slate.com There Is No Male Loneliness Crisis. What’s Actually Happening Is So Much Darker. Nick Keppler 25–32 minutes

Illustration of people hanging out with friends in a city, outside a cafe. Life America’s Loneliness Trap One group of people is more isolated than anyone else. It’s not men.

Aug 13, 20265:40 AM

Men are lonely, you’ve probably heard. “Few men will admit it, but it’s true of most of them,” declared Los Angeles Times columnist Jean Guerrero in one in a tsunami of recent takes on the “male loneliness epidemic.” Guerrero partially blamed the “virtual world” and its “pornography and ideological provocation.”

This discourse often faults men—or at least masculinity—for our empty social calendars. A Guardian columnist theorized, “Many men are socialized to prioritize strength, independence and stoicism, making it difficult for them to open up and form emotional connections.” An Atlantic writer agreed, writing, “Friendships are hard to maintain … but the social stigma that some men face when opening up and being vulnerable can make things even harder.” A “punk-rock psychologist” told Vice that men have low emotional intelligence.

BuzzFeed has cranked out 12 posts about male loneliness in 2026 alone (so far, at least). Some of them are pretty brutal—for example, “27 Loser Men Whose Actions Single-Handedly Prove the ‘Male Loneliness Epidemic’ Is Self-Inflicted.”

The inability of men to form friendships, or even make conversation, with each other is a ready setup for a Saturday Night Live bit. In one viral sketch, exhausted women take their male partners to a “man park,” where they grunt about sports and Marvel movies. A sketch from April also featured a group of men, sequestered together while their wives have gal time, struggling to move past monosyllables. A mention of “the male loneliness epidemic” was even slipped into a recent cold opening skewering the problem drinkers of Trumpworld. The Daily Show ran two segments about male loneliness over the past few months, one of which culminated in Leslie Jones ranting, “So many of these problems could be overcome if men would just go to therapy.”

I could go on and on. As assembled in the popular imagination, the image of lonely men—evidently, most men—is emotionally repressed, excruciatingly awkward, and freaked out by intimacy outside a romantic relationship (and maybe even within one); overall, they’re a drag on others and susceptible to dangerous influences.

Do such men exist? Perhaps. But the truth is, in aggregate, men are not much lonelier than women. Recent large polls from Pew Research and the Harvard Graduate School of Education found no significant gender gap in self-reported feelings of loneliness. In a KFF survey, more women (18 percent) than men (13 percent) said they always or often feel lonely. In the 2021 American Perspectives Survey, 15 percent of men said they have no close friends, versus 10 percent of women, but when Pew pollsters asked the same question more recently, they found no substantial gender disparity. In the latest American Time Use Survey, the average man spent about five and a half hours per day alone and the average woman about five hours and 20 minutes. Differences in time spent with friends and family were also puny.

Loneliness has, overall, crept up to alarming levels in the U.S. These same studies show that Americans have fewer close friends and spend more time alone than in decades past. Since 1990, the total population who said they do not have a single close friend quadrupled, from 3 percent to 12 percent, according to the APS, while those who counted 10 or more close friends shrank from 33 percent to 13 percent. The number of hours per day an average adult spent alone was about five in 2003 and seven in 2024.

Across all these studies, there is one group that is drastically lonelier than everyone else. The people who are not getting their share of social connection in America are those who aren’t getting their share of a lot: poor people. Those who struggle to afford essentials are also more likely to struggle with feelings of isolation.

When viewed from this angle, loneliness in the U.S. seems less like something people impose on themselves through poor psychosocial maintenance—an inherent premise of blaming gender—and more like something society imposes on people. There isn’t really a male loneliness crisis. But there is, as I learned poring over studies, speaking to experts and to low-income people, a loneliness trap. And since anyone’s luck can go sideways, we’re all at risk of getting stuck in it.

At the start of his 20s, Dan had an assortment of friends left over from high school and a workforce training program. They went to restaurants, caught movies, and hung out at the mall.

Then COVID-19 hit. Dan, who asked me to use only his first name, lived with his mother in the Boston area. They didn’t skip any precautions. He stopped taking community college classes, which he had hoped to use to transfer to a university for a four-year degree. “I’m basically just a shut-in for a year and a half,” he said, “and I don’t do anything.”

