The Journal · The Brantford Club

Social Clubs for Adults: What the Research Says About Belonging

Statistics Canada reports more than 1 in 10 Canadians aged 15 and older feel lonely always or often, and a meta-analysis of 148 studies found people with stronger social relationships had a 50 percent higher likelihood of survival. A social club for adults is one of the oldest answers on record; Brantford has kept one at 98 George Street since 1898.

Nobody joins a club because of a confidence interval. People join because the winters are long, the calendar after forty empties out, and the people they liked at work scatter the day the job changes. But the research on social connection has grown loud enough that the case for company is now a matter of published record, and a club that has kept a room of company since 1898 owes its readers the honest version of that record. Here it is, sources named, claims hedged where the science hedges.

The Canadian Numbers First

Statistics Canada’s Canadian Social Survey, reported in November 2021, found that more than 1 in 10 people aged 15 and older said they always or often felt lonely: 15 percent of women and 11 percent of men. Living alone nearly doubled the odds, with 24 percent of people who lived alone reporting frequent loneliness against 11 percent of those living with others. And the load is not carried evenly by the old, as the stereotype has it; among Canadians aged 15 to 24, nearly 1 in 4 reported feeling lonely always or often. Loneliness also travelled with poorer reported mental health: close to half of the frequently lonely rated their mental health fair or poor, against 7 percent of those rarely or never lonely.

What Connection Does, According to the Studies

The research case runs deeper than mood. A 2010 meta-analysis in PLoS Medicine by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues, pooling 148 studies and 308,849 participants, found a 50 percent increased likelihood of survival for people with stronger social relationships, an influence the authors judged comparable to quitting smoking and larger than physical inactivity or obesity. On specific outcomes, a 2016 systematic review in the journal Heart associated poor social relationships with a 29 percent increase in risk of coronary heart disease and a 32 percent increase in risk of stroke. In the United States, the Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory put the public-health framing on record: lacking connection, it warned, “can increase the risk for premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day,” with about half of American adults reporting loneliness and almost half reporting three or fewer close friends. The numbers are American, but nobody reading a Canadian winter thinks the pattern stops at the border.

The Longest Study Says It Plainest

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed its participants since 1938, the longest-running study of adult life anywhere, and its director Robert Waldinger has summarized eight decades of data in one sentence: “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.” Not the fittest at fifty, not the wealthiest: the most connected. What the study measures the slow way, a standing room full of regulars delivers the ordinary way, one Tuesday at a time.

What to Look For in a Social Club

The research suggests the useful ingredients are regularity and realness: the same people, met often, around something worth doing. A good social club for adults supplies exactly that machinery, a standing calendar, a table that expects you, and company that notices an absence. Brantford’s oldest version is The Brantford Club, a private business and social club in a c. 1855 house at 98 George Street, where the machinery has run since 1898: lunches, club evenings, dinners with a theme, and a bar where the regulars are the point. The Journal’s entries on third places and what membership gives carry the rest of the argument.

The studies arrive with confidence intervals; the room has been sure since 1898.

Questions readers ask about clubs and connection

Sources: Statistics Canada, Canadian Social Survey (2021) · Holt-Lunstad et al., PLoS Medicine (2010) · Valtorta et al., Heart (2016) · U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory (2023) · Harvard Study of Adult Development.