08/07/2026
We absolutely love to see community being created by so many.
If you're willing to try a for-profit community, you should join us for an event. We are a nonprofit combatting the loneliness epidemic by creating consistent connection for women. We meet monthly around metro Detroit and are looking for chapter leaders to start chapters in their local communities. The goal is to grow the chapters in Metro Detroit and Michigan before we go outside of the state. It's a big task but our leaders are up for it.
Article below.
Friendship economy: Consumers pay to find community, connection
Novi — The United States is facing a "friendship recession." Paid community groups are stepping in to help solve it.
On a warm summer evening, people in search of connection met at the Maples Golf Club in Novi, swimming in the pool and chatting together. In that moment, the loneliness plaguing many in America seemed to fade away for those gathered there.
The pool party was organized by a group called Eventurous Singles. With hundreds of paying members, Eventurous Singles exists to bring connection back into the world. It is far from the only paid community in Michigan and nationwide to do that.
Macomb Township resident Kleo Chrisopoulos is one of those paying members who attended the Saturday pool party. She's grateful she decided to invest $24.99 a month to join the group, saying it has transformed her life.
"For somebody like me who's very shy, very introverted, I'm not as quiet as I used to be, and my son, he sees it," said Chrisopoulos, a 47-year-old nurse. "He's like, 'she's happy. She's going out. She has friends.' Now I've done things that I never saw myself doing, like ever. Things like getting up to the front of the group to do karaoke, participating in cold plunges and letting them take pictures."
Businesses built around bringing people together, from social clubs to recreational sports to networking groups, are finding lots of customers like Chrisopoulos willing to pay to connect. Pew Research Center data from 2025 found that about 24% of adults under 30 and 16% of all U.S. adults feel lonely all or most of the time. A 2024 Harvard survey found that 17% of Americans had no close friends. In 1990, that figure was just 3%.
As isolation grows, demand for structured social experiences is growing with it. Groups are emerging and expanding offerings centered around community; consumers increasingly view these types of memberships as worthwhile investments in building relationships and a sense of belonging.
Kayaking, pickleball, dinner parties
Melissa Hesse, founder and event coordinator for Eventurous Singles, created the organization in 2023 when she herself was looking for connection.
"I had gone through a divorce and moved back from Germany," Hesse said. "I found myself going through a phase in life I wasn't used to — going from being busy 24/7 to now having some free time, and not really having people to share that time with. I was trying to find a group to do things with, and it was a dead end everywhere I looked."
After finding nothing, Hesse decided she would create her own community: "I decided to bring the people to me. So I started a hiking and kayaking page, and found that there were a lot of people going through similar situations. The group grew really quickly. It grew to over 4,000 people in nine months, and we went from just hiking and kayaking to doing every single kind of event you could ever imagine, from vacations to circus acts."
In March 2024, Hesse realized that she would have to add a fee to expand offerings and conduct background checks on prospective members. Now the group offers the monthly $24.99 membership, has more than 600 paying members and offers both smaller daily activities and larger events and trips.
"We have events every single day of the week," Hesse said. "If there's ever somebody that needs to get out of the house, we make sure there's always an event they can go to. On the weekend, we try to do something in the morning, more like a hiking, kayaking or a bike ride event, and then, at night, we try to do a dinner and dancing event. Coming up, we have a huge party at Oakland Yard. There's sand volleyball, an outdoor bar, a band and co****le. It's an amazing time that everybody talks about all year."
The Oakland Yard party is one where, due to the scale, an additional charge will be required for those in attendance. Tickets for Eventurous Singles members cost $40 with a $1 fee. Tickets for non-members, who are allowed at this party, cost $45 with a $4.89 fee.
The Ann Arbor Bicycle Touring Society also operates every day, offering bike rides for its upwards of 300 paying members. The society brings people together of all skill levels and backgrounds.
"It's really a community environment, and we meet all walks of life, which is really exciting," said Dan Harrison, president and chairman of the board. "You're working with doctors, professors and housebuilders — everyone who wants to go out, have the exercise and have fun. Also, 'bike to eat' is what some people like to say when we bike to the Dexter Bakery. On the rides, you have people riding anywhere from 10 miles to 100 miles."
The Saline-Lindenberg Sister Cities group is a slightly more niche gathering for those in the Saline area interested in connecting with and celebrating their German roots. Hosting guests from Lindenberg, Germany, venturing to Lindenberg themselves and meeting monthly, members of the paid group bring friendship to the international stage. Board chair Jack Ceo said he has grown close with both the Saline and the Lindenberg families he has met through the group.
"We think that it's important that people understand where they come from," Ceo said. "We stay in Lindenberg anywhere from 10 days to two weeks. Then my wife and I, we've gone over there when it wasn't a scheduled visit, just on our own, and we've met with or even stayed with our friends in Germany who we've stayed with in the past."
Stonewall Sports is also an identity-based group. It is a nonprofit, nationwide LGBTQ+ community-based sports organization with a chapter in Detroit. Members can participate in free and paid events or join sports leagues, with registration fees ranging from $42 to $125 per player. The organization also offers a Pay What You Can Fee Waiver, allowing some members to pay less. Its membership numbers have grown quickly over the past year.
