Outgrowing Your Hometown Friends: What the Research Actually Shows

If your hometown friends feel more distant every time you go back, you are describing something researchers have measured. In a longitudinal study of two cohorts of young adults moving away from home to college, personal networks grew quickly with new friends, while friendships from before the move were progressively lost. Family relationships were not. But the most intimate inner layers of people's networks stayed stable in size, with effort going into keeping them. A separate study found that friendship quality declined less across a major life transition when people invested more effort in the relationship.

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After a move, outer friendships faded while the closest circle stayed the same size.

What happens to a network when you move away

In a 2024 study in Advances in Life Course Research, Kempnich, Wölfer, Hewstone and Dunbar followed two cohorts of young adults moving away from home to college, tracking the size and makeup of their complete personal networks. Networks grew rapidly as people made new friends at college. The researchers found that the social overload this could cause was partly offset by the gradual loss of friendships from before the move, but not of family relationships. Most new relationships went into the outer, less emotionally close layers of the network, which take less effort to maintain.

The inner circle stayed the same size

The most intimate inner layers of the network, the few people someone is closest to, remained stable in size, and people made efforts to keep those relationships. Face-to-face contact mattered far more than digital media for creating and keeping ties, so the emotional quality of a friendship was traded off against physical distance. The best predictor of how many original network members people kept in touch with was how large their network was before the move; living closer and being popular in the new setting had weaker effects.

Effort slows the fade

In a 2015 study in Human Nature, Roberts and Dunbar examined how entire personal networks changed over 18 months across a major life transition. Family relationships and friendships behaved very differently. The decline in friendship quality was reduced when people invested more effort in the relationship. There was a gender difference in what worked: for women, decline was prevented most by talking together more often; for men, by doing more activities together.

What this does not show

Both studies followed people through a move or transition, mostly young adults going to college, so they may not describe every way hometown friendships change. They show patterns across networks, not why any single friendship faded or whether it should be saved. We could not find a study testing journaling, writing or voice recording for drifting friendships. We read both papers through their indexed summaries, not the full texts, so we have left out details we could not see.

What that means if you want to try it

Drifting from some hometown friends appears to be a normal part of moving on, while the closest few tend to be the ones people work to keep. The research suggests effort is what slows the fade, so it can help to name which friendships you want to put that effort into. Phi's 60-second voice entries are one place to say it out loud. That is a format, not a tested treatment: neither study above tested voice journaling.

Sources

Kempnich, M., Wölfer, R., Hewstone, M., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2024). How the size and structure of egocentric networks change during a life transition. Advances in Life Course Research, 61, 100632.Roberts, S. B. G., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2015). Managing relationship decay: Network, gender, and contextual effects. Human Nature, 26(4), 426–450.

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