In 2023, the think tank Onward declared a “friendship recession”, revealing that a fifth of young people had only one, or no, close friends. An online “kind girl” community thinks they have found the answer to this loneliness crisis in young women.
Beginning as an online support space five years ago, “We Got You Boo” now offers twenty to forty large meetups every month across the country for women seeking new friendships.
“People have lost touch with their friends and it is only just being talked about,” founder Lydia Leyland tells The London Economic. These people are increasingly turning to her platform, with thousands of their female members coming to their social events, or texting in their countless group chats, for the very same reason: “they feel like they don’t have any friends.”
Founded in 2019, it was the “aftermath” COVID pandemic that has been the catalyst for rising levels of isolation among the young. The travel influencer Leyland says that “COVID has been the huge switch” as people lost touch with friends and had little ways of escaping any mental health issues they were facing. “When you are struggling with your mental health you push friends away,” only impounding the loneliness felt by many as the pandemic went on.
It was six months ago that We Got You Boo upgraded from online chat forum to in-person meet-up space, growing from two to three events per month to over twenty. Social media itself has been the driving factor for why so many of Leyland’s members craved real-world interactions.
Social media may offer a world of infinite interconnectivity, but “we really are not connected with people,” believes the young entrepreneur. “When we put out phones down, we realise we have not seen our friends for a couple of weeks.” This problem can be even more acute when you find yourself hundreds of miles away from the friends you had just recently made at university. Leyland has seen that “it is really hard to keep even a few” of those friends once you have graduated.
The membership numbers of this self-entitled “kind girl” community have grown exponentially, with a 507% membership increase since the beginning of the year. Before February, “everything we got went to charity,” and the business was not making money. With hundreds of new women joining each month, that is not the case anymore.
Much of this surge has come from the cities, with their biggest hub being London, which sees new members joining daily.
“It is interesting to me how incredibly lonely people feel in cities,” says Leyland, who is from the Lake District. Having looked into this phenomenon for a while, she has concluded that the sense of isolation comes from “people comparing their lives to others.” Even if you are seeing your friends as regularly as those living in a non-urban area, constantly being surrounded by social hubbub of a city can make you feel “extra lonely.”
Although her focus is on twenty- to forty-year-old women, Leyland is in no doubt that the “friendship recession” is just as deep for men. She says, “You would not believe the amount of messages we get” from men, or from their partners, asking if this service is available for them.
For the young women who do join the We Got You Boo platform, the effect of making new friendships can be huge. “Quite a few girls” have told Leyland that “the community has saved their life,” with mental health group chats playing a key role in the supportive members give to each other with their problems.
However, with only thousands of members currently, she “can’t even imagine how many more are struggling” with loneliness across the country.
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