We're back with "All the Lonely People," a series diving deep into how loneliness shows up in our lives. This week: is the men's loneliness epidemic overblown? There's been a lot more attention on loneliness in the past few years, with special attention on men's loneliness. And some men definitely are lonely: according to a recent Pew survey, 16% of men say they're lonely all or most of the time. But so are 15% of women. So why are we so concerned about men? What launched the narrative about men's particular loneliness? And if the problems men are having don't boil down to loneliness, what do they boil down to? Brittany is joined by Vox senior reporter Allie Volpe and Harris Sockel, writer and content lead at Medium, to break it all down.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the men's loneliness epidemic?
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Do you relate? Well, you may be lonely, but you're not alone. One third of Americans report feeling lonely at least once a week. And 16% of Americans report feeling lonely all or most of the time.
It's hard to say definitively if loneliness has gotten worse, but what we do know is that a significant amount of people are feeling it. And we also know that chronic loneliness is really bad for us. Studies show loneliness is associated with a higher risk for heart disease, dementia, stroke, even premature death. But who is at greater risk for loneliness?
Chapter 2: Why are men reported to be lonely?
And for those of us stuck in the loneliness loop, how do we get ourselves out? I'm Brittany Luce, and for the next few weeks on It's Been a Minute, we're launching a series called All the Lonely People. We're diving deep into how loneliness shows up in our lives and how our culture shapes it. This week, we're talking about men.
Outside of the general loneliness epidemic, there's also been a lot of discussion about a men's loneliness epidemic. Study after study is showing that loneliness is on the rise and men are being hit especially hard. It's called the male loneliness epidemic, where men tend to be more isolated than women. And a lot of men are lonely. About one in seven say they're lonely all or most of the time.
We asked our listeners what that looks like. And here's what a few of them had to say.
Chapter 3: What do men think about their loneliness?
I'm a 63-year-old lonely man. I think the loneliness is a result of a divorce of five years ago.
I guess I'm trying to make sense. sense of what someone is supposed to do in their 40s. I can't help but think about the community and the sense of togetherness and unity that I experienced earlier in life. And it's left me with a great sense of loneliness.
Loneliness to me is more about the day in and day out with no one else. I try so hard to make friends. I have altered work schedules to try to make myself available. And it doesn't seem that anything really works. Going on nine years with no friends.
That was Rick Klebanow, Jonathan Ellis, and Devin Burns. You'll hear more from them throughout the episode. But while a lot of men are lonely, some surveys suggest that they aren't actually more likely to be lonely than women are. But if that's true, then why has there been so much attention on men's loneliness?
Chapter 4: How did the narrative about men's loneliness spread?
And if the problems men are having don't boil down to loneliness, what do they boil down to? I'm joined today by Allie Volpe, senior reporter at Vox. Thanks so much. And Harris Sockle. He's a writer and content lead at Medium. Thanks. To break it all down. According to Pew, there's only a 1% difference in reported loneliness between men and women.
How did the narrative about a men's loneliness epidemic spread anyway?
I wrote a little bit about this. And I think the male loneliness epidemic conversation kind of, it spread because it became a conversation kind of about dating. That's how I first heard about it. And that's, I think, why this traveled so far. And I think they were conflating a conversation about singleness with a conversation about being lonely when actually they're kind of two different things.
Yeah, I think it just sort of neatly folds in with all of the headlines I've been seeing that basically just scream like there's something going on with men. Like men are having a problem. You know, fewer men are enrolling in college. Gen Z men are dating less. And perhaps most concerningly, men made up nearly 80% of the suicide rate in 2022.
So there's a lot of really big problems happening here. And I think all of this stuff is like very woven together under just like the big umbrella of like men are going through it. There's something happening here. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What are the underlying issues beyond loneliness?
Yeah, it's interesting. It's like we got all these different threads, isolation, lack of friends, you know, perhaps less dating or increased celibacy, combined with some of these other things that you mentioned, Ali, like taking up the majority of the suicide rate, unemployment, under education, some of those things might be correlated with each other.
But they've all kind of been lumped in together with this idea that men are uniquely and especially lonely. I've also seen, though, the idea that men are uniquely lonely, too. used to explain the rise of people like Andrew Tate and the reelection of Donald Trump. Why did loneliness get latched onto as an explanation?
