The Plight Of The Filler & Floater Friends

When Jess DeRose was planning her 21st birthday celebrations, she came up against a challenge in the form of her guest list. While some people might struggle limiting the number of people to invite to such an event, DeRose faced the opposite problem: She didn’t have enough people to invite — so she ended up asking friends of her now-husband and other mere acquaintances to populate the party.

Milestone birthdays can be difficult for DeRose, a now-27-year-old Philadelphian who co-founded The Only Human Project, a media company focused on mental health. “I do feel like I’m a person that’s very thoughtful for everyone else, and I don’t think that anyone kind of considers me that way,” she says. “Thinking about a 30th birthday party in a couple years, I’m like, Will anyone make a big fuss out of me or initiate celebrating my birthday? I end up actually planning things for myself before anyone has a chance to because I don’t want to be disappointed.”

DeRose identifies as a “floater friend,” a concept that, along with that of the “filler friend,” has been increasingly discussed online in recent years. Across social media, both men and women have opened up about “the very specific pain” that these individuals endure in lacking a core group of friends. In just the last few months, two different women who see themselves as “floater friends” have shared TikToks showing them celebrating sad solo birthdays that both subsequently went viral. Each video was flooded with comments from viewers who could empathize: “As a floater friend, I literally just go to dinner with my parents every year.” “Trying to plan a wedding without ‘my girls’ is an interesting thing.” “I didn’t realize I was the floater friend until it was my birthday and we had celebrated everyone else and mine came and went.”

Experts say that while these terms haven’t formally found a footing in academia — the study of adult friendship itself is scant among psychologists or social scientists, according to the UCLA Center for Friendship Research — the ideas behind floater or filler friends are very real and may just be part of human nature. “They’re evocative terms, and they put words to something that we didn’t have words for,” says Jaimie Arona Krems, director of the UCLA center. Understanding the difference between a filler and floater friend, she adds, may help someone determine whether they fall into one of these categories — and potentially break out of these boxes and form more meaningful relationships.

“People can always feel where they are on the totem pole of your life.”

Forty percent of Americans believe they lack a best friend, according to the Survey Center on American Life, while the number of Americans who report having no close friends at all has increased from 3% in 1990 to 12% in 2021, with researchers speculating that the jump was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. (Two years later, Pew Research Center put the number of Americans with no close friends slightly lower, at 8%.)

These findings track with warnings from former surgeon general Vivek Murthy, who in 2023 declared that the United States was in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation, describing the two forces as public health issues that could increase the risk of premature death by 26% and 29%, respectively. Harvard researchers have called this trend a “friendship recession,” pointing to an increased cultural focus on work and family, as well as the shift to digital life, while The Atlantic declared last year that we are living in “the anti-social century.” Against this backdrop, it makes sense that people might have embraced “therapy speak”-adjacent terms, like filler or floater friend, to help them make sense of confusing feelings or a sense of isolation. As DeRose, the Philadelphia floater friend, puts it: “It’s just a really cool thing when somebody puts into words how you're feeling.”

For DeRose, identifying as a floater friend felt natural because she lacked a foundational friendship group during both high school and college. While she had people she was friendly with, she was never invited to join them at parties or in taking a bus to prom. “I felt like the outsider, and I had to ask other people to be involved,” DeRose says. “It’s just feeling different and longing for a different social circle than you have — something that’s a little more connected and a little bit bigger.”

Her description of being a floater friend aligns with how experts understand the term. Krems from UCLA says floater friends predominantly have what are known as weak-tie relationships: people they see regularly at, say, Pilates or at work and who provide some “valuable friendship sustenance” — but nowhere near enough to be satisfying. That might sound sad, but that’s not always the case. Psychotherapist and author of the forthcoming book The Friendship Lab Elisabeth Crain, Psy.D., describes a floater friend as someone suffering from a “depth gap” in her relationships, possibly because of her own personality or lifestyle. “She’s moving through spaces and has different interests and a myriad of things that she wants to do, so she’s already low commitment,” she says. (Another way to think about it: The line in Taylor Swift’s “Cardigan” in which she sings, “A friend to all is a friend to none,” an ancient adage that’s originally sourced from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.)

“I feel like I’m invited around, but I don’t feel like I belong anywhere too strongly. It’s not for a lack of trying. There is a bit of disconnect.”

Kat Kramer, a 24-year-old social media worker in New York City, identifies as exactly this version of floater friend. With a childhood that stretched across multiple U.S. states plus a stint in the United Kingdom, Kramer became accustomed to drifting between different friend groups, never putting down proper roots among any of them. In high school, her interests ranged from sports to music; then, while at college in North Carolina, she estimates she was in as many as 15 different clubs. “I mixed my interests in hobbies across the board, and so it was harder to feel like you belong just to one specific group,” she says. “It’s like you’re floating between.”

While Kramer used to struggle with being a floater friend, and admits to occasionally experiencing FOMO, she’s since come to embrace this identity for herself. She believes having lots of “little niche groups” where she feels a sense of belonging has made her into a more well-rounded person. “Some people really enjoy intimate, cozy connections with just a few people, and it’s kind of cliquey and exclusive. That’s not a bad thing. That can feel really great when you’re part of an exclusive group,” she says. “But for me, I didn’t enjoy it as much because I felt like I was limiting myself from new opportunities, new activities, and new friends.”

