Illustration by David Cutler

One day early in the semester, around three o'clock in the morning, Mike Schneider, a sophomore, found himself in desperate straits. He was violently ill, his stomach rebelling against him in constant spasms, apparently from eating some bad fish the previous day. He didn't feel at all like moving. But six of his fellow students, gathered in his dorm room, prevailed on Schneider to allow them to seek medical help. "During one of the busiest weeks for all of my friends," he recalls, "they took time to drive me to the hospital and sit with me for hours, pick me up, and then continue to check on me and bring me anything I needed until I was completely healed. Three friends who couldn't go to the hospital wrote me a poem and sent me a Get Well Soon! balloon."

College friendships have endured long beyond student days for Betsy Alden '64, who is service-learning coordinator with Duke's Kenan Institute for Ethics and a visiting lecturer in public-policy studies. She and eight former dorm-mates came to Duke from a variety of backgrounds—different parts of the country, large and small high schools. But, she recalls, "We had similar values. Most of us were activists of one kind or another." They protested segregation at Durham's Carolina Theater. Later most became professors or teachers; one works with pregnant teens and another teaches yoga at a Virginia ashram.

Freshman year was a particularly formative period, Alden says. And for this network of friends, it remains a reference point. Back when it was the Woman's College, East Campus was in many ways a closed community. "There were no phone calls after 10:30. There was one television in the dorm parlor." So, late at night, when the doors were locked, she and her friends carved out social space inside the dorm. Over time, that social space enlarged.

"There isn't anyone in this group who wouldn't share anything with the others," she says. "There is no secret, no family tragedy, no celebration that we could not talk about." Together they've been through births, marriages, divorces, and deaths. And, Alden says, they've taught each other. "These are the people who challenge me to be the best I can be—to call me on it when I am not doing something that they believe I ought to be doing, who really care enough to be truthful all the way."

These are familiar stories of friendship—a theme that, as it happens, was familiar and even fundamental back in the time of Plato, around 380 B.C.E., as illustrated in his dialogue Lysis, or Friendship. Plato's protagonists devise and reject alternative models of friendship, including friendship between those who think alike and those who think in opposite terms. They seem to conclude only that friendship is linked with beauty, and "beauty is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature that easily slips in and permeates our souls." More than 2,000 years later, the idea of friendship is more confusing than ever. In a world defined by multitasking lives and constant connections to cyberspace, friendship is encountering new stresses—even as it's enduringly important.

Some new research suggests reasons for worrying that friendship, however amorphously understood, isn't what it used to be. The June issue of the American Sociological Review carried a study, "Social Isolation in America," that found that social networks are breaking down. The study spurred a flurry of media accounts. Syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman called it "one of those blockbuster studies that make us look at ourselves" and concluded that "Americans can take poor, paradoxical comfort from the fact that if you are feeling isolated, you are not alone."

"Social Isolation in America" interpreted data from the 2004 General Social Survey, which asked a representative sample of some 1,500 Americans questions about their close ties with other people. The study asked the same questions and relied on the same face-to-face interviewing techniques used in a 1985 survey. It showed more Americans treating "kin," spouses and parents mostly, as their major or only confidants. In 1985, four of five respondents had at least one close friend who was not a relative. By 2004, that figure was fewer than three in five.

The social scientists behind the new research are Lynn Smith-Lovin, Robert L. Wilson Professor of sociology at Duke; Miller McPherson, research professor of sociology at Duke and professor of sociology at the University of Arizona; and Matthew E. Brashears, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Arizona. Smith-Lovin says she and her colleagues were surprised by what they discovered. The basic patterns of life usually don't change that quickly, she says.

They heard from social scientists from around the world; colleagues in the Netherlands and Hungary, for example, had found similar patterns in their own data. With all the publicity, "We got e-mail from people who thanked us for doing the research," Smith-Lovin says. "They were happy to hear that they weren't the only ones without a web of social connections."

If individual isolation is increasing and social networks are fracturing, that may be in part because we have less time to nurture them. "We know that American families have adults who are spending many more hours in the labor force," Smith-Lovin says. "Women have moved from part-time to full-time work, and some people are working multiple jobs to make ends meet. And we know that the average tenure at a job has gone down dramatically, meaning that fewer people mention coworkers as close confidants."

During the last few decades, tasks and roles that used to be handled by family members or neighbors have been handed off to professional helpers, Smith-Lovin says. We have daycare providers, dog walkers for hire, even therapists to whom we, in essence, subcontract our needs for support. Smith-Lovin says that she and McPherson have experiences that are true to their findings: The two are closely connected as spouses and confidants. All the same, she has fewer close confidants than she did twenty years ago. "That's partially because of geographic moves that we have made and partially because life is just very, very busy."

Social fragmentation is not merely a modern concern. De Tocqueville, the early illuminator of American democracy, speculated that "as the circle of public society is extended" in America, "the sphere of public intercourse will be contracted; far from supposing that the members of modern society will ultimately live in common, I am afraid they will end by forming only small coteries." The so-called Middletown studies of the 1920s, based in Muncie, Indiana, speculated that radio was making people more isolated and lonelier.

"The phenomenon has been going on since we started moving out of hunting-and-gathering societies," says McPherson. "Back when we were in communities of twenty to fifty or sixty people, everybody knew everybody else and discussed important matters with everybody else on a daily basis. And so their core networks were really large. We've pretty much been on a decline ever since."

For Aristotle and other ancient thinkers, friendship was a civic glue: Friends would live together and nurture the same interests. It was friendship, then, that would hold together the city-state. If the city-state was virtuous, that reflected the tendency of friends to support one another in striving for virtuous lives. Of course, a tight circle of friends could also form a cabal that would upset the city-state—a view given a certain validity centuries later by E.M. Forster, who, in his essay "Two Cheers for Democracy," declared, "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

In cheerleading for good health practices, medical researchers have long drawn links between social isolation and individual well-being, including proclivities to suicide. Now neuroscientists are finding that friends can change the way we think, on the deepest level. The brain is remarkable in adapting to its environment, says Kevin Pelphrey, assistant professor of psychological and brain science at Duke. "It's an incredibly plastic, adaptive, proactive type of organ."