Yeah, it's almost like a very easy explanation because it's solvable. If you kind of pin it on loneliness, then there's a solution embedded in that, which is like, talk to them and make them less lonely. And it kind of feels like too easy of a solution to what might be just more kind of ingrained ideological differences.
Yeah, yeah. Like Harris said, it's an easy solution. And speaking of some of these people like Andrew Tate, their messages of like, well, you need to have women around you only to dominate them. And like those sort of messages I think are very appealing for men who feel like their place in the world is being threatened.
And so it's very easy to say like, oh yeah, like maybe they just need a girlfriend or a friend and like, they'll be better. And I think that maps neatly onto the way that we socialize boys and men too, to sort of value that one romantic relationship. And like, that is the thing that is going to make your life better.
That's true. Some recent research has found that men expect more benefits from romantic relationships and are more motivated to seek them out compared to women.
Yeah, like because of that social messaging of like, yes, you need to find your spouse and your partner. I think it could be really, really isolating for men who don't have that.
For the last eight years, I've been single in every way. The mind wanders to what did I do wrong? What's wrong with me that I can't find someone that wants to be around me?
You know, thinking more about the data, like even if men don't self-report loneliness at a rate much higher at all than women, at the same time, I don't want to minimize that something is definitely going on. The same Pew data that we discussed earlier shows that men on a whole are less likely to reach out to people for emotional support compared to women. Other data shows that 15% of men
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Chapter 6: Why are men less likely to seek emotional support?
women have more one-to-one intimate relationships. If you think about physically how they're relating to their friends, with women, it's more face-to-face talking. And men, they're more doing things together side-by-side or playing a game side-by-side. There are a few studies around just physically how people orient to each other.
I think men are socialized less to reach out to individuals and more to kind of
go to a group of men which seems harder to maintain and have yeah well you got to build the group and then maintain the group and then they got to be there when you need them that's a lot and men are also again socialized to value that romantic relationship above all else whereas women it's much more acceptable as girls are growing up you value your friends
It's maybe seen as like a little feminine for boys to have a lot of friends or to seek their friends for this like emotional support and validation. Like, no, that's what you're supposed to use your romantic partner for. And then that brings up like a lot of vulnerability if you do need that support.
You might be afraid to reach out to a friend out of a fear of looking weak, out of a fear of maybe even being rejected. Your friend being like, dude, like we don't talk about that. That's strange. And so prevents people from doing it in the first place.
I also wonder too if... it can feel safer to be in a group because then you get more reinforcement that you are doing friendship the right way.
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Chapter 7: How do societal norms affect men's friendships?
Whereas like maybe, you know, as we've been kind of circling in this conversation, but I guess I'll say it, maybe perhaps in a one-on-one friendship, because there is so much homophobia in our society, it can feel like, you know, maybe this one-on-one friendship with another man is feeling too romantic. Where in a group, maybe it's more of a way to make sure like the emotional depth is like...
Even. Yeah, that's a great point.
Coming up, do men need to spend more time with their boys? A friendship is a kind of living thing. You need to water it like a plant. Or after a while, those friendships can atrophy. Stick around.
I see the media and there's a societal point of kind of not poking fun at, but acknowledging the idea that men have a difficulty connecting with other men or in superficial terms. I don't like sports. I don't connect in those kind of traditional ways. My girlfriends, friends, boyfriends or husbands, there seems to be a language I don't speak with them and puts me at odds.
You know, something else that each of you brought up when you talked to our producer Liam in your pre-interview chats, we don't get a lot of man-to-man friendships in media really outside of buddy comedies.
Yeah. And I think like our media is a great way where we could like show examples of what like really great friendships could look like. Like that's why Sex and the City and Girls are like so popular because they give women an example or an archetype of different kinds of friendships. It's why people were like, I'm a Samantha, I'm a Marnie.
It gives people a role in which to slot themselves or lets them know, okay, well, what I'm experiencing is normative or other people feel this way too. And you so rarely see that with Men, like again, like you said, except for like buddy comedies. And in that case, they're often like doing a thing. They have like a very specific task that they're doing.
And it's not so much like we're so good friends. And it's like for the female centric friendship shows, it's about their friendships.
Yeah. Another thing from the Pew study gets at something that each of you have brought up, which is that men were just as likely to reach out to their spouse for emotional support as women were. But for every other kind of relationship, they were less likely to say that they'd reach out. You've each kind of discussed this phenomenon of men putting more of their eggs in
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