Who can you call at 2am? It's time for Christians to counter the loneliness epidemic

Let me take you to a drab government seminar room sometime in 2008. My wife and I were exploring fostering and adoption, and as we gathered with others to learn what might be involved, our straight-talking facilitator prepared us by sharing her toughest stories. “What will you do when your foster child won’t hug you because of her attachment issues,” she asked, “or your adopted son punches a hole in your wall because of his traumatic past? You’re going need people to support you.” 

Then she asked a question that would burrow under my skin for years to come: “Who can you call at 2am when everything’s gone wrong?”

I sat there, staring at the floor, my pen hovering over my workbook. It wasn’t that I didn’t have friends but, having not long moved, most now lived hours away. Even then, I wondered how great I had been at staying in touch and whether we’d ever got close enough to call them at such an ungodly hour. I closed my workbook, unable to think of a name to write down.

Years later, that ‘2am question’ would lead me to launch Friendship Lab, a charity focused on adult friendship. In the moment, it was the catalyst for me getting intentional about my own friendships. I wasn’t alone in needing to.

We’ve never needed friends more, yet we’ve never found them harder to find

According to YouGov, around 20 per cent of Britons have no close friends, including seven per cent who have no friends at all. Our own research at Friendship Lab finds that more than half of us struggle to make new friends, and 40 per cent would like to be closer to the friends we have. While UK figures haven’t been collected, the Barna organisation found around 20 per cent of American churchgoers felt lonely, which links to a similar global trend. After surveying 140 countries, Gallup researchers declared: “Almost a quarter of the world feels lonely.”

This has now been dubbed a ‘friendship recession’. Author Noreena Hertz has called ours “the lonely century”. We’ve never needed friends more, yet we’ve never found them harder to find. The question is why.

The forces against friendship

The barriers against friendship are many. Blame can be laid at rabid individualism, political polarisation, the decline of community institutions, the negative effects of smartphones and social media, post-pandemic workplace changes and more. But while these factors play a part, other forces precede them. You may recognise these at work in your own life, as I have in mine.

Force 1: Busyness

For many of us, talk of the ‘friendless’ brings a certain image to mind – perhaps an awkward aunt who’d rather scroll social media than join family gatherings, or the 49-year-old still playing computer games in his mother’s basement. The friendless, we may think, are those relationally inept folks who need better social skills. 

Not so, according to research. In most studies, friendlessness is rarely a matter of social skills. It wasn’t for me, sitting in that seminar room (as I hope my friends could attest!). Instead, the most powerful force raging against friendship today is busyness. With long workdays, lengthy commutes and endless activities to ferry children to and from, we may feel we have little time left for friends. And when we do, there’s no guarantee our busy friends will have time for us. Busyness is friendship’s most formidable foe.

Force 2: Mobility

Today, few of us live in the neighbourhood we grew up in. After school, we leave town for university. After university, we relocate again for work. Some of us haven’t just moved cities but countries. With each move, our friendships need to adapt. But like a sapling lifted from its soil, some friendships wilt in transit. And with around 50 hours of socialising needed for an acquaintance to become a casual friend, making friends in our new homes takes time. For all the new experiences our mobile age offers, there’s a friendship price to pay with every move. 

Force 3: Neglect

Friendship in our era has simply been neglected. Both culture and Church have been part of this.

In culture, friendship has been overlooked for romance. A quick look at your Spotify playlists will prove it, any songs you find there about friendship being mere drops in an ocean of love songs. We have sex and relationships education in school, but little education on friendship, we celebrate Valentine’s Day but ignore International Friendship Day, and we produce books and programmes aplenty on dating, sex and parenting, but little on friendship.

It takes around 50 hours for an acquaintance to become casual friend 

Meanwhile, in our churches, friendship has been overlooked for charity. Think about it. In your Christian life, how many sermons have you heard on friendship? One? Maybe two? Now, how many sermons have you heard on serving the least, the lost and the needy? Probably many more. It’s understandable why – sacrificial love is our calling. And didn’t Jesus say that if we only love those who love us back – like our friends – we’ll get no reward (see Matthew 5:46-47)? Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard thought these verses made the idea of reciprocal friendship unbiblical. Many Christians have followed suit, feeling guilty for spending time with friends when there’s a needy world to serve.

When even Jesus himself needed friends (see his beautiful friendship with Mary, Martha and Lazarus unfold in Luke 10, John 11 and 12), we must question Kierkegaard’s judgement. And while romance is a gift, will it make it into heaven? Jesus’ words in Matthew 22:30 suggest it might not. And will charity be needed in a world without brokenness? I don’t know. What I do know is that in the new heavens and earth we will enjoy deep, rich friendship. If friendship is eternity’s enduring relationship, it’s worth pursuing now.

