Your holiday card list used to run to three pages. This year, it fit on one.
Some of the names left gradually. Work friends drifted after retirement. The parents you stood beside at Saturday soccer games moved away or moved on. A few names you crossed off for sadder reasons.
A smaller circle is a common part of getting older. When psychologists Tammy English and Laura Carstensen tracked adults over time, they found that networks tended to shrink in later life mainly because casual contacts fell away , while the number of close relationships stayed fairly steady. Older participants also said the people in their lives brought out more positive feelings and fewer negative ones.
The findings describe a pattern across participants, rather than a rule that fewer relationships are better. Network size on its own didn’t predict how people felt from day to day.
A smaller circle can still be a well-connected one, and it can also hide loneliness. Social isolation and loneliness aren’t the same thing. The National Institute on Aging describes social isolation as having few people to interact with regularly, and loneliness as the distressing feeling of being alone, which can happen even around ...