Networks shrink with age, and not only through constraint
The fall in the number of relationships after fifty is consistent across all data. One theory holds that it is partly chosen.
The finding
All sources agree: the number of active relationships declines steadily from mid-adulthood, in self-report surveys as in contact data. The meta-analysis by Cornelia Wrzus and her colleagues, published in 2013, makes this one of its clearest results.
Composition changes too: the share of family relationships rises, that of work-based relationships falls, notably after the end of working life.
Robert Kahn and Toni Antonucci proposed in 1980 to describe these changes through the image of the convoy: a set of people who accompany each individual through life, whose composition changes while a close core endures. The image stresses continuity more than loss.
Socioemotional selectivity theory
Laura Carstensen proposed from the 1990s that perceiving a limited time horizon alters priorities: goals of acquiring knowledge give way to goals of emotional regulation.
On that view, network shrinkage is partly a selection: the least rewarding relationships are dropped, and time concentrates on the closest ones. Work by Frieder Lang and Laura Carstensen indeed finds that the decline mainly affects peripheral relationships, while the number of close ones remains comparable.
The evidence invoked
Studies experimentally manipulating perceived time horizon, by asking people to imagine a distant move or a restricted time, find in young adults partner preferences close to those of older people.
Those experiments concern preferences reported in hypothetical situations. They support the theory without establishing that the observed shrinkage proceeds from the same mechanism. Moving from a preference expressed in the laboratory to a network composition observed over decades remains an inference.
The competing reading
A structural explanation accounts for the same data: the disappearance of work contexts, reduced mobility, health problems and deaths among close contacts reduce opportunities. It needs no assumption about preferences to produce the observed curve.
The two readings are not exclusive. Separating their respective shares requires comparing people of the same age whose constraints differ, which few studies allow.
What well-being data show
Surveys find on average a reported relational satisfaction that does not fall with age, while the number of relationships does. Setting these two curves side by side is one of the most cited arguments for a reading that does not treat shrinkage as deterioration.
That result is compatible with selectivity theory without demonstrating it, since an adjustment of expectations would produce the same observation. It also raises a problem of selective survival: people surveyed at advanced ages are not a representative sample of their generation.
Key points
The number of active relationships declines steadily from mid-adulthood.
Socioemotional selectivity theory attributes part of that shrinkage to choice.
Reported relational satisfaction does not fall with the number of relationships.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
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