About · what this is
A site that describes the state before anyone tries to fix it
No Friends Guide is a reference about adult loneliness: what it is, how it differs from being alone, when it arrives, and what it is like in the particular situations where people meet it — at night, inside a relationship, after a marriage ends, later in life.
Why it exists in this shape
The gap it was built for is a specific one.
Search for almost any version of this and two kinds of page come back. One is clinical: a symptom list, a health warning, a figure with no origin attached. The other is encouragement: join something, put yourself out there, be your own best friend. Both skip the same step — saying what the thing actually is, in the hour a person is actually reading.
So that step is the whole site. Each page describes one state in one set of circumstances, says what is going on underneath it, and then says where description runs out. Nothing here is a programme, and nothing here promises the state will lift. What it offers is recognition and a plain account, which is a smaller thing and a more honest one.
Who writes here
Nobody is going to be introduced on this page, and that is deliberate.
No Friends Guide is written and maintained as an anonymous editorial project. There are no bylines, no author photographs, no invented editors and no professional credentials claimed on anybody's behalf. A site about loneliness that opened with a stock portrait and a fabricated qualification would be doing the thing it is arguing against.
Nothing here is written in the first person about an experience the site did not have. There are no reader letters, no anonymised case studies and no "one woman told us", because none of that could be verified and all of it is easy to invent. What the pages stand on instead is checkable: plain description, stated limits, and a rule against publishing any figure that has not been traced to a named primary source.
What it will not do
Four commitments, each one checkable against any page here.
- No diagnosis. Loneliness is a state, not a condition. This site does not decide whether a reader is lonely, depressed or unwell, and it holds no quiz that pretends to.
- No unsourced figures. No number appears anywhere on this site unless it has been traced to a named primary source with a year. Nothing has, so nothing numeric is published — including quantities stated in words.
- No invented people. No pseudonymous experts, no borrowed qualifications, no manufactured stories.
- No instructions to cheer up. Nothing here begins with getting out more, and no organisation, app or service is recommended by name.
The rules behind all four, and the record of claims that were written and then removed, are on the editorial policy and sources pages.
How the pages are produced
Stated openly, because a reader is entitled to know.
Drafts are produced with the assistance of AI tools and then edited, cut and checked by a person before publication. The angle of each page, the boundaries it holds and everything it refuses to say are editorial decisions, not model output; automated checks sit on top and refuse a build that carries an unsourced figure or a broken page.
Contact
Corrections are the most useful thing to send.
Email hello@nofriendsguide.com or use the contact page. Corrections are handled the way the corrections policy describes: fixed on the page and noted there.
One thing this site cannot be: somebody to talk to. If it has stopped lifting at all, or it has turned into hopelessness, that belongs with a doctor, a therapist, or a helpline in your country rather than with a website.