Friendship in the face of the culture of catching up: how to recreate a real, strong and authentic bond

“I really have the impression that the rare times we see each other, my friends and I, we spend more time doing a sort of summary of our lives than actually sharing new experiences,” laments Nathalie, 56, a marketing project manager based near La Ciotat. “We make up for lost time as best we can,” she notes. With a burst of questions/assessments: how are things going at work? And your husband? And the children? This lacks spontaneity, we are forced to organize a fortnight in advance to schedule a coffee, a lunch, a drink, or even find a slot just to call each other, because of our busy lifestyles, our children, our jobs… I think we have all become a little lazy in friendship. Whereas a friendly bond is cultivated with attention – and intention – a bit like a romantic bond.”

Same observation for Aurore, 47 years old, lawyer in Paris and mother of two children: “Clearly, quality time with my friends is reduced drastically as the years go by. In question? Our professional and family obligations, but also, I believe, social networks. On Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp, we look at each other’s posts, we like each other, we exchange frequently, but briefly, and this gives us the illusion of sharing things. While, ultimately, we remain in the story and in the commentary of our lives. But being friends isn’t just that. It’s sharing essential little things and great founding moments with the people we love, spending time together, being in the present… In short, experiencing things to create new shared memories. It’s trivial to say, but we can’t do it anymore.”

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Many people today experience this uncomfortable feeling of oscillating between nostalgia and frustration when it comes to their adult friendships. This phenomenon has a name: “catch-up friendship” or “friendship in catch-up mode” (a bit like the catch-up TV, TV on demand). Formalized by British author and podcaster Michelle Elman in Bad Frienda book which explores in particular the theme of friendly breakdown (ed. Renegade Books, 2025, untranslated), this type of friendship would be the symptom of a broader malaise, which she calls “catch-up culture». Basically, no more spontaneity and sharing of real experiences, and hello “updated” exchanges.

A false proximity

And it’s not just those in their fifties who have doubts. On TikTok, Gen Z is also wondering about the decay of its links. “When I see my friends, I just feel like I’m the equivalent of a “photo dump†giant (a sharing of recent images without classification or hierarchy, Editor’s note) of the past weeks, says Léa, 27 years old, communications manager. We limit ourselves to this review of the different aspects of our lives, it remains very superficial and no longer leaves space for deeper confidences. We add up our stories. When we were little, we spent our lives together, we shared everything, it was so much easier and intense.” In her work, Michelle Elman analyzes that in addition to a structural (and natural) transformation of our friendships in adulthood, it is above all our propensity to experience our interpersonal relationships through social networks which creates this illusion privacy.

Aude, 55, interior decorator, is full of insight and refinement: “Today, our perception of proximity is completely blurred. Yes, networks keep the thread going, but they also increase misunderstandings. Before the era of Instagram or Whatsapp, when a friend didn’t give any news, it just meant…no news! From now on, if we don’t respond but continue to like posts or watch stories, it becomes interpretable…” In addition to remaining superficial, networks would therefore add unnecessary friction to our friendly relationships. By introducing a logic of permanent availability, the platforms have also transformed our ordinary constraints (fatigue, mental overload, dispersion) into supposed signs of disinterest. What if our friendships, subject to a kind of implicit surveillance in which each micro-interaction takes on a disproportionate emotional charge, had worn out?

A friendly bond is cultivated with attention – and intention – a bit like a romantic bond.

Nathalie, 56 years old

A value in recession?

Vincent Cocquebert, essayist and keen observer of contemporary morals (particularly inThe Cocoon Civilization2021, et The War of Sexcession2025, Ed. Arkhê), is particularly interested in the mechanisms that isolate individuals. He analyzes: Yesterday, in pre-industrial societies, there were mechanisms of mutual aid, gift/counter-gift, strong links outside of any contractual logic. A system of “close protection”, to use the words of sociologist Robert Castel, which allowed collective solidarity. But today, our interpersonal relationships are also subject to the performance logic of ultraliberal society; they become like a sort of capital to grow.”

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In his eyes, this friendship catch-up would only be a revealer of what certain American researchers have called the “friendship recession» (recession of friendship). In an article published in February 2025 by the Harvard Kennedy School, we learned that in the United States, the number of friends has been in free fall since the 1990s: the share of people saying they have ten or more close friends has fallen from 33% in 1990 to 13% in 2021. Still in this survey, 22% of Americans say they have not created a new friendship for at least five years. Social anxiety, disengagement, “liquid ties” (to quote sociologist Zygmunt Bauman), the finding is quite depressing. On this side of the Atlantic, almost a quarter (24%) of people over 15 say they suffer from loneliness, according to the latest annual report Loneliness of the Fondation de France, published in January. And the future of friendship sold by some is hardly bright. At the beginning of 2026, an American company offered an “AI companion” in the form of a pendant to wear everywhere. Called “Friend”, this connected object equipped with a permanently open microphone, powered by artificial intelligence, was intended to be a remedy for hypermodern loneliness… However, our friendships, even maintained via the tools of technology, remain prodigiously powerful, as the essayist Vincent Cocquebert reminds us: “In an existence of continuous flow in which our relationship to time is disrupted, friends allow a sort of biographical continuity; they offer a way to regain control over a narrative of oneself and allow us to maintain an anchor.”

