Dating After Divorce and Rebuilding Your Social Life

You signed the divorce papers in the spring. By the fall, the two couples you and your former spouse saw every month have stopped calling, and most of the friends still in touch are people you knew before the wedding. Studies of friendship after divorce find that people tend to keep their individual friendships, and some grow closer to them, while friendships with both members of a married couple are rarely maintained.

Friendship Losses After Separation

A divorced person often loses contact with friends who came into the marriage through the former spouse, and those people rarely stay in both lives. Sociologists Matthijs Kalmijn and Marjolein Broese van Groenou documented these changes in contact with friends and relatives after a marriage ends, and other studies have linked a shrinking network to a harder adjustment after divorce.

Married friends can pull back for a less comfortable reason. Researchers who study friendship after divorce report that some married people see a newly single friend as a risk to their own marriage and reduce contact. The relationships that last are usually with close friends and family, and leaning on those people during the divorce often makes the bond stronger.

The Friendship Gap Among Men

The Survey Center on American Life compared a 2021 national survey with a Gallup poll from 1990. The share of men with no close friends rose from 3% to 15% over those 31 years, and the share with at least 6 close friends fell from 55% to 27%.

Across all adults, the share with no close friends rose from 3% to 12%, and the share with at least 6 close friends fell from 33% to 13%. The rise among men without a single close friend was steeper than the rise for the population as a whole.

Remarriage and New Partners

Among younger Baby Boomers who divorced and later remarried, the time between the two marriages was about 4 years.

Stated intentions show a wider split. In a Pew survey, 29% of previously married men said they wanted to remarry and 36% were unsure. Among previously married women, 15% wanted to remarry and 54% said they did not want to marry again.

Men who are unsure about remarrying, 36% in that survey, can date with no plan to marry, and a man who wants that kind of relationship with a younger partner might begin on a sugar daddy website.

Hours Required for a New Friendship

Communication researcher Jeffrey Hall measured the hours needed to make a friend. His first study asked 355 adults who had moved within the previous 6 months to estimate the time they had spent with a new acquaintance. His second followed 112 first-year university students for 9 weeks. Combining the two, Hall estimated that it takes roughly 50 hours together to go from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to become a friend, and more than 200 hours to become a close friend.

The kind of hours mattered. In the first study, hours spent working together or attending classes predicted lower emotional closeness, while leisure time predicted more. Conversation also predicted closeness. Catching up on daily events and joking around predicted larger gains in closeness in the student study, and superficial small talk slowed them. A divorced adult with a full-time job has to find those 200 chosen hours in evenings and weekends.

Close-Friend Numbers After 50

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey of 5,057 adults found that older Americans report more close friends than younger ones. Among adults 65 and older, 49% had 5 or more close friends, compared with 40% of those 50 to 64 and 32% of adults under 30. Across all ages, 8% said they had no close friends. By sex, the figures were close, with 40% of men and 36% of women reporting 5 or more close friends, a different result from the Survey Center's, since surveys that measure close friendship do not always agree. Among adults 50 and older with at least one close friend, 77% said they were highly satisfied with their friendships. Satisfaction rose with the size of the circle, from 65% among people with 1 to 4 close friends to 81% among those with 5 or more.

The same survey asked what matters for a fulfilling life. Friendship outranked marriage by a wide margin, with 61% of adults calling close friends extremely or very important and 23% saying the same about being married.

Divorce Inside a Social Network

The friends a person keeps also affect the marriages around them. Political scientist Rose McDermott, with James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, used 3 decades of records from the Framingham Heart Study, from 1971 to 2001, to trace divorce through social networks. People were 75% more likely to divorce if a friend had divorced, and 33% more likely if a friend of a friend had divorced. The effect disappeared beyond 2 degrees of separation.

In an interview about the divorce contagion study, McDermott said that divorced people tend to become less popular in their networks, and that the isolation that follows makes the effects of divorce worse. She also pointed to research showing that single and divorced men tend to have worse health and shorter lives. A divorced person has one more reason to rebuild friendships early instead of waiting for them to return on their own.

Loneliness and Health

In May 2023, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released an advisory titled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. It reported that about half of American adults said they felt lonely even before the pandemic. The advisory linked poor social connection to a 29% higher risk of heart disease and a 50% higher risk of dementia among older adults, along with a 32% higher risk of stroke, and it stated that lacking connection raises the risk of early death to a level comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

The advisory also found that Americans spend less time with each other in person than they did 2 decades earlier. A newly divorced adult who waits for invitations to arrive is working against that trend.

A Standing Weekly Plan

Pick one friend you already like and set a fixed weekly evening with that person, at the same time and place each week. Choose something you would do anyway, such as dinner or a weekly game, since Hall found that leisure time people chose predicted closeness better than hours spent working together. At 4 hours a week, the 200 hours Hall found for a close friendship takes about a year.