"The summer of 2025 was our first year hitting over 300 players for kickball," co-sports director Joel Boyd said. "We added in an extra hour of indoor volleyball to increase capacity. We restructured pickleball to double the number of players. People are definitely looking for ways to get more involved, get out of the house and have those authentic in-person relationships again. It's really cool seeing those week-one free agents walking in, and by the end of the day or 10 weeks later, you see them walking out with new friends, and coming back for new sports."
'We are so meant for connection'
Other groups are also seeing increasing participation, including sororities, a long-standing part of college tradition for women. In 2025, the National Panhellenic Council saw a registration increase of more than 10% at 129 monitored campuses, with 6,016,248 women as initiated members. While sororities are nothing new, the increased participation and willingness to pay stem from a world dominated by technology, said Trinity Koppus, a junior at Central Michigan University who is president of the Collegiate Panhellenic Council on the Mount Pleasant campus.
"The world we live in today, with it being so focused on technology, it's kind of broken down people's abilities to create connections and build a community organically," Koppus said. "The popularity of joining (a) sorority or fraternity while in college is that it gives people structure and re-teaches you how to connect and talk to people — not only the people within your organization, but those in the greater community through service activities and connections with different organizations."
Several fraternity members feel the same. "People are seeking community, especially after COVID, and this is such a great community," Western Michigan University student Brady Taylor said. His fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, started during COVID on Zoom and has grown to 50 members. Meanwhile, Tennyson Corbett, president of Western Michigan's Pi Kappa Alpha chapter, has seen his grow from around 20 members before COVID to around 90-100 members now.
Connection is essential to well-being, even if remote work makes it hard, Amalia Miralrio, a Detroit clinical social worker and s*x therapist, explained: "Really, we are so meant for connection and meant for relationships. But loneliness is common. It's a mix of both these external circumstances, like remote work, and then also what's happening inside their own lives and their ability to make use of connections."
For entrepreneurs, the simultaneous difficulty and necessity of connection means a world of opportunity, said Laurel Ofstein, faculty director of the Michigan State University Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
"At the Burgess Institute, we have several students that have proposed ideas for meetups for people interested in getting together to play sports together or even just to go out socially," Ofstein said. "I see a real need. There seems to be this loneliness epidemic, and people are really seeking community to the degree where they're willing to pay for it."
For many, Miralrio explained, the structure that these paid memberships offer can help to overcome some of the internal factors holding people back: "There are so many ways that people can get in their own way when it comes to reaching out. Having built-in structure removes some of that anxiety by providing that frame, schedule and some sense of community expectations. It can help people feel like they know what to expect. They can relax and just focus on connecting."
Eventurous Singles member Chrisopoulos agreed, saying the paywall is reassuring for people who are anxious: "I know some people are skeptical of the paid social group. They say, 'How desperate am I that I've paid to make friends?' It's not really that. What it does is it takes the guesswork out. It removes the hardest part, which is like making that first step."
That is not to say that the paywall removes all the difficulties and anxieties. Redford Township resident Joe Sanchez has been a paying member of Eventurous Singles since June 2024, but it took him until September 2025 to start participating.
"I started paying for the group, and it took me 15 months before I actually went to an event," Sanchez said. "It was so hard for me to get over that strange anxiety. Finally, they posted a TreeRunner event, something I've been wanting to do for seven years but never had someone to do this with. I didn't want that to be my first thing, so I showed up to karaoke on Monday. I was introduced to this one guy when I walked in, and he immediately made me feel so comfortable. Then, it came time for me to do my song, and everybody was cheering and going crazy for me."
For Sanchez, this moment was the start of a rewarding personal journey. Now he attends three to four events a week, and gets together with others from the community even more often.
"I've made so many friends," Sanchez said. "There's so many different things now that I'm no longer afraid of that I can go out and experience. I would have never taken a line dancing class before. Never. But I went and had an absolute blast. It's really amazing the personal growth that I've made at 49 years old. It's unreal."
Koppus has seen similar growth after becoming part of Greek life: "I really struggled with making connections for the first few months before I decided to join a sorority. I thought I would give a sorority a try, and that was really the first time that I had someone taking the time out of their day to get to know me. It's really brought me out of my shell. I definitely think it was worth the investment."
For organizers of paid social groups, seeing the impact of their work can be powerful and fulfilling.
Detroit Young Professionals offers several events a year to help young adults network and grow professionally. Michael Wheeler, board chair, said he has felt pride in the connections he has seen members make: "We've had people come to us and say they found their life partner through a DYP event. That they've found Realtors and best friends, and pretty much any type of beneficial human connection you can think of."
Hesse echoed the sentiment: "It's really surreal. My mission is to help people not feel like they're lonely, and live their best lives. We've had nine couples that have gotten engaged, and just thousands of people finding their best friends, their soulmates. It's just amazing to watch it all happen."
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America is facing a rise in loneliness. Michiganians sick of being stuck behind screens are finding businesses offering activities and friendships.
