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Quick take: apps are the fastest way to start a friendship; in-person contact is what makes it last. The best-performing models combine both by design.
We've never had more tools for staying "connected", and loneliness has never been higher. That's not a coincidence - it's the paradox at the centre of this whole conversation. According to The Cigna Group's 2025 Loneliness in America report, 57% of Americans report being lonely, and Gen Z - the most digitally connected generation in history - reports the highest rate of any age group, at 67%. The same research found that heavy social media users were consistently more likely to report feeling alone, isolated, and left out than lighter users. Harvard's Making Caring Common project found something similar back in 2021: 61% of young adults reported serious loneliness, more than double the rate among people aged 55-65 - the group least likely to have grown up with a phone in hand.
The numbers don't fit the story we usually tell about technology and connection. The digital connection has not produced less loneliness. But that doesn't mean digital tools are the problem. The research points toward how digital and in-person contact each do different, non-substitutable parts of the job of building a friendship.
The short answer: apps are the best tool for starting a friendship, but the research is consistent that quality plateaus unless the connection moves in person - a structural ceiling, not a matter of trying harder online. The formats that solve this build the offline step into the product itself rather than leaving it to chance. Les Amis is one specific example: curated matching paired with a recurring calendar of in-person events, so the friendship has a built-in path off the app.
Harvard's Making Caring Common report offers a plausible explanation for this paradox. Young adults are "especially dependent on social media and peer approval", which makes the curated, comparison-heavy nature of social feeds a source of feeling deficient rather than connected - watching a stream of other people's highlight reels reads as evidence of one's own social shortfall, not as actual contact. Cigna's 2025 data reinforces this from a different angle: the heaviest social media users are the most likely to report loneliness, not the least - the opposite of what you'd expect if digital contact were simply additive to in-person contact.
The important nuance: this is a finding about passive, broadcast-style social media use (scrolling feeds), not necessarily about the more targeted, intentional apps built specifically for meeting people. Those deserve to be evaluated on their own terms, which is what we're going to do next.
Digital tools lower the barrier to initiating contact more than any other innovation in the history of friendship formation. This matters enormously for women who are geographically isolated, socially anxious, or in a life stage that makes in-person meetings hard to engineer.
Research on self-disclosure has found that people with social anxiety often self-disclose more easily and form higher-quality initial connections with people they meet online than they do face-to-face, because digital communication removes some of the split-second social read that in-person interaction demands. For a new mother who can't easily leave the house, a woman who just moved to a new country and doesn't yet speak the language, or someone whose anxiety makes cold in-person approaches difficult, an app is often the only realistic first step. And dismissing that step because it's "not real" contact misses what the research actually shows about who benefits most from it.
Apps and texting are also demonstrably effective for maintaining friendships between in-person visits. Research on relational maintenance and on texting specifically consistently finds that positive, reciprocal digital contact meaningfully predicts relationship satisfaction. Robin Dunbar's research on friendship decay found that digital contact - texts, calls, social media - measurably slows the rate at which a friendship cools, even though it doesn't stop the decay outright.
This is the single most useful finding for answering the "app vs in-person" question directly. The 2012 study of 2,188 users of a social networking site by Marjolijn Antheunis, Patti Valkenburg, and Jochen Peter tracked friendship quality across online-only, offline-only, and mixed-mode friendships. The differences between mixed-mode and offline-only friendships disappeared over time: a friendship that started as a match on an app and became a real-world friendship was, eventually, indistinguishable in quality from one that started at work or through a mutual friend. But the gap between online-only and offline friendships remained significant even after years of continued digital contact.
In other words: the problem isn't that a friendship started on an app. The problem is a friendship that stays on an app.
Psychologists Sbarra and Hazan's research on emotional co-regulation in close relationships describes how two people's nervous systems synchronise and stabilise each other during in-person contact - a bidirectional physiological process that dampens stress responses over time. This is a different mechanism than emotional support conveyed through words; it operates through proximity, tone, physical presence, and cues that a screen doesn't transmit in the same way.
Shelley Taylor's tend-and-befriend research - the finding that women's stress response is buffered specifically through social connection, mediated by oxytocin - was studied in the context of real, physical social contact. The oxytocin release that makes tend-and-befriend work as a stress buffer is a physiological response bound up with in-person presence in a way that digital contact, whatever its other benefits, doesn't replicate to the same degree.
This also aligns with Dunbar's finding that in-person contact "resets the clock" on a decaying friendship. Digital contact maintains, whereas in-person contact rebuilds.
Put the three findings together and the shape of the answer is clear. Digital tools are the best initiation mechanism available, especially for the women who most need a low-barrier first step. But friendship quality plateaus if the relationship never leaves the app - this isn't a matter of trying harder digitally, it's a structural ceiling. And the physiological mechanisms that make close friendship protective against stress and loneliness (such as co-regulation, or tend-and-befriend) require the in-person presence that a chat thread can't provide.
This is exactly the logic behind our comparison of swipe, curated, and event-based friendship apps: the formats that perform best in practice are the ones that treat digital matching as a front door, not a destination, and build the offline step into the product itself rather than leaving two people to coordinate it from an open-ended chat. Les Amis is built around that same principle: a curated application process gets the matching right, and a recurring calendar of small-group, in-person events (8-12 women, in cities across Europe and the US) makes sure the friendship doesn't stall in the online-only tier the research says never catches up. See how Les Amis membership works.
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A: Yes. Research on mixed-mode friendships (those that start online and move offline) found they reach the same quality as friendships that started entirely in person, once the relationship becomes in-person. The starting mechanism doesn't determine the ceiling; whether the friendship moves offline does.
A: Research from Cigna's 2025 Loneliness in America report found that heavy social media users report more loneliness than lighter users, and Harvard's Making Caring Common project attributes this partly to the curated, comparison-driven nature of social feeds, which can produce a sense of social deficiency rather than genuine connection. This applies most to passive, broadcast-style social media use rather than to apps built specifically for meeting people.
A: Texting measurably slows the decay of an existing friendship, but research on friendship networks suggests it doesn't stop the decay outright - in-person contact is what "resets the clock". A friendship maintained purely through text, without periodic in-person contact, tends to plateau at a lower quality than one that includes both.
A: The research suggests this isn't really the right question, because apps are the more effective tool for initiating contact, especially for people who find in-person approaches difficult, while in-person contact is what friendships need to reach their highest quality tier. The friendships that end up strongest are usually the ones that started on an app and moved offline relatively quickly, not the ones that stayed purely digital.
A: An online-only friendship exists entirely through digital contact (texting, social media, video calls) without in-person meetings. A mixed-mode friendship starts online (through an app, a shared group, a game) and later moves to in-person contact. Research has found that mixed-mode friendships eventually match the quality of offline-only friendships, while online-only friendships remain measurably lower in quality even after years of continued contact.
A: In-person contact activates physiological mechanisms - including co-regulation between two people's nervous systems and, in women specifically, the oxytocin-mediated tend-and-befriend stress response - that text and video don't fully replicate. These mechanisms are part of why close, in-person friendships are protective against stress and loneliness in a way that digital-only contact isn't.
The technology didn't fail us. It did exactly what it was built to do, which is make initiating contact easier than it's ever been. What the research is clear about is that initiating contact isn't the same job as building a friendship, and treating a match or a follow as the finish line rather than the starting line is what leaves so many digitally "connected" people lonelier than they expected to be.
If you want a structure that treats the app as a front door rather than the whole house - curated matching, followed by a real, recurring reason to be in the same room - Les Amis is built around exactly that sequence, across 12 cities in Europe and the US.
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