Scientists have identified the three leading killers of mom-friend plans: the never-ending day-care virus, the sitter who bailed, and the mysterious vortex that is “out of town.” The first two are unavoidable, but the third is a choice that society, collectively, seems to be making more and more. Out of town is where all of your friends are when you’ve finally decided to host a playdate. Out of town is where everyone is for the entirety of August. Want to grab a drink? I would love to, but I am, well, you get it.
Several caveats apply. We don’t know whether Americans are actually making more weekend trips; the most recent large-scale, comprehensive assessment on the topic was conducted in 1995. The most common reasons that Americans gave last year for not spending more time with their friends were their own mental-health issues, not having enough money, and being too busy; travel didn’t appear anywhere in the top six. And going away is not an entirely bad thing. Jeffrey A. Hall, a University of Kansas communication professor who studies friendship, told me that he encourages people to visit out-of-town friends to keep those relationships alive.
But something is going on here, especially among better-off Americans, and it can make building community challenging. If people are always going away, they can’t be around for preplanned meetups or be run into casually, interactions that are the glue holding together friendship and social life. As the anonymous writer behind the Substack Cartoons Hate Her wrote in 2024, people say they want “a village” where they currently live, but they nevertheless spend a suspicious amount of time going “out of town.” (She put the term in scare quotes, as though the Catskills were a newly discovered bacteria.) When she hosted a party for her son’s preschool class, for example, only about a third of the kids showed up—“surprise, everyone else was ‘out of town,’” she wrote. In a discussion of the article on the DC Urban Moms and Dads message board, a poster wrote, “I don’t know why my neighbors are always out of town on weekends,” before adding that, as a consequence, he or she also travels frequently, and thus contributes to the weekend desertion of the neighborhood. Elsewhere on the internet, the “out of town” phenomenon is a recurring grievance wherever women, people over 30, and particularly women over 30 gather.
[Read: The friendship paradox]
Several demographic trends help explain why so few people ever seem to be home on the weekends. Americans have been prioritizing vacations over the past 20 years, even as the cost of living has increased, according to preliminary data gathered by Jeffrey LaMondia, a civil-engineering professor at Auburn University who studies American travel habits. His research subjects, he told me, “were rearranging their annual budgets to make sure that they had funds to take these trips.” A 2016 study by LaMondia and two colleagues also found that people who have higher incomes and who live in denser areas near airports are more likely to travel for fun. This same demographic is likelier to do remote work, which in some cases requires people to drive or fly into headquarters periodically to check in. Many people combine these work trips with a vacation day or two, a practice known by the ungainly name “bleisure.”
What’s more, highly educated people have been moving farther away from their families of origin in recent decades, which means that seeing relatives or childhood friends might necessitate a weekend trip. Because people are so geographically spread out, even a modest wedding or baby shower might require high-school friends, college roommates, and extended-family members to all fly in from different cities. And don’t get me started on the rise of kids’ travel sports. An acquaintance of mine recently tried to get a bunch of us neighbors together to go to a bar for one (one!) drink. The week of, several people canceled because their kids had out-of-town sports competitions the morning after the gathering.
It’s not like I’m some country mouse who barely leaves my home. For several years before we became parents, my husband and I lived in Northern Virginia but spent much of the winter in Florida. We, too, would gripe about our village-less-ness and then promptly book a month-long Airbnb in Miami. While we were away, we missed countless house parties, museum outings, and other events with our friends in Washington, D.C. I even missed a book talk by a friend whose book I loved and whom I never get to see.
Part of what makes this topic so difficult to talk about is that many of the reasons people travel are good ones. Who would shame someone for attending their kid’s soccer game or their cousin’s wedding? But when weekends away add up, people are not truly living in the actual village that they want to be their “village.” “If you invest entirely in the people who are not there,” said Hall—who, again, generally supports the idea of people traveling—“then you’re missing out on building relationships with people who are in your geographical same location.” This is why remote work can feel so—remote. You’re not truly relating to either your virtual co-workers or your physical neighbors.
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote that “the trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts.” This being 1961, she offered the example of someone “getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man” or “hearing about a job from the hardware man.” This picture, although too rosy and now outdated, still holds true in some respects: People tend to befriend the folks they run into regularly over time—which can occur through planned hangouts but also happenstance, in the school pickup line or while waiting for their coffee at a neighborhood café. When people travel frequently, they may miss out on encounters that can lead to connection. “If you have an erratic schedule where instead of going to the laundry every Sunday afternoon, you just go randomly when you run out of clothes, the laundromat’s not going to be a fertile place to find friends,” Rebecca Adams, a professor emeritus of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, told me.
Repeated encounters matter because they help make our friendships smoother and less awkward. The more you see someone, the better you get to know them, and “greater familiarity reduces your social energy costs,” Hall said. “You don’t have to worry about what another person thinks of you.” You can break out of small talk and get straight to the juicy drama because you’re not filling the person in on what you’re like—they already know because they’ve been around to find out.
I’m certain that as soon as this article is published, I’ll be caught red-handed at the airport, 400 pounds of baby-travel gear in tow. I still travel! I’m sure that many other people I know will continue to as well. But lately I’ve become less interested in going out of town just to add variety to my weekends. The place I live already has plenty of things to do and people to see—as long as I’m around to see them.