His friends moved away or drifted out of contact. Six years later, his social life still hasn’t recovered.

Dan is now 27, and together he and his mother survive on her Social Security payments and his full-time job as a home health aide, which pays $21 an hour. He’s working toward a bachelor’s in business administration via online classes. These days, he tells me, “I don’t hang out with people. That’s not really something I do.”

He attributes his loneliness to a lack of hobbies. People trying to make new friends are often told to get involved in groups of like-minded others, but Dan doesn’t have the means to get out there. With more disposable income, he could afford to go to dance classes or a gym to meet people, he says, or “maybe learn to sail.”

Socioeconomic status is a consistent predictor of loneliness. According to the KFF study, adults in households making less than $40,000 in annual income are about three times as likely to report frequent loneliness as those in households making more than $90,000. In the Harvard survey, 29 percent of those earning less than $30,000 felt lonely, compared to 19 percent of those earning $50,000 and up. In the American Perspectives Survey, 1 in 5 U.S. adults without a college education said they had no close friends—about double the rate of those with at least a bachelor’s. In the American Time Use Survey, people making $25,000 a year or less spent almost six and a half hours alone in an average day, about 90 minutes more than those in the $25,000-to-$50,000 bracket and three hours more than those making $100,000 or more. The poorest group also had the sharpest increase since 2010, when they spent about four hours alone each day.

This trend extends outside the U.S.; in a University of Oxford study of 20 European countries, 49 percent of low-income individuals felt lonely, versus 15 percent of high earners.

Maybe Dan could have made friends in college, but his in-person secondary education was interrupted by the pandemic and he never went back. Some people his age make friends at their job, but his line of work isn’t great for that. Spurred by an aging population, home health and personal care is a growing field that does not require a college degree. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4 million Americans worked as aides in 2024, a 17 percent jump from 2023. Averaging $16.78 an hour, they barely outearn fast-food employees. “I do see it as a dead-end position in many ways,” Dan said.

One reason is a lack of co-workers to learn from or supervisors to impress. For the most part, his agency sends him to the same few households day after day, alone.

It’s a common predicament: Low-paying fields have changed. Many workers now have tenuous if any ties to others doing the same job.

In decades past, low-wage positions weren’t like this. “If you were a working-class person in the ’70s, you probably saw the same people every day at work,” said Arran Davis, a researcher at Oxford who studies social interaction and public health. “Maybe you went to one of these working men’s clubs or the same bar after work and you had a fairly large social network.” There was also a sense of pride and belonging in being part of a large, public-facing company, like one of the Big Three auto manufacturers, he adds.

Low-paid tasks, like security and cleaning, are now increasingly subcontracted, leaving the people who do them outsiders at the places where they go to work. The people who monitor entrances or vacuum carpets at night are most likely not employed directly by the company and are not invited to the holiday party. Gig apps, like Uber and DoorDash, allow for an even greater level of isolation, with no co-workers and an algorithm acting as a dispatcher and supervisor.

For those in a low-paying sector that does involve a consistent worksite, high turnover in fields like hospitality, food service, and retail impedes bonding among co-workers.

Today’s paradigm might seem “intentionally designed to atomize workforces,” said Davis. There was probably no secret plan by some cabal, he says, but it’s another facet of the modern economy that favors the rich. “They certainly hit upon a thing that is not great for worker solidarity,” he said. The amount of the U.S. workforce belonging to a labor union has been halved since 1983, from 20 percent to 10 percent; this decline can make workers’ economic prospects bleaker, as well as hurt their social connections by dislodging another employment-related source of camaraderie.

Even as poor workers make fewer friends on the job, their professional lives tend to eliminate social time. They may need to put in more hours or work nights and weekends to keep up with the cost of living. In 2025 an employee who earned the minimum wage needed to work 116 hours a week to afford an average two-bedroom rental and 97 hours for a one-bedroom, according to data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which factored in higher local and state minimum wages.

