Lonely Single Men Want Romance, but Women May Not

Single people who are lonely want to go on dates and start romantic relationships, right? For lonely single men, that might be true. But for lonely single women, not so much. In fact, among single women who had previously been married, more than 70 percent of the loneliest of them were not very interested in romance.

Those were some of the striking findings reported in "Is everyone 'looking for love'?" by Yale sociologists Hannah Tessler, Meera Choi, and Grace Kao. The article was published earlier this year (2024) in the Journal of Family Issues.

Is Everyone Looking for Romantic Love? Not at All

The assumption that just about everyone is looking for romantic love is so pervasive, and until recently so rarely challenged, that it strikes some people as a truism about human nature. That’s just what it's like to be an adult: It is normal and natural to want to be in a romantic relationship. Only it isn’t.

In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that among a national U.S. sample of solo single people (not married, not cohabiting, and not in a committed romantic relationship), half were not interested in a romantic relationship or even a date. When they conducted a similar survey in 2022, the percentage had increased a bit: 56 percent were just not interested.

Tessler and her colleagues found the same thing. In their analysis of a national U.S. sample of solo single people surveyed in 2021, they learned that 51 percent of them were not interested in going on dates or starting a romantic relationship.

That number, 51 percent, came from averaging across all of the solo single people in the study. It mattered, though, whether they were men or women and whether they had always been single (never married) or had been previously married.

• Among the previously married, a remarkable 73 percent of the women were not interested in romance. Among the previously married men, that number was 50 percent.
• Among those who were never married, the women were again more likely to say they were uninterested in dating or romantic relationships than the men, but the difference was much smaller, 47 percent vs. 44 percent.
• For both the never-married and previously married women, the older solo singles were even less likely to be interested in romance than the younger ones. (The patterns were less straightforward for the men.)

The researchers did not have data available to explain their results. Typically, when previously married women express less interest in romantic relationships than men, and when it is shown that they are more likely to initiate divorce, what happens inside the marriage is posited as an explanation. For example, even as the division of household chores and caring for children has become more equal over time, women, on average, still do more than their share.

Those kinds of explanations may well have some validity, but they assume that women want to be single because of what they didn’t like about being married. What I have learned in my study of the single at heart is that many people—men, women, and people who identify as neither, the previously married as well as the lifelong single people—are attracted to single life because they appreciate what it has to offer. They are not so much avoiding romance as embracing the freedom, the social connections, and the psychological richness of single life. Because they appreciate solitude rather than being afraid of it, they are especially unlikely to feel lonely.

Loneliness as a Possible Driver of Romantic Interest—or Not

Among solo singles who have never been married, the loneliest among them do typically want romance. But again, that was mostly true for the single men. Among the previously married, too, the lonely single men were especially interested in dating and having a romantic relationship.

Tessler and her colleagues did not test any explanations for these differences, so we can only speculate. Maybe when women feel lonely, they are more motivated to reach out to friends and family than to a romantic partner. They often have more experience at nurturing ties with friends and family than men do. Or maybe they have learned, through experience, that the promise of romantic relationships as a cure for loneliness is often a false one.

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Regardless of the explanations for their findings, what Tessler and her colleagues have documented is significant. In this research, and in some of Tessler’s other work, she is throwing data at the presumption that everyone is looking for romantic love, and knocking it down. She is taking aim at something fundamental—what we assume to be normal and natural and universal desires among adults.

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