle." So he distanced himself from them, and, he says, "Eventually the phone just stopped ringing."

Cohen used to choose his friends, he says, "by if they listened to New Order or wore Doc Martens. From that quick assessment you knew you had things in common." Forming new friendships requires a certain chemistry, much as romantic relationships do, and the older we get, the more we have to approach friendships the same way, with friend dates and relationships and breakups. Now, Cohen says, "I'm really friendly, but I don't have any friends." By "friends," he means people he sees regularly, people who call to say hello. Cohen doesn't seem to mind the vacuum left by his old friends' departure. "I used my therapist as a surrogate," he says. "We stopped talking about my problems and I ended up just telling her about what I was doing that week."

Louise Hawkey, a research scientist in psychology at the University of Chicago, says certain people select what she calls existential loneliness. "They find it a purposeful, meaningful way of living out their lives," she says. Hawkey has been working on a study measuring the genetic predisposition to loneliness -- some people are more prone to it than others, but even for those, there may be a certain amount of self-deception involved in voluntary loneliness. "If people are choosing it, either they're perfectly able to live in those circumstances and aren't inclined to feel lonely," she says, "or they're really good at deceiving themselves that this is acceptable for them: The way to come to terms with a solitary life is to say, 'This is my choice. I like it like this.'"

A writer in Albany, N.Y., named Daniel Nester says when he relocated upstate from Brooklyn he chose to bring little of his old life with him beyond his wife and the contents of his apartment -- no one from his former circle of friends. "I'm currently not interviewing for new buddies. I've downsized my circle of friends to almost nil," he says. "I have one friend. I used to have 30." Petty grievances that were once small fissures grew to crevices as he prepared to leave, and instead of courting new friendships, he drew closer to his wife, filling the social absence with books. Nester would rather be friendless than in the companionship of what he calls "fool's gold" friends. "My faith in friendships is pretty low right now," Nester says, but his expectations are high. "It's like a blood bond: We confide in one another; we defend one another," he says -- anything less is not friendship at all.

Next page: It's hard to believe that the voluntarily lonely aren't just playing hard to get