Several men sitting alone at tables inside a restaurant. Customers in a New York diner, 1962. Romano Cagnoni/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

“If you’ve got someone who’s working six or seven days a week to make ends meet, there’s just less time to make connections and keep those relationships up,” said Isaac Bledsoe, a researcher at the American Institute for Boys and Men.

The lack of social cohesion in working-class jobs contrasts with the norms of white-collar fields. Physicians, lawyers, software developers, engineers, teachers, accountants, financial managers, marketing professionals, and journalists are conditioned to see one another as colleagues and build professional networks inside their current place of employment and beyond. Attending happy hours and taking advantage of networking opportunities are often seen as parts of the job. These outlets may produce friendships and ease general socializing.

What’s more, much of this “professional class” got an implicit education in socialization in college. “We have entire ecosystems at colleges dedicated to investing in the kids’ social lives through clubs and student affairs and all that stuff,” said Sam Pressler, a research fellow at the University of Virginia who studies social connection.

In a poll from the Survey Center on American Life, 60 percent of four-year college graduates said they made at least one close friend at school—while only 35 percent who did not attend college reported having met a close friend at school.

Pressler calls college “a relational supercharger.” He said: “You build relationships that last with you, not just during college but later in life. You build mentorship relationships. You build certain habits of participation that stay.”

Habits established in college may prevent someone from falling off the “friendship cliff” after school, as Dan did. But for people who are struggling financially, merely having friends is not enough to cure isolation.

Sarah Perez works as a production assistant at a Los Angeles home fragrance company. Unlike Dan, she interacts with co-workers and gets along with them. One recently invited the 32-year-old Perez and some other work friends to a birthday excursion to a renaissance fair.

“They bought tickets and costumes and everything, and I just couldn’t go,” said Perez. “I didn’t have the money, and I wouldn’t have been able to dress up along with them, and it sucked.”

Tickets were $65 and didn’t include add-ons like a giant turkey leg or horn of ale.

Perez earns $22 an hour, and her income is quickly eaten up by expenses, including credit card debt she’s trying to pay down. She spends most of her time in her room, in a shared house that she rents for $1,000 a month. She enjoys journaling and fiction writing and has trained herself to generally avoid visiting places that cost money.

“It’s a bummer, especially because one of the best things to do when you meet new people is to bond over an experience together,” she said. “That’s how you make friends. That’s how you know whether or not you can vibe with somebody.”

For those of us not counting pennies, it’s easy to forget how often hanging out means spending money. Friends see movies or go to concerts together. They catch up over drinks or brunch. Taking a class or investing in a new hobby, like crafting or cosplay, could lead to meeting like-minded people. These activities aren’t free.

American cities and towns once featured a variety of low-cost socially connective spaces to which members contributed mainly time and effort. These are the civic organizations whose decline political scientist Robert D. Putnam lamented in Bowling Alone, his landmark 2000 book on the decay of community participation in the U.S.

In the midcentury, people had a menu of groups tailored to various demographics: women’s clubs, veteran associations, ethnicity-based organizations formed for cultural preservation or political advocacy and religious auxiliary groups, like the Knights of Columbus and B’nai B’rith International. Community members could also volunteer at a local Red Cross or Scouts chapter or join a fraternal order that provided camaraderie with a dose of ritualism for their own sake, like the Eagles or Elks.

In most places in the U.S., these institutions have fewer members and produce much less activity than in decades past—if they still operate locally. Some of them seem downright archaic. But nothing rose up to replace this social infrastructure, and the U.S. experienced a “hollowing out of civic institutions and decline of third spaces,” said Bledsoe, who also notes the decline in attendance at church, another no-cost community.

Instead, friendship often centers on leisure activities and entertainment that requires disposable income—which is in short supply for many. After all, a third of Americans tell pollsters they don’t have funds to cover a $400 emergency.

The effects of this are more than just boredom and loneliness. Missing out can make people feel bland or underdeveloped, creating another social impediment.

When Perez goes on dates, she says, she often feels inadequate during conversations about life experiences. “They’ll tell me, ‘Oh, yeah, I spent two weeks in China, I spent two weeks in Europe,’ and doing all these things, and it’s just like: I haven’t taken a vacation in over five years,” she said. “I can’t. I don’t go anywhere. I’m not cultured. I feel very left behind, and I’m only getting older, so it is very depressing to me.”

