Source: The Conversation – UK
You know what’s happening in the lives of dozens of people. A friend from school has just had a baby. Someone you follow online recently got engaged. A colleague has returned from a holiday. Messages and updates arrive constantly. Yet when you’re having a difficult week, deciding who to call feels surprisingly hard. You’re connected – but you don’t feel it.
This paradox is increasingly familiar to many young adults. Despite being more connected than any previous generation, many report struggling to build friendships that provide a genuine sense of closeness, belonging and support. Young people have been described as “too connected to connect”.
You might feel you have more connections than ever before, but those connections can feel shallow, rushed and carefully staged. Relationships abound, but authenticity – the ability to be yourself – feels scarce.
In my own work, I’ve seen this in children who contort themselves into particular roles or identities to preserve family connection. Or in spouses and partners who hide parts of themselves to maintain a facade or status quo in a marriage or romantic relationship.
In essence, it is a form of conditional love: the idea that we are only lovable if we present particular sides of ourselves, while keeping others carefully edited or hidden away. Perhaps the issue is not a lack of people, but a lack of spaces where it feels safe to be our authentic selves.
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Depth and authenticity in young adults’ friendships could be threatened by this same dynamic. This risk stems partly from the environments in which people form friendships. Social media platforms, professional networking spaces, dating apps and even some university and workplace cultures can encourage people to present highly curated versions of themselves. These spaces are often shaped by performance — where people can feel pressure to appear confident, socially successful or emotionally untroubled.
If depth in friendship is under threat, it is worth asking what deep friendship actually involves. Research on close relationships suggests that meaningful friendships depend less on the number of people in our lives and more on the quality of connection we feel with them.
Depth emerges when we feel able to show parts of ourselves that are usually hidden, when those parts are met with recognition rather than judgment, and when we feel as though we matter.
In this sense, deep friendship is not about constant contact. It involves reciprocity, emotional risk and a willingness to move beyond performance. It requires continuity over time, shared vulnerability and the gradual building of trust. These qualities cannot be manufactured quickly, nor can they be sustained through curated selves.
Building deeper friendships
If we want deeper friendships, we may need to shift our focus away from finding more people and towards investing differently in the relationships we have.
In her book Frientimacy, the author, Shasta Nelson, argues that close friendships are built through three basic ingredients: positivity, consistency and vulnerability.
We are naturally drawn towards people with whom we feel accepted, valued and at ease. Deep friendship is rarely built around impressive performances or obligation. Instead, it grows through interactions that leave us feeling understood, encouraged and welcomed. This can be as simple as expressing our appreciation, showing genuine interest or creating moments of shared enjoyment – all ways to express positivity about the relationship.
Consistency is perhaps the most overlooked ingredient. Many adults assume that closeness emerges from profound conversations alone. But friendship research repeatedly suggests that regular contact matters enormously. Trust develops through repeated encounters: a weekly coffee, a message asking how someone is doing, a walk after work – a shared routine that communicates, “you matter enough for me to keep showing up”.
we.bond.creations/Shutterstock
Vulnerability is where authenticity comes into play. Vulnerability does not require dramatic disclosure or emotional oversharing. Rather, it involves allowing other people to see parts of us that may be imperfect, uncertain or unfinished. It means moving beyond carefully curated versions of ourselves and risking being known more fully. Deep friendship develops when vulnerability is met with empathy, rather than judgment.
These ingredients interconnect. Consistency creates the trust that makes vulnerability possible. Vulnerability deepens the positivity people experience in one another’s company. Together, they create what Nelson calls frientimacy: the sense of closeness, understanding and belonging that characterises meaningful friendship.
The lesson here may simply be that friendship is not something we “acquire” so much as “practice”. In a culture that so often rewards performance, deep friendship asks for something different: presence, consistency and the courage to be known.
The French philosopher Simone Weil once wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”. Perhaps this can be applied to friendship. Deep connections rarely emerge instantly. More often, they begin when we pay closer attention to one another, reveal a little more of ourselves, and keep showing up.
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Sam Carr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.