Seven years on, only 48% of the people in someone’s personal network were still in it. For the closest roles — the people you discuss important matters with, the people who help you out — only around 30% still held the same position.
How it was done
A Dutch panel study. 1,007 respondents aged 18–65 were interviewed, and 604 of them were re-interviewed seven years later about the same personal network.
What it means
The striking part is not the loss. It is that network size stayed constant. People did not end up with fewer relationships; they ended up with different ones. Names left and other names arrived, and the total held steady, which is precisely why the turnover is so easy to miss from the inside.
The ties that ended largely did not end in conflict. They ended because the shared context that produced them — the job, the course, the neighbourhood, the weekly thing — stopped existing, and nothing replaced the regular unplanned contact it had been supplying.
That reframes the problem. It is not that people are bad at friendship. It is that friendship in adulthood loses its infrastructure, and almost nobody notices in time to do anything about it.