Why Men and Women Stop Being Friends in Adulthood, According to a Psychologist
· Vice
Men are losing friends at a rate that should alarm everyone, and one of the least discussed reasons is that they stopped being friends with women.
The numbers on male friendship have been bad for a while and keep getting worse. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey found one in five American adults has no close friends, double the rate from the early 1990s — among men under 30, it’s one in four. The American Perspectives Survey found the share of men with six or more close friends fell from 55% to 27% over roughly the same window. Women’s numbers dropped too, but by nowhere near as much. Cross-gender friendship is one of the casualties inside that decline that rarely gets examined on its own terms.
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According to clinical psychologist Dr. Aileen Alegado, nobody consciously decides to stop being friends with people of the opposite sex. It’s more that the conditions disappear. “Social circles gender-sort naturally, romantic partnerships can reframe opposite-sex closeness as complicated, and friendship maintenance drops down the priority list,” she told Body+Soul. School and shared housing did a lot of the sustaining. Once those are gone, so, usually, are the friendships.
Men’s Loneliness Crisis May Be Worse Without Female Friends
The attraction question is the one everyone sidesteps. Research found that men reported higher levels of attraction toward female friends than women did toward male friends, regardless of relationship status. In a separate study, researcher Linda Sapadin surveyed more than 150 professional men and women about their cross-sex friendships. Sexual tension topped women’s list of dislikes. Men, by contrast, more frequently cited attraction as a reason for initiating a friendship in the first place. The two groups are not always operating with the same understanding of what the relationship is.
Research found that cross-sex friendships that made it through attraction complications were almost always the ones where both people said something about it. The ones that stayed quiet about it mostly didn’t survive.
For men especially, the case for doing the work is hard to argue against. Pew’s 2025 data found that 74% of men would turn first to a romantic partner for emotional support, reaching out to friends far less than women do. A close female friend represents one of the few relationships in a man’s life that might operate differently. Dr. Alegado describes cross-gender friendships as offering “a perspective that same-gender friendships, however close, simply can’t replicate.” Given where the friendship numbers are headed, that perspective is increasingly hard to find.
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