Is Male Loneliness a New Epidemic or an Age-Old Struggle?

Source: Adrian Swancar/Unsplash

Although researchers have been exploring loneliness as a societal epidemic for decades, the topic of specifically male loneliness has recently become front-page news and ignited vitriolic online debates. Stories abound about how men deserve to be lonely, while others contend that they’re not really lonely, they’re just wallowing, as many women retreat from unsatisfying heterosexual relationships.

Events like the grotesquely expensive Jeff Bezos wedding, Sean Combs’ recent trial, and the culture wars ignited daily by the U.S. president are partially to blame for such caustic narratives. An apparent growing disregard for and abuse of women and others is nauseating to witness and feels symptomatic of a broader cultural tailspin.

But does the experience of oligarchs, rapists, and globe-trotting misogynists like Andrew Tate help understand what's occurring within the sea of "regular" men, and their perceptions of loneliness? Also, is the male loneliness epidemic actually new? And why are so many people comfortable with hating on men’s emotional pitfalls? Does the entry-level privilege most heterosexual men enjoy within a patriarchal society obfuscate their ability—or their right—to feel lonely?

Unpacking Male Loneliness

According to a recent Pew survey, 16 percent of men (and 15 percent of women) say they're lonely all or most of the time. Key causes include men's relative paucity of friendships compared to women's. Additionally, men are often encouraged to be stoic instead of vulnerable, which makes it hard for them to express themselves emotionally and interact in meaningful ways with other people, including intimate partners.

Then there’s the addictive and misogynistic manosphere that targets boys and young men and may offer shelter from a world in which traditional notions of masculinity are increasingly contested. Many men and boys actively seek purpose in a changing society in which some groups of women are excelling at historic levels and outpacing them in school and at work.

However, gender alone does not determine loneliness. This is illuminated in a 2020 survey of adults in 237 countries finding that age, gender, and culture interacted to predict loneliness. Additionally, male loneliness is not a new phenomenon: One marker of loneliness is suicide rates, and for decades, men have had higher rates than women.

We see this reflected in a 2009 study about suicide rates among youths aged 15 to 24 in 15 European countries: 5.5 to 35.1 for males and 1.3 to 8.5 for females. However, compelling insights from a recent American study conducted between 2018 and 2023 demonstrate increases in suicide among preadolescent and adolescent females, suggesting that rates may be rising faster among female rather than male youth. These findings do not invalidate male loneliness. Rather, they contextualize and temper the current frenzy about male loneliness by providing evidence-based data demonstrating, among other things, that men have been lonely before. They might be lonely for different reasons, but it’s not their first rodeo, nor are they the only ones feeling this way.

Gendering Loneliness

Should we be so hyper-focused on male loneliness? College journalist Nicholas Sherwood, for one, doesn’t think so. In fact, he argues, gendering the loneliness epidemic may come at a heavy cost that impacts everyone, not just men or boys: "If the public is to seriously confront the growing crisis of loneliness, it cannot—must not—frame the crisis as something exclusive to men. To do so is to allow the manosphere to take ownership of the matter and entrench culture further into a contemptuous, misogynistic fugue.”

We definitely don’t want the manosphere taking up any more space culturally and within the lives of men, boys, or anyone feeling adrift in our increasingly precarious and disconnected world.

If male loneliness isn’t new, why are the debates about it blowing up right now? Part of it has to do with a backlash against toxic masculinity and the multiple spaces, especially online, where we encounter elements of these aggressive, sometimes violent forms of masculinity. It can sometimes feel like problematic men are everywhere. Vivian Park, a college journalist at the University of Michigan, explains this well:

Loneliness Essential Reads

Solving the Youth Loneliness Epidemic

Why the Way You See the World Can Make You Lonely

I think this is what underlies the sentiment that causes “some men are bad” to become “all men are bad.” The uncertainty makes it hard to decipher when masculinity is good and when it is bad, and misogyny is unrelenting. Women cannot simply ignore or take a break from men or their masculinity, toxic or not, when it is present in our loved ones, our family, friends, significant others. It is tiring, exhausting.

Neuroscientist Dean Burnett has shed some interesting light on this trend. As he explains, our brains have evolved to assume that the world is a fair place, and this is why we generally approve of things like fairness and justice. So, when we see someone falter, especially if they are of a higher status than ourselves, we can feel a burst of satisfaction. It's possible that this phenomenon, known as schadenfreude, may also account for the current lack of empathy toward men who may be struggling with loneliness.

A final point that might add to our broader understanding of the current obsession with male loneliness is that, as a society, we gravitate toward epidemics because they involve a sense of numerical authenticity, which makes us feel like some degree of science and credibility is involved. They’re also a kind of cultural diagnosis of what’s going wrong, who’s falling behind, or who’s surging ahead. Those are vital bits of information that can help us determine not only the state of the world, but our place in it.

Branding all men as enemies, broken, or deserving of loneliness feels short-sighted and detrimental in the long run. Being empathetic to male experiences of loneliness doesn’t mean letting male violence and oppression glide by. It’s about exploring it with a bit more nuance. Men are lonely and more than a little adrift, which is how many of us have felt under patriarchy for decades — centuries even. The systems need to change before the individuals can do so in meaningful, lasting ways. That can only happen effectively and in ways that take hold when we all pitch in.