Last month I was sitting on our balcony here in Saigon, watching the motorbikes swarm through the intersection below, and my wife asked me something that stopped me cold.
“When was the last time you talked to a friend? Like, really talked?”
I opened my mouth to answer. Then I closed it. Then I sat there for what felt like a very long time.
The honest answer was: I couldn’t remember.
Not a group chat message. Not a “happy birthday” comment on someone’s wall. An actual conversation where I said something real and someone said something real back.
It had been over a year. Maybe longer.
And here’s the thing that surprised me most. I’m not antisocial. I’m not depressed. I genuinely like people. I run a content business, I talk to my team regularly, I have a wife I adore and a little daughter who makes me laugh every single day. My life is full in almost every measurable way.
But somewhere along the line, every friendship I had started to feel like a performance. And I just quietly stopped showing up for the curtain call.
The version of me that people became friends with doesn’t exist anymore
When I think about the friendships I let go of, they weren’t bad friendships. They were friendships built around a version of me that I’ve outgrown.
The guy who’d stay out until 2am. The guy who had strong opinions about everything and wanted to debate them over beers. The guy who could do “banter” for three hours straight without getting tired.
That guy is gone. And I don’t miss him.
I moved to Vietnam in my early thirties. I got married. I had a kid. I started meditating every morning. I traded late nights for 6am runs along the Saigon River. The things that fill me up now are quieter, slower, and honestly a lot less entertaining to talk about at a dinner party.
And when I’d catch up with old friends, I could feel myself performing. Putting on the old personality like a costume that doesn’t fit anymore. Laughing louder than I needed to. Pretending to care about things I stopped caring about years ago.
Psychologists call this social masking, and the research on it is pretty clear. The constant effort of presenting a version of yourself that doesn’t match who you actually are leads to significant mental exhaustion and disconnection. It’s not just tiring. It actively erodes your sense of self.
I didn’t have the language for it at the time. I just knew that every time I hung up the phone or left a catch-up, I felt worse than before I showed up.
So I stopped showing up.
This isn’t just a “me” problem
After my wife’s question rattled around in my head for a few days, I did what I always do. I went looking for data.
Turns out I’m not some weird outlier. According to the American Perspectives Survey, 12% of adults now say they have zero close friends, up from just 3% in 1990. The number of people who report having ten or more close friends dropped from 33% to 13% over the same period.
In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a formal advisory declaring loneliness and social isolation a public health epidemic. The advisory noted that lacking social connection increases the risk of premature death by nearly 30%, which puts it roughly on par with smoking.
Psychologist Robin Dunbar’s research suggests we can only maintain about 150 meaningful relationships, with only about five people in our innermost circle. But for a lot of us, even that inner five has quietly shrunk to one or two.
Research from the American Psychological Association highlights that friendships and romantic relationships actually support each other. Having close friends outside your marriage buffers against stress within it. When you lose those friendships, your marriage has to carry a weight it was never designed to hold alone.
That hit close to home.
The uncomfortable truth about why it happened
I’d love to blame this on being an expat. Living in a different country makes it harder, sure. Time zones are annoying. You miss the casual, unplanned interactions that keep friendships alive.
But if I’m being honest with myself, the geography is an excuse.
The real reason is that I got comfortable. My wife became my best friend, my business partner, my co-parent, my sounding board. She became everything. And I let that feel like enough because building new friendships, or maintaining old ones in an authentic way, requires a kind of vulnerability I’d been quietly avoiding.
It requires showing people the actual version of you. The one who meditates and reads Buddhist philosophy and gets excited about sentence structure. The one who would rather go for a morning run than go for drinks. The one who has changed so much that introducing yourself honestly to old friends feels like meeting a stranger.
In my book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism: How to Live With Maximum Impact and Minimum Ego, I wrote about the concept of letting go of who you think you should be. It’s a core Buddhist idea. But I realize now I only applied it to my inner life. I never applied it to my friendships. I kept trying to show up as the person my friends originally signed up for, and when I couldn’t do that anymore, I disappeared instead.
What I’m doing about it (slowly)
I don’t have some neat resolution for this. I haven’t signed up for a men’s group or downloaded a friend-matching app. I’m not going to pretend I’ve fixed this in the four weeks since I noticed it.
But I have done a few small things.
I messaged an old friend and told him the truth. Not “hey man, we should catch up sometime,” but something more like: “I’ve changed a lot and I think that’s why I went quiet. I’d like to talk if you’re up for it.” He was. The conversation was awkward at first and then surprisingly good.
I’ve also started paying attention to the people already around me here in Saigon. The guy at the coffee shop I see every morning. A couple of other dads at my daughter’s school. Not forcing anything, just being a bit more open instead of treating every interaction as a transaction to get through.
And I’ve stopped expecting friendship to look the way it did when I was 25. It doesn’t need to be loud or constant or fueled by alcohol. It can be a 20-minute voice note while I’m walking home from the gym. It can be someone who asks how the business is going and actually wants to hear the answer.
The thing nobody tells you about your late thirties
Nobody warns you that growing into a better version of yourself can make you lonelier. That the things you shed along the way, the people-pleasing, the performing, the keeping up appearances, those were also the things holding your social life together.
When you stop performing, you find out which relationships were built on the performance. And the answer, in my case, was most of them.
That’s not a tragedy. It’s just the cost of changing. And I’d rather be lonely and honest than surrounded by people who only know the character I used to play.
But I’m also done pretending that my wife and daughter are enough to fill every human need I have. That’s not fair to them. And it’s not true.
So I’m starting over. At 37. In a city where I barely speak the language. With a personality that’s quieter than the one I used to lead with.
It’s uncomfortable. But the best things usually are.