Floater friends typically enjoy some agency in choosing to drift between groups. Filler friends, however, are a different case — designated as such because of decisions other people make. Krems says filler friends are those who’ve been classified, perhaps unwillingly, as another person’s “Tier 2 or Tier 3” friend. Similarly, Crain says a filler friend is someone who might receive an invitation to a dinner party or — gasp — a wedding because someone more meaningful to the host can’t make it. “It’s the B team. It’s a placeholder,” Crain says, stressing that the filler friend is likely aware of their status, even if they have no choice in it. “People can always feel where they are on the totem pole of your life.”

“For some people, it’s shocking, because there’s a disparity between the two people. It’s sort of like dating, and they’re ‘just not that into you.’”

On TikTok, self-described filler friends have vented about being “the backup” who is called upon when others aren’t available. “They keep you around but they do not really choose you… Why do you talk about how much you love me, but somehow I’m never on the first draft of the guest list?” vented one woman. “If you don’t choose me, I’m going to feel like I’m an option,” said another.

For Krems, filler friends bring to mind the work of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who posited that people can only really maintain 150 relationships in their life that are ranked via concentric circles of importance, with filler friends occupying the outer rings. Crain offered a similar analogy, comparing a filler friend’s place within these circles to planets around a sun. “That person is telling you something. They’re telling you where you live in their orbit and in their solar system,” Crain says “You’re not the closest to the sun. They have other people.”

While “filler friend” and “floater friend” may be new to our collective vocabulary, it is natural for people to rank the relationships in their life via degrees of importance, if only for the practical purpose of determining how much of our limited time we should allocate to each person. But, Krems adds, the math is a little less straightforward: Under the alliance hypothesis of friendship, she explains, we typically rank our friends based on where we suspect we fall in their rankings of us, forming “alliances” of sorts that might be diluted in value should they have alliances of equal worth with others.

The pain of the filler friend, in turn, comes when they discover — by being omitted from, say, a bridal party — that they’re not as valued as they thought they were. “For some people, it’s shocking,” Crain says, “because there’s a disparity between the two people. One person sees it as I really care about this person. I have a lot of love. And the other person’s like I don’t really view you in that way. It’s sort of like dating, and they’re ‘just not that into you.’”

Do certain types of people tend to consistently fall into one of these friendship categories? Sadly, experts said that individuals who see themselves as filler or floater friends may be trapped in something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. “People who believe they’re going to be rejected act less warmly toward other people,” Krems says. Crain also speculates that individuals who exude a “thirstiness, desperation, or longing” for another person’s friendship might actually cause that person to instinctively retreat.

“I end up planning things for myself before anyone has a chance to because I don’t want to be disappointed.”

Krems says that people who lack what social scientists bluntly call “social intelligence,” including some neurodivergent individuals, may also be at a disadvantage when it comes to forming meaningful, central friendships. That’s the case for Charles Candor, a 28-year-old data professional in Brooklyn who has autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Candor says he feels like both a floater friend and a filler friend among different crowds, kept at a distance from inside jokes or gossip in part because he occasionally misses social cues — but also because he can sometimes keep himself at a distance in order to observe. Occasionally, he might leave an event early because he gets overstimulated, which he fears gets mistaken for a lack of interest. “It’s a way of life for me,” he says. “I feel like I’m invited around, but unfortunately, I don’t feel like I belong anywhere too strongly. It’s not for a lack of trying. It’s just sometimes I feel like there is a bit of disconnect.”

If you’re wondering whether you might fall into the floater or filler friend category, experts say there are a few questions to ask yourself. For one, do you feel as if you could count on this person if you ever needed them? If not, then you’re probably not as close to them as you think. Additionally, if you haven’t made the cut for a major event in their life (a wedding, a birthday celebration), it’s likely you’re one of the outer planets in their friendship solar system. Finally, ask yourself how you feel when you leave an encounter with this person: fulfilled or unsatisfied? Replenished or depleted? Content or confused?

And for those who are seeking to build deeper friendships, there are several strategies you might consider — the most effective of which is finding ways to spend time with them more often, even in limited bursts. Quick calls to say hi or share something that made you think of the other person are more effective than waiting five months for a two-hour window to open up in both your schedules. “Just making that connection, feeling that support, doing that in a way that is synchronous can be so much more meaningful than a 10-hour marathon call you never really schedule,” Krems says. She also suggests asking a favor of a friend, pointing to what’s known as the “Ben Franklin effect”: wherein people tend to like us more when we request their help.

Finally, Crain advises taking “calculated risks” with friends, wherein you share deeper things with them about yourself, peeling back layers of the proverbial onion. “Trust is not earned immediately. It’s built over time,” Crain adds. “Those calculated risks can pay off, and they can deepen the relationship, and they can create meaning.”

The filler and floater friends who spoke with Bustle all say they have prioritized support from — and find meaning in — nonfriend figures in their lives, whether they are family members or romantic partners. DeRose in Philadelphia, for example, has put her efforts into nurturing the quality of the relationships she does have, rather than focusing on the quantity she doesn’t. With that in mind, she and her husband decided that their wedding party would be composed solely of their siblings, which they felt best represented the most valued connections they hope to maintain for the rest of their lives. “Everyone has different social needs,” she said. “Just because you don’t have that big friend group doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you.”