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Intensité émotionnelle

So, atomized, our friendly ties? Not so sure. They even became a publishing phenomenon when Alice Raybaud, a journalist and essayist barely thirty years old, published Our powerful friendships (Ed. La Découverte, 2024). A remarkable book, which explores this intimate link of “mutuality” and “care”, yet long perceived as secondary, even “sacrificable”, according to her. What if it was from friendship that a true revolution of the intimate could arise? This is the thesis of the author, who suggests seeing in it an incredible force for change, solidarity, resistance to norms, as well as a vector of emancipation – in particular for rethinking parenting and creating a family differently.

Our friendships are driving places where concern and affection can be shared, without being tied to marital or family loyalties and expectations.

Alice Raybaud

In her book, she analyzes: “Our friendships are driving places where concern and affection can be shared, without us being bound by marital or family loyalties and expectations. Through them, many of us have found a space in which growing up was suddenly possible, places where we can let go of our defenses and where we encounter an attention, a respect, a trust that, elsewhere, is not always distributed.” Could friendship simply be a form of bond that has “nothing To envy romantic love? “Friendship can contain an equally great emotional intensity,” explains Alice Raybaud. We just need to think of the pain that a friendly breakup can cause to grasp the imprint it leaves on our lives.” What if it was this romantic love which had relegated friendship to a secondary character in our lives, operating a “takeover bid on the word love”, in the words of the young essayist? One thing is certain, love and friendship have often been opposed to each other throughout the ages.

The social and the private

Historian of sensitivities and associated researcher at Paris-Cité University, Anne Vincent-Buffault explored the evolution of our friendly ties in a reference book: A story of friendship (Ed. Bayard, 2010). She explains how friendship, central in ancient societies, was gradually relegated to private spheres, losing strength in the face of the rise of the state and the predominance of conjugality. During Antiquity, it was firstly the philia (from Greek «to like»), a notion linked to hospitality, which prevails. According to the researcher, it is “one of the cements of Athenian society, a system of obligations, of reciprocal duties”.

Taking care of our female friendships is a real feminist issue

Alice Raybaud

It is Aristotle and his Nicomachean Ethics, true treatise on friendship, which maintains that the latter is “absolutely necessary for life: without friends, no one would choose to live, even if they possessed all other goods”. But in society as in literature, it has long been male, “manly” friendships that have been especially valued. Like Montaigne and La Boétie, two brilliant minds of the Renaissance, two souls united – “because it was him, because it was me”, to use the famous formula of the first. An intellectual ideal long refused to women, because, always according to Montaigne as quoted by Alice Raybaud in her book, “the ordinary capacity of women is not such as to respond to these relationships and this intimacy, and their soul does not seem firm enough to support the embrace of such a tight and durable knot.” According to Anne Vincent-Buffault, women have, in fact, long been considered “unsuitable for friendship”, and female friendships are often presented as “rivalries between women”.

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A way of perpetuating the patriarchal social order in the eyes of feminists like Alice Raybaud, who writes that “taking care of our female friendships is a real feminist issue”. In the 18th century^e century, with the Enlightenment, morals evolved a little, philosophers seeing in friendship the possibility of building a more egalitarian and just society. Then things got worse with the advent of conservative bourgeois society, and friendship loses ground Alice Raybaud summarizes: “at the end of the 19th century.^e century, the emergence of the ideal of loving marriage relegated friendship further into the hierarchy of social relations. If we did not, of course, wait until recent times to fall in love, until then it was unions of convenience, guided by social and economic strategies, which took precedence in matters of choice of spouse. It was only at the turn of the 20th^e century that the model of romantic conjugality, as we know it today, is gradually establishing itself as a measure of existence.” A model that is too rigid, according to her.

Today, our interpersonal relationships are also subject to the performance logic of ultraliberal society.

Vincent Cocquebert

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A political project

Elastic, informal, freed from blood ties, marital alliance, interest, friendship would come back in force. Adorned with an incredible form of freedom, this notion even appears as a powerful ferment of modernity. Like Alice Raybaud, some would like to see it as an agent of transformation of our societies. Thus, the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie proposed in An aspiration outside. Praise of friendship (Ed. Flammarion, 2023) to promote friendship as a way of life and as a political project to move away from “familialism”.

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What if friendship became a lasting model in the same way as the family or the couple and allowed us to grow old together, in sorority, like Maison des Babayagas, this self-managed residence for elderly women located in Montreuil, in the Paris suburbs? To invent a more united and fluid society, others propose to rethink our friendships according to a contractual mode. A pact of friendship sealed by law? This is what MP Clémence Guetté wants, who, twenty-six years after the Pacs, is campaigning “for a policy of friendship” – the title of her essay to be published by Éditions La Découverte on August 27. Could friendship, this bond from the depths of the ages, change the world? Alice Raybaud is not far from thinking so: “We have a lot to learn in our ways of relating to each other and of loving in general, in all spheres of life. fully enlightened, can allow us to reinvent another relationship with others and with ourselves, as well as with the alliances of our existence. » We still need to give back space to friendship in our daily lives, by devoting to the other, to others, a real privileged moment Organize the time of reunion. Stop seeing your friends in fashion catch-up to weave this link in reality and the present. Friendship is not built in the story. It is experienced, together.