A small group of runners smiling and checking in with each other at a sunrise run club meetup, warm morning light

You know the woman with the purple hair from your Tuesday yoga class. You don't know her last name, you've never gotten a coffee together, and you'd be a little embarrassed to text her out of nowhere. But when she's not there, class feels different. You notice. You'd probably ask about her if she vanished for a month.

Psychologists have a name for that relationship now, and a growing body of research suggests it might matter a lot more than we've given it credit for. It's called a fringeship, and understanding it may be the fastest, lowest-pressure way to actually feel less alone.

What is a fringeship, exactly?

The term comes from a 2025 paper in the journal Review of General Psychology, where a team of relationship researchers, including Karen Fingerman, Jeffrey Hall, and weak-ties pioneer Gillian Sandstrom, formally defined a category of connection that sits between "acquaintance" and "close friend." They call it a fringeship, and they describe it with four traits: regular, predictable contact in a specific setting, mutual and voluntary recognition of each other, a comfortable mix of small talk and modest personal disclosure, and real, if not deep, fondness, all without the obligations that come with closer friendships.

Think of the regular at your coffee shop who remembers your order. The guy you nod to every morning at the dog park. The coworker who is your "partner in crime" at the holiday party but who you've never hung out with outside the office. None of these people would show up if you listed your closest relationships. All of them shape your week more than you probably realize.

The researchers argue fringeships aren't failed friendships or a consolation prize for people who can't make "real" ones. They're their own category, with their own job to do: providing belonging, novelty, and low-stakes connection without the time cost or emotional labor that close friendships require. In a life that's already stretched thin, that might be exactly the kind of relationship most of us have room for.

The data behind the theory

The idea that casual, "weak tie" interactions carry real psychological weight isn't new. It's been building for over a decade. Psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, now at the University of Sussex, ran an early study where she gave more than 50 participants clicker counters and had them tally their interactions with close ties and weak ties across six days. The pattern held: people who had more conversations with weak ties, acquaintances, strangers, the person ahead of them in line, tended to report being happier day to day than people who had fewer of those exchanges.

In a related study, Sandstrom sent participants to a Vancouver Starbucks and randomly assigned them to either keep the barista transaction brief and efficient, or to actually engage, smile, make eye contact, have a beat of small talk. The people who engaged reported a better mood and a stronger sense of belonging afterward, from an interaction that lasted maybe ten seconds longer.

More recent work has pushed the finding further. A 2025 study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science examined minimal social interactions, greeting someone, thanking them, briefly conversing, across a large, nationally representative sample, and found these small moments were linked to higher life satisfaction. Separately, researcher Hanne Collins has found that people with a richer mix of relationship types in their daily conversations, not just close friends but a spread of acquaintances and weak ties, report greater happiness overall.

The throughline across all of it: your nervous system doesn't seem to care whether a positive social interaction comes from your best friend or the barista. Connection registers as connection, and you need more of it flowing in from more sources than most of us assume.

Why this matters more than ever right now

Here's the uncomfortable backdrop. Close friendship, the kind fringeships get compared against, has been quietly collapsing for adults. The Survey Center on American Life's landmark 2021 study found that the share of American men reporting zero close friends rose from 3% in 1990 to 15% by 2021, a fivefold jump, and the share with 10 or more close friends dropped from 40% to just 15% over the same period. Women fared somewhat better but moved in the same direction. We covered the scale of the broader loneliness crisis and the WHO's 2025 findings on social connection here before, and the throughline is consistent: the traditional deep friendships we grew up assuming would just accumulate on their own have gotten measurably harder to sustain.

That's exactly why fringeships matter as a strategy, not just a psychological curiosity. Close friendships take real time. Research on friendship formation puts the number at somewhere around 50 hours of shared time to move from acquaintance to casual friend, and 200-plus to reach close friend. Most adults, juggling work, kids, and a shrinking supply of third places to even meet people in, simply don't have 200 spare hours lying around. But you almost certainly have the ten seconds it takes to actually look the barista in the eye, or the twenty minutes it takes to show up to the same Tuesday class again.

