New research reveals that almost one in ten British people say they haven’t got any friends in real life.
Instead, eight per cent of Brits between the ages of 18 and 70 emanate all their social interaction from the internet, the poll of 3,000 people reveals.
Extrapolated out to the wider UK population of about 55 million, that works out to 4.4 million people who have no ‘real’ friends they can count on.
Those Brits without real-life friends instead said they have ‘online’ friends, who they keep in touch with through social media, online games or email.
The study by life insurance specialists LifeSearch discovered that the remaining 92 per cent who did have friends had, on average, eight friends each.
The poll revealed men have an average of nine friends, with women having an average of seven.
Those aged 35-54 have the least real friends, with seven, compared to those aged under 35, who have an average of ten friends.
Brits over the age of 55 had an average of eight friends each.
The study also found that 55 per cent of the 3,000 people surveyed said they had a ‘best friend’, with their partner top of the pile.
All in all, more than a third (39 per cent) of those polled said their best friend was their husband, wife or partner.
Asked to reveal how they knew their best friend, those surveyed revealed the following:
How Brits know their best friends’ Relationship Percentage
Partner 39 per cent
School friend 9 per cent
Sibling 8 per cent
Parent 7 per cent
Hobby friend 6 per cent
Another parent at child’s school 3 per cent
Cousin 3 per cent
Barry Taylor, 44, of Watford, Hertfordshire, said his wife Claire was now his ‘best friend’.
The window fitter said he’d lost touch with friends from school and hadn’t seen his ‘hobby’ friends since giving up playing darts.
He said that he used to keep in touch with friends from school and meet up once or twice a year, and used to play darts in the pub league.
He said that he gave up darts after breaking his arm, and friends from school were all online these days as they’ve mostly moved away.
He said that his best and probably only friend was his wife Claire, and that was all that he need.
Sadly for some people, friends move away and as people get older and they’re on their own, they find it difficult to make friends because everything is done online.
Teenagers make friends effortlessly, particularly when they’re at school, and generally, they might keep those friends after they leave school, but people make different lives for themselves, or they move away or just make a different group of friends when they start work.
As we get older though we tend to have friends through marriage, but if that marriage ends or someone’s loved one dies, then that person is left isolated with no way of making new friends apart from online, which is extremely sad indeed.
Friends with children stop asking you over because they’re too occupied doing family things, or they think that they’re now more important than you are, or you might drop in on them and they’ve changed and no longer want to be your friend so people resort to online activities to bide their time away.
There are, of course, ways of meeting people like getting out and walking about, talking to people, going for a coffee, even a coach trip to meet people. However, not everybody is the same and not everyone is as outgoing as the next person, and sometimes it’s easier to hide behind a screen than to make actual contact because that’s the society that we’ve become because of social media.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 