Paid Friend-Making Apps Cannot Substitute for Genuine, Effort-Built Friendship
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/elle-hunt. "We’re in a crisis of loneliness – but is buying friends on an app likely to help solve it? | Elle Hunt | The Guardian." September 24, 2026. www.theguardian.com
The Gist
The author argues that even though lots of new apps and paid social events promise to cure loneliness by helping you make friends, real friendship can't actually be purchased—it has to be earned through time and effort. She says these services are really just businesses looking to make money off people's loneliness, and that true connection only happens when you're not expecting something in return for your investment.
Conclusion
While friend-making apps and paid social gatherings may provide opportunities for social connection, they are unlikely to solve the loneliness crisis because genuine friendship and community cannot be bought—they must be built through unpaid time, effort, and investment.
Premises
- These apps and events exist primarily as commercial ventures to encourage brand investment and spending, not purely as altruistic solutions to loneliness
- Payment is sometimes framed as ensuring commitment, but this framing exploits the very desire for connection that makes the service valuable
- The core value proposition of these apps (ease, speed, guaranteed outcomes) works against the actual process required for real friendship, which necessarily takes time, effort, and sustained investment
- Real community, like friendship, is built through shared investment and mutual weathering of difficulties over time, not through a single transactional download or payment
- Authentic relationships can only be forged when there is no expectation of a return on investment, which is inherently undermined by a paid transactional framework
- Paid meet-ups can create the conditions for friendship (a date in the diary, a room full of people) but cannot manufacture the friendship itself—that work still falls to the individuals involved
Assumptions
- Genuine friendship requires an absence of transactional expectation to be authentic
- Ease and low effort are inherently incompatible with meaningful relationship-building
- Commercial motives fundamentally taint or undermine the potential for authentic connection, even if genuine bonds can occasionally form in commercial spaces
- People experiencing loneliness have the capacity and opportunity to build community themselves if they simply try harder or organize free alternatives
- There is a meaningful distinction between 'creating conditions' for friendship and creating friendship itself