Fringeships are the connection you can actually afford. They don't require calendar coordination, group chat logistics, or the vulnerability of a real ask. They just require showing up somewhere more than once and letting recognition happen.

Where fringeships are actually forming right now

If you want to see fringeship formation happening at scale, look at what's happened to run clubs over the last two years. Strava's own data shows run club participation has grown 59% globally, and new clubs on the platform nearly quadrupled in a single recent year. It's not really about the running. Group activities on Strava now run about 40% longer than solo ones, and in Strava's own survey, 58% of respondents said they'd made new friends through a fitness group. Among Gen Z users specifically, a notable share said they'd been on a date with someone they met at one.

Run clubs work as fringeship factories for the exact reasons the research predicts: same time, same place, same loosely familiar faces, low pressure, no obligation beyond showing up. You don't have to remember anyone's last name to get the benefit. You just have to keep coming back. If you're in the Phoenix area and curious what that looks like locally, there's a running list of what's happening around Phoenix worth a scroll, run clubs and casual group meetups included.

The same logic applies to pickup basketball, a Saturday farmers market, a standing trivia night, a recurring co-working session at the same coffee shop. None of it needs to be labeled "making friends." It just needs to repeat.

How to build more fringeships on purpose

The research points to a few concrete moves, none of which require you to become a different, more extroverted person.

Pick one recurring thing and actually return to it. A single great class or event rarely produces a fringeship. The second and third visit is where recognition starts, and recognition is the whole mechanism.

Say the small thing. A "good to see you again" or a genuine "how'd your week go" does more work than it feels like it should. You are not trying to deepen the relationship. You are just registering that it exists.

Stop screening interactions down to efficiency. The instinct to keep the barista exchange brief, to put in headphones at the dog park, to avoid eye contact at the gym, is understandable but it's quietly costing you the exact boost the research keeps finding. You don't need a conversation. You need a beat of actual acknowledgment.

Let quantity do some of the work. Because fringeships cost so little time, you can have more of them running in parallel than you could ever sustain as close friendships. A handful of these light, low-stakes connections spread across your week adds up to a meaningfully different baseline mood than depending on two or three close friends to carry all of it.

Treat repetition as the goal, not depth. This is the part that trips people up. You are allowed to like someone, show up around them regularly, and never take it further. That's not a failure to become real friends. According to the researchers, it's the point.

The gap Let's is built to close

This is, honestly, close to the whole idea behind Let's, the IRL app. Fringeships form in the small gap between "I want to do something" and "there are people around me doing it too," and that's exactly the gap we built the product to close. You post or join a specific plan nearby, golf this afternoon, a run Saturday morning, coffee before work, and you match on the activity itself rather than on already knowing someone. Nobody has to become your best friend for the connection to count.

The recurring part matters too. Because the app surfaces what's happening near you on an ongoing basis, it's built for exactly the "show up to the same thing again" pattern the fringeship research points to, not a one-off meetup you'll never repeat. Hosts approve who joins and are ID verified, and locations stay approximate until you're accepted in, so lowering the bar to showing up never means lowering your guard. And if you'd rather start with people you already know, Let's works privately too: a small group, direct invites, a standing plan that finally gets on the calendar instead of dying in a group chat.

The encouraging part

For years, the advice around loneliness has quietly implied that the only real fix is more best friends, deeper intimacy, bigger emotional investment. That's true, and it's also exhausting, and it's probably part of why so much well-meaning advice about "putting yourself out there" doesn't stick. The research on fringeships offers something more forgiving: you don't need to overhaul your social life to feel less alone. You need a few more places where the same faces show up, and a little more willingness to say hello when they do.

Look at your week right now. There's probably already a Tuesday yoga class, a coffee order, a dog park, a run club nearby, something you could return to twice instead of once. That's the whole ask. Show up again, say the small thing, and let the recognition build on its own. If you want a running start on finding that recurring thing near you, download Let's and see what's happening close by this week.

Sources