She feels alienated even when her co-workers talk about that classic watercooler topic, TV. The streaming services they watch aren’t within her budget.

Mike D was laid off from his job editing a gardening website. Then, an education platform that provided a side income teaching classes in writing and editing closed.

A computer scientist by training, he started a weekly Substack, Pithy Cyborg, that delivers news roundups and philosophical musings on A.I. Mike D—who asked to be identified using the name by which readers know him—gathered “a few thousand” subscribers, 2 percent of whom choose to pay, his only income now. (Mike is among a growing number of computer science professionals not employed in the field; the New York Federal Reserve clocked the underemployment rate of new graduates in the once supercharged career path at 16 percent.)

He said he reaches CEOs, computer engineers, company founders, and scholars at elite universities in the Boston area, where he lives, some of whom suggest meeting up to talk A.I. over coffee. “I literally can’t afford to buy a cup of coffee,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.” Ironically, as his newsletter connects him to more people, Mike feels lonelier.

He still gets invitations. Some of his contacts, old and new, have implicitly or explicitly offered to pay for his expenses during a meetup. He turns them down. “That makes you feel like a stray animal being fed,” he said. “I’d rather disappear than be pitied.”

He goes for walks, reads white papers on A.I., and tends to his readership. He regularly communicates with a handful of subscribers one-on-one, “and those relationships have become meaningful,” he said.

But he finds most socializing exhausting. He hates being asked what he did last weekend or whether he’s tried some new restaurant in the area.

“Every casual conversation becomes a minefield of shameful moments where your poverty might accidentally show,” he said. “So you start preemptively avoiding conversations altogether. At this point, it’s the humiliating exposure that’s more costly than the outing itself.”

To the surprise of no one, income is closely associated with self-esteem in the U.S. This creates another isolator for poor Americans: a hesitation to be seen and share when you’re down-and-out. This can harden into a defensive mindset that persists even when around other people.

Davis, the Oxford researcher, led a study that reviewed survey data from almost 25,000 respondents in 20 countries. Lonely people were more likely to report pain, fatigue, and low mood—a trifecta he dubbed a “defensive symptom cluster,” associated with keeping one’s guard up. Within the lonesome population, poor people were more likely to be burdened by this gloomy cluster than lonely people with more money. Poor people were also more likely to feel lonely than better-off people who spent the same amount of time around others.

Even if they aren’t technically alone, “there’s something that they feel is, like, lacking in their social lives,” said Davis.

It could be several things. Poor people have lower “self-reported social capital,” or internal feelings about their value in a social network, Davis says. They may also develop low expectations of other poor people, as “being poor creates friction between relationships.” Poor people lean on friends for problems rich people either don’t have, like needing a small loan or an emergency place to stay, or solve with money, like childcare and transportation. This can wear down friendships and make people skeptical of new acquaintances.

And the stress of poverty can sap the mental energy required to invest and really connect with someone. “I think being social is like exercising. It has a little bit of a cost,” said Davis. “If you’re feeling tired and you’re feeling a bit shit, you probably don’t want to exercise, and you don’t want to be social.” And if you fall out of your routine, exercising becomes harder.

Money also makes people more likely to feel ready for a relationship; in a 2025 study of single Americans from age 25 to 35, higher income levels were tied to one’s desire to begin a relationship, self-reported relationship readiness, and—after a six-month follow-up—the odds of being in a relationship. And the inverse was true. Low-income people felt less ready and were more likely to stay single. This applied to both men and women. The confidence of the economically comfortable is not misplaced; polls also show that financial stability is a highly attractive quality in a potential partner.

An obvious challenge of dating when poor is that it’s another dreaded social situation that ends with a tab.

Mike D has forgone dating since being laid off. “How am I supposed to go on a date? Seriously?” he asked. “ ‘Hey, want to take the commuter rail to a moderately priced restaurant where I’ll quietly panic about splitting the bill, then literally cry if you order anything expensive?’ It’s just too humiliating. I give up.”

