I don't have friends, unless you count. What about you?
Apart from one another, my wife and I have one lifelong friend each in the States that we've rarely seen in the fifteen years since we expatriated. She and her girlfriend email one another describing their day every day, but I seldom hear from or contact my male counterpart.
Now, we have people that we meet with at the house for wine or bridge, or with whom we'll go out for a meal, or who invite one another to their parties, but these aren't people I would impose upon or expect much from.
Then again, we don't need anything from others. If we had to evacuate our home for say a tenting and fumigation, we'd stay at a hotel, not the home of our social contacts. If we need a ride to the airport, we hire a taxi, not impose on others.
This group of people deserve a name to distinguish them from the loose acquaintances that we only see at the bridge club, or in my wife's case, at any of the various other groups she belongs to like her garden club, her girlfriends learning ukulele along with her, and her painting club. Though they can form stronger relationships than just "Hello, how are you" - they'll chat about their lives and share tips on living here when together - she doesn't interact with them at other times.
They're not like the lifelong friends in the States nor the people we only say hello to like our neighbors. They're inbetween.
So, the bottom line is that we have acquaintances of various degrees with whom we do things, we have no friends in a deeper and more practical sense because unlike when we were children, we don't need an ingroup that we look forward to seeing outside of the house every day and upon whom our own sense of identity and place in the local social order depends.
I'm 70, and you're 26. At 26, I had made that transition from a posse of male friends to one special friend because I was married. I suppose your relationship does that for you. Even if you haven't met your soulmate yet, even if you cycle through a series of relationships for a while, each of those will likely be a substitute for a stable of people with whom you meet frequently as was the case before forming physically intimate bonds.
