How to make friends (and keep them) | Sheridan Voysey

Sheridan Voysey begins with a test of meaningful friendship: who could you call at 2 a.m., when everything has gone wrong and the other person would be seriously inconvenienced? He recalls sitting with his wife in an adoption seminar in 2008. They were eight years into what became a 10-year attempt to start a family, and the facilitator warned that adoption could bring great joy but also difficulty. A support network would be essential. When she asked participants to write down the name of their 2 a.m. person, Voysey’s pen hovered over the workbook because he could not think of anyone. He says this problem is widespread: roughly every fourth person in a workplace, neighborhood, or train carriage is regularly lonely. Loneliness, he explains, is associated with increased anxiety and depression, reduced meaning and happiness, weaker heart health, and a shorter lifespan. Friendship reverses those effects: people with close friends tend to be happier, healthier, and longer-lived. Voysey calls friendship “a superpower” and the most overlooked relationship of the era. The central issue is not merely that people feel lonely, but that modern adults have forgotten how to create and maintain close friendships. He frames the situation as either a “loneliness crisis” or a “friendship recession,” and proposes a friendship revolution built around three commitments.

Voysey says he did not fit the obvious stereotype of someone who needed friends. As a presenter, he was comfortable talking to strangers and had high social confidence. Yet, when he considered the 2 a.m. question, he realized he was facing three major barriers common to adults. The first was mobility. He had moved cities several times, had friends living elsewhere, and was not doing enough to remain connected to them. The second was busyness. He asks the audience to acknowledge periods when they were too busy to keep in touch, then cites research suggesting that 50 hours of meaningful contact are needed to move from acquaintance to casual friend—before reaching the levels required for a good friend or a 2 a.m. friend. His conclusion is blunt: he simply was not putting in the hours. The third barrier was neglect. Culture gives romance far more attention than friendship. Voysey jokes that listeners should search their Spotify playlists for a song about friendship and will find an ocean of love songs surrounding perhaps the one familiar friendship song from Toy Story. People know Valentine’s Day, but fewer know International Friendship Day. Schools provide sex education, while friendship education is rare, and books, apps, courses, and organizations help people date, marry, and raise children without offering comparable guidance for adult friendship.

Because friendship has been neglected, Voysey argues, people are no longer sure what counts as a friend. He asks whether workmates, a person helped through a local charity, a barista who remembers one’s order, or a hairdresser who knows family drama should be considered friends. Comedians offer deliberately extreme definitions: Jim Hayes says a friend helps you move house, while a best friend helps you move a body. In a Groucho Marx paraphrase, a friend visits you in jail, a good friend bails you out, and a best friend says, “That was fun.” At Friendship Lab, the organization Voysey leads, the definition is more constructive: a friend is someone you can “talk to, depend on, grow with, and enjoy.” Talking includes both ordinary matters—football scores and holiday plans—and deep hopes and fears. Depending on means having someone to call when everything has gone wrong. Growing together means helping each other meet life’s challenges and become the people they are meant to be. Enjoyment can mean laughter, playing squash, or sharing a taste for “moody European films with subtitles” in which everyone dies meaningfully. Voysey invokes Oxford researcher Robin Dunbar to make the larger point that friendship is not just one factor in health and happiness; he presents it as the factor influencing them. The goal is therefore not simply to reduce loneliness, but to build relationships that combine conversation, reliability, growth, and pleasure.

The first part of Voysey’s proposed manifesto is to treat being a friend as a vocation—as important as being a parent, poet, or professional. He calls being a friend a “sacred calling” and having a friend a “sacred trust.” Just as people read books to become better parents, practice to become better poets, or take courses to advance professionally, they should become skilled at friendship. That means rediscovering what Voysey calls the forgotten and unspoken rules of friendship. He does not present friendship as something that automatically works if two people like each other. Instead, it requires attention, learning, and deliberate practice. The idea responds directly to the cultural neglect he described earlier: society has built extensive resources around romance, marriage, and parenting, but has left adults with little instruction in how to form, deepen, and sustain “life-giving” friendships. For Voysey, this commitment changes friendship from a vague byproduct of shared workplaces, neighborhoods, or activities into a relationship that deserves intentional effort. A person who wants a 2 a.m. friend must also learn how to be one. The revolution begins when friendship is treated as a serious part of a meaningful life rather than as an optional social extra.

Voysey’s second commitment is to put friends before screens. He describes the relationship many people have with their devices in romantic terms: they gaze into screens, caress them, and return to them hour after hour. His point is not that people have no time for friends, but that they often prioritize screens over people. He cites Office for National Statistics figures saying the average person spends five hours a day watching streaming video alone. Against that amount of screen time, the actions needed to maintain friendship appear small: a check-in text takes about 10 seconds, a catch-up call about 10 minutes, and a meet-up about one hour a week. Even after making that time, he jokes, people would still have enough hours to watch strangers renovate homes they could never afford or compete to be voted off an island. The recommendation is therefore practical rather than abstract. Return one’s attention to where it is most important, valued, and needed. “Putting people before pixels” does not require abandoning entertainment or devices; it requires recognizing that a friendship can be sustained by small, repeated investments, while passive screen consumption can quietly absorb the time and attention that close relationships need.

The third commitment is to embrace the risk of mutuality. Voysey distinguishes friendship from one-sided arrangements: if someone is always the giver, the relationship is charity; if someone is always the receiver, it is dependence. Friendship is a reciprocal “dance” of giving and taking, seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard, and knowing and being known. He explains why people may avoid that reciprocity. Always giving can protect someone from revealing their own needs, while always receiving can spare them the sacrifices friendship requires. Genuine friendship may involve cooking when a friend is sick, giving up a weekend to help them move, or losing sleep when they call at 2 a.m. Mutual vulnerability is difficult precisely because both people must allow themselves to need and be known by the other. Voysey illustrates the distinction with Helmut, a man from his father’s church whom he did not know. In 2018, Voysey’s father was diagnosed with cancer and was also caring for Voysey’s mother in Australia. Helmut arrived with a notepad and organized meals, lawn care, and putting out the bins. For two years, he drove Voysey’s father to chemotherapy every Tuesday and Thursday, while the refrigerator stayed full and the lawns were mown. Voysey initially calls this sacrificial, life-changing charity—not yet friendship.

Over time, the relationship between Helmut and Voysey’s parents changed. The repeated Tuesday and Thursday visits gave Helmut people he could talk to about both small and large matters. He could depend on them while working through his own problems, grow with them through mutual encouragement, and enjoy their company. Those days eventually became his favorite days of the week. Voysey’s father’s cancer battle ended in September 2021, and Helmut was present carrying the coffin. Voysey emphasizes that not every charitable relationship should or will become a friendship, but this one became “equal, mutual and fulfilling.” The story shows the difference between helping someone and sharing a relationship in which both sides give, receive, and become part of each other’s lives. He closes by imagining a culture in which songs about friendship are as common as love songs and International Friendship Day is celebrated as prominently as Valentine’s Day. His three commitments are repeated as the route to that future: treat friendship as a vocation, put friends before screens, and embrace the risk of mutuality. Friendship, he concludes, supplies change during stagnation and continuity during crisis. The “friendship revolution” begins with people deliberately becoming the 2 a.m. friends they themselves hope to have.