"Get Real Friends" — Why This Advice Assumes a Reality That No Longer Exists

The advice is delivered with certainty, usually by someone who has not thought carefully about what they are assuming. You spend too much time online. You need to get real friends. The implication is clear: the friendships happening through screens are not real, and real ones are available if the person would only stop choosing the substitute. This advice would have been questionable twenty years ago. In the current moment, it fails on almost every empirical and philosophical ground on which it tries to stand.

What "Real Friends" Assumes About Availability

The first thing the advice assumes is that real friendships are readily available to the person receiving it — that the choice to have online friendships instead of physical ones is a preference rather than a response to circumstances. For many people this assumption is simply false. Adults in their thirties and forties who have moved cities for work find that building new physical friendship networks takes years and often never recovers to pre-move depth. Studies from the Survey Center on American Life have documented a dramatic decline in close friendship counts over recent decades — the share of Americans reporting no close friends at all quintupled between 1990 and 2021. People are not choosing online friendship over abundant physical friendship. They are finding online friendship where physical friendship has become scarce. The person who grew up neurodivergent in a community where their interests and way of moving through the world were rare did not choose to have no local friends before finding people online who understood them. They looked where the people who understood them actually were.

What "Real Friends" Assumes About Quality

The advice also assumes that physical proximity is a reliable proxy for depth of connection — that the friends available in local physical space will offer more genuine understanding, more support, and more of what friendship actually is than the friends encountered online. This assumption is not supported by what research finds about friendship quality. A comprehensive study from the University of Michigan on friendship quality across modalities found that the strongest predictors of high-quality friendship — perceived understanding, responsiveness, mutual disclosure, sense of being known — were not associated with physical proximity. Online and physically proximate friendships scored equivalently across these dimensions on average, and for people with minority interests, minority identities, or unusual life experiences, online friendships scored higher. The person who has been telling their local friends they are fine for ten years while having a genuine conversation with someone online every day is not confused about which relationship is serving them better. They are correct.

The History of the "Real" Standard

Every new communication technology has been greeted with concerns about the authenticity of the connections it enables. The penny post in Victorian England generated anxiety about the decline of face-to-face visiting. The telephone was accused of undermining genuine social life. Social scientists in the early internet era predicted that online connection would produce a generation incapable of real intimacy. None of these predictions materialized. People adapted communication technologies to their social needs, and the connections formed through those technologies proved as enduring, as meaningful, and as real as connections formed in any other way. The letter-writing friendships of earlier centuries included some of the deepest and most documented relationships in the literary and intellectual record. The "get real friends" advice is the current iteration of a concern that has been wrong every time it has been deployed. It is worth asking why we keep deploying it.

What the Advice Does to the Person Receiving It

There is a specific harm in the advice that rarely gets named. The person who has found genuine connection online and is then told that connection is not real receives a message that their experience of being understood is an illusion, that what feels like friendship is something lesser, that their social life is a failure masquerading as success. For someone who has struggled to find connection elsewhere, this message does not motivate them to go find better friends. It communicates that they are not capable of real friendship — that something is wrong with them for finding it where they found it. The advice shames the person for a social achievement while calling the achievement a failure.

A Digression on What "Real" Actually Tracks

When people use the word real in this context, they usually mean something like: what I grew up thinking friendship looks like. Friday nights in person. Shared physical space. Accumulated shared experience in a specific geographic location. These are real features of friendship and they carry value. But they describe one historical form of friendship, not friendship itself. Aristotle's account of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics identifies three kinds: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and friendships of virtue — the last being the deepest kind, based on genuine mutual admiration and the desire for the other's good. Nothing in Aristotle's account requires physical proximity. What it requires is knowing the other person well enough to admire their character. That can happen across a cable.

Taking the Advice Apart

The instruction to get real friends rests on an implicit model of social life that no longer describes the conditions most people inhabit. It assumes availability of alternatives, primacy of physical proximity as a marker of authenticity, and the failure of online connection to meet the relevant standard for friendship. Each assumption is either empirically questionable or philosophically confused. The more useful advice — the advice that actually helps people with their social lives — looks different: invest in the connections that are genuine, regardless of medium, while remaining open to expanding connection in any direction that serves you. The word real should track the quality of what is happening, not the location of the bodies involved.