Can We Swipe Our Way to Friendship?

The premise is similar. Users answer questions about birth order, economic background, and how spontaneous they are, and an algorithm matches them with like-minded strangers.

Some apps keep you swiping through profiles, hoping to find a match. Others plan a night out, but leave the follow-up to you. The most structured services match the same people week after week for a shared meal. All you have to do is show up. That repetition gives connection a chance to take hold.

These platforms are trying to replace what institutions like church, civic groups, and the office once provided. Remember sipping coffee after a service? Or standing around the water cooler at work? You didn’t have to plan it.

In the Bay Area, where remote work is common and people cycle through jobs and cities, there are fewer chances to see the same faces and let familiarity build over time.

For Hobbs, the curated dinners were fine. She met interesting people. And then, almost without exception, everyone drifted back into their separate lives. So she decided to shell out a few hundred dollars and try Real Roots, a women-only program that matched her with nine strangers and committed them to meeting every Tuesday for six weeks. A guide tagged along to encourage the attendees to push past small talk.

“Since we were meeting every week, I think we got to know each other better and better,” Hobbs said. “And now, even though the series is over, we still meet up every Tuesday.”

It’s only been a few months, but the entire group is still gathering.

They’ve scheduled a craft night to make glitter cups, and Hobbs organized a pole dancing class.

Along the way, something else has shifted for her. For years, most of her friendships lived online through gaming and streaming, connections she once defended as just as real as anything in person. That’s no longer true.

“I do feel more fulfilled by face-to-face socializing,” she said. “There’s just something about getting up and going outside.”

Recently, the ladies met up for game night at Victory Point Cafe in Berkeley. Over a round of the board game of “Hues and Cues,” the women talked about how they’d grown tired of trying to build connections online or through one-off events.

Kelsey Manion said she had tried apps like Bumble For Friends (BFF), the friendship-focused version of the dating app, but the experience felt hollow and the connections rarely lasted. “It felt easier to ghost people.”

Morgan Ezeir said she never made it off the apps. “I did BFF for a little bit, but it just felt weird,” she said. “It felt like I was dating, but I wasn’t.”

Wing Tovbis, who moved to the Bay Area from Canada, said even when they found a connection on the app, it didn’t carry over. “It’s a pretty big hurdle to actually meet in person.”

The pull toward connection is strong enough to change behavior after years of isolation. About half of Americans report feeling lonely because we are spending less and less time together, with the steepest declines among teenagers, who are spending 45% less time hanging out in person, according to federal data.

There’s no recent period in U.S. history where we’ve spent so much time alone. The World Health Organization warns that social isolation carries risks comparable to smoking, and is linked to higher rates of depression, anxiety, heart disease and early death.

Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist at Harvard who studies loneliness, describes it as “an anguishing feeling of deprivation that you don’t feel deeply known, that you don’t have relationships that are deeply meaningful to you.”

He said several drivers have been at play.

Social media led to hundreds of online followers, but very few real friends, while also highlighting how much more fun others were having. And it goes beyond comparison; it’s also the relentless scroll of frightening news that leads to a sense of despair.

Many people report what Weissbourd called existential loneliness: not just missing friends, but feeling fundamentally unmoored from the world.

Then the pandemic pulled people out of schools, offices, and gyms. Young people spent critical social years behind screens, had fewer chances to practice in-person interaction, and their anxiety and loneliness climbed.

Weissbourd pointed to a feedback loop loneliness creates: you feel like you have bad social skills, so you pull back; pulling back makes you rustier; rustiness makes you feel even more deficient.

Emily Steelhammer said she knows that trap well. Friendships have come and gone during her 15 years in Oakland. People moved, drifted off, got swallowed by jobs and kids.

She tried to rebuild through a queer meetup, acting classes, even a summer in New York, half-hoping a change of scenery would solve her ache for deeper connections.

“When I feel lonely, I pick up the phone and fill that void with parasocial relationships — YouTube, TV, scrolling for hours,” Steelhammer said. “It’s so easy to trick my brain into filling that void in a way that’s not practically changing my life at all.”

Friendship apps didn’t help either. The endless swiping felt like window shopping. She would scroll, then close the app, feeling worse.

What finally shifted things was something simpler. A flyer she kept seeing around Lake Merritt for a group called Friend Cult. Its tagline stuck: “It shouldn’t take a blood ritual to get our friends together” — a nod to the elaborate scheduling gymnastics so many Bay Area residents joke about.

Every Wednesday, the group meets at a different Oakland restaurant for what they call a “friend sabbath.” There are about 40 regulars, $35 monthly dues, and a few loose rules: don’t talk about work, ask personal questions, come and go freely.

“I went the first night dreading it,” Steelhammer said. “And the first thing that happened was someone immediately pulled me into a conversation about restaurant recommendations.

Then somebody walked in holding a plastic alligator head, trying to figure out how to turn it into a lamp.” She laughed. “I went home thinking, I’m so glad I left the house.”

She keeps going back each week, even when the venue isn’t her scene. Recently, they met at a pizza spot called Hesher’s located on Broadway near Jack London Square. The rock music was loud. Not her vibe.

At the door, she slipped a green cord around her neck to signal she’s a regular. Newcomers wear red. People clock who’s new and pull them in. No one stands alone for long.

Within minutes, people are talking about breakups, parents, money, and why they moved here. It was surprisingly light on small talk. Laughter cut through the music.

Steelhammer moved through the room with ease, dropping into one circle, then another. She asked questions and waited for the answers.

People responded in kind. She said she didn’t expect to enjoy the evening, but found that she did. She called it her weekly “social nutrition.”

Research suggests that kind of regularity matters. It can take dozens of hours together to move from acquaintance to friend, and far more to build real closeness.

“There is collective buy-in at Friend Cult,” she said. “People are choosing to be there, and the goal is actually to enact community, not just to see if you can find somebody useful and move on. It’s like an old school social club. Like the Elks Lodge. But with stranger aesthetics.”

In many ways, it echoes something older — regular gatherings, shared space, a reason to return. The fact that it has to be rebuilt points to a deeper problem.

Developmental psychologist Niobe Way has spent four decades listening to young people talk about friendship, and she has a blunt diagnosis for what’s gone wrong. It isn’t social media. It isn’t the pandemic. It’s the culture.

“Loneliness is not natural,” Way said. “We are social animals.”

She calls it a clash of culture and nature. Our society prizes self-sufficiency, independence, and productivity. It sidelines caring, vulnerability, and connection.

“The only thing we need in our lives is each other,” she said. “Normalize wanting intimate friendship. It is not a girly thing. It is not a gay thing. It is a human thing.”

She said the first step is simple. Pay attention to the person in front of you. Ask what matters to them. Listen to the answer.