What even is friendship?

If we are to see the friendship recession lift and our lonely century end, we need to get clear on what friendship is – which is no easy task given how the word is stretched to mean so many things it isn’t. We say man’s ‘best friend’ is a dog, we ‘friend’ people we barely know on Facebook, and have our hearts warmed by sweet media stories of ‘friendships’ between football stars and needy kids, or divers and dolphins. None of this reflects the equality, mutuality and intimacy that true friendship entails. 

So, what is a friend? Here’s the definition we use at Friendship Lab: A friend is someone I can talk to, depend on, grow with and enjoy. All four elements are important.

A friend is someone we can talk to about the little things and the large, from football scores and work pressures to our doubts, hopes and fears. They’re someone we can depend on to take our call at 2am when everything’s gone wrong. They’re the ones who help us grow into the people we’re meant to be, committed to our callings, character and welfare. And they’re people we enjoy because of the laughter they bring, the insights they carry, the sharp game of tennis they play – or just because their presence makes us smile. 

The three commitments of friendship 

Leaving the seminar room that day, I knew I needed to reprioritise my friendships. But how? No one teaches us how to make or maintain friendships as an adult. The best I came up with was to put my friends’ birthdays into my diary and be more intentional at reaching out – whatever that meant.

Today, I’m still learning the art of friendship. But with a few years of research under my belt and a university-trialled course produced, I have railway tracks to run along. And the starting point, I believe, is to make three key commitments:

1. Treat friendship as a sacred identity

Scripture has much to say about friendship, from proverbs about iron sharpening iron (27:17) to rich portrayals in the lives of David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi. But the theme reaches its pinnacle in John 15.

In this well-known passage, Jesus says he no longer thinks of us as his servants but as his friends. Why? Because while a master doesn’t share the inner workings of their private life with their servant, Jesus does with us (v15). In us, Jesus has someone to talk to, and we in him. He adds that real friendship means laying down one’s life for a friend (v12-13) – becoming people who can depend on one another. He calls us to “bear fruit” (v16) – growing with him – and says that if we remain in his love, his deep joy will be ours (v10-11) – enjoyment. And to top it off, Jesus says he wants such friendship shared (v12). Friendship isn’t an optional extra in the Christian life, or an unbiblical distraction, but a holy vocation.

To be a friend is a sacred calling. To have a friend is a sacred trust. To see our friendships flourish requires us to embrace our identity as a friend, to see it as important as being a parent or carer.

2. Prioritise friendship in our diaries

One of the biggest myths about friendship is that it happens organically. After the golden years of university, when shared rooms and timetables put us in each other’s orbit daily, it doesn’t. Adult friendship must be prioritised and diarised.

Yes, life is busy. But with Ofcom telling us that the average Brit spends a whopping five hours a day watching TV and streaming video alone, it’s fair to say that if we have time for Netflix, iPlayer, TikTok videos and Facebook scrolling – if we can binge watch The Crown and watch endless reruns of The Big Bang Theory – we have time for friends. 

Friendship isn’t an unbiblical distraction but a holy vocation

And if, like me, you’ve found yourself telling someone at work or church: “We really must get together!” without anything transpiring, commit to quit using the phrase until you’ve pulled out the diary and offered some actual dates and times.

3. Learn the art of friend-making

Putting my friends’ birthdays in my diary was a good place to start in 2008. Thankfully, I’ve since discovered what else being ‘intentional’ might mean for forging friendships – like the importance of expressing affection to a friend in a way they can receive, and how measured vulnerability can build trust between us; like why asking for a friend’s help is as necessary as being generous towards them, and how celebrating their success is as critical as being present in their crisis; like why something as small as responding to a friend’s text matters, and the cumulative effect that regular check-ins and meet-ups have to building lifelong camaraderie. 

Like other arts, friendship is a series of micro skills we can learn and master. We have enrichment weekends for our marriages and professional development seminars for our careers. It’s time to get equally upskilled in our friendships.

I once treated friendship like a stranger in the street – there, but not particularly worthy of attention. Then, one day, we stopped to talk, and I discovered it held answers to many of life’s questions. People with close friends have lower levels of anxiety and depression, higher levels of happiness, even longer lifespans. Friendship is a superpower benefitting us, our friends and society. 

So, who can you call at 2am when everything’s gone wrong? If a name evades you, a journey awaits. It’s the first step to becoming a 2am friend ourselves.