Even if one finds a partner, many people consider financial stability a prerequisite to marriage—including, in one study, 91 percent of 18-to-22-year-olds. This is sensible, considering the startup cost. The average budget for a wedding ballooned from $13,000 in 1990 to $20,000 in 2005 to $36,000 in 2025. The costs of homeownership and childcare, life steps often taken as part of a progression with marriage, also continue to rise.

Perhaps as a result, marriage rates since 1980 have remained consistent among adults age 33 to 44 for the top 25 percent of earners, as per the Brookings Institute, but have declined for everyone else, dropping from 60 percent to 38 percent among the lowest earners.

Income is, again, a social barrier—in this case to an institution built around a promise of perpetual companionship.

Poverty is a perpetual problem that Americans—for the most part—accept as unavoidable or deserved or not so bad except in extreme circumstances. It generates more headlines during recessions and depressions, but rarely is the plight of the poor deemed a crisis.

Yet there’s always a crisis of masculinity in America.

At the end of the 20th century, deindustrialization and the stagnation of wages were demoralizing the gender traditionally tasked with being breadwinners. Journalist Susan Faludi’s 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man summed up this trepidation. “All the elements of the old formula for attaining manhood had vanished in short order,” Faludi wrote. “The boy who had been told he was going to be the master of the universe and all that was in it found himself master of nothing.”

Before that, psychologists and social critics worried about how men were holding up amid second-wave feminism. “Masculinity is no longer assured by virtue of female dependency,” wrote journalist Myron Brenton in his 1966 book The American Male: A Penetrating Look at the Masculinity Crisis.

We worried about the men who transitioned from World War II battlefields to the tepid worlds of corporate hierarchies and suburban lawns. “What’s Wrong With Men?” was the title of an NBC special that, according to a preview, explored “the dilemma of a man in today’s world, beset by problems of job competition, civic status and accusations of inadequacy as a husband and a parent.” It aired on Oct. 19, 1961.

Earlier, the 50 percent failure rate of World War I–era recruits to meet military fitness standards, the mass migration to cities and their indoor environments, and the end of frontier pushing had all caused waves of concern about men. Whenever society shifts and the hierarchy wobbles, we become anxious about the type of man who sits at the top of it—out of actual apprehension, morbid curiosity, and a fear of the backlash.

It is kind to ask about us men from time to time. As things change, men and boys can struggle in demonstrable ways, such as our recent decline in educational achievement. But the crisis in masculinity has been an amorphous, low-simmering moral panic since forever—and, in looking at the data, the “male loneliness epidemic” seems like its latest iteration. Aside from the scant statistical evidence for it, I find it particularly harmful in two ways.

First, the expansion of loneliness in the U.S. is real. The pundits who fixate on its impact on men usually ignore a troubling number of lonely women. Their isolation and hurt are rarely addressed.

Second, gendering loneliness implies that the root cause of isolation lies deep within the lonely person’s personality, where their gender identity resides.

But looking at how poverty intersects with loneliness illuminated for me that social structures play a large, often ignored role in connection and the lack thereof. Most people need reasons or easy opportunities to repeatedly interact with others to create and maintain friendships. This is why so many are formed in school—be it grade school or grad school. These connectors are getting scarcer for adults in the U.S. Loneliness is a problem that affects not just the poor, but, like any social ill, it’s easier to overcome if you have money.

Unfortunately, the more blame-centric message of the “male loneliness epidemic” has been internalized by lonely men. This stands only to make things worse.

Pressler, the University of Virginia researcher, led a project called Nobody to Call, for which he and his co-authors interviewed 30 men without college degrees. After high school, many of the men’s social circles had “withered and drifted,” he said, without a structure to sustain them.

Numerous interviewees felt culpable. “These men were seeing it as their own responsibility to rebuild their relational lives anew,” said Pressler, “and that felt both cruel [and] very difficult, and also actually put the burden on what we believe to be the wrong group.”

He added: “It should be the responsibility of family, friends, neighbors to call them into community, and obviously that’s a big set of questions of how you do that, but putting the focus on the collective rather than the individual to fix themselves felt like the more appropriate response.”

Thinking about the plight of poor people in America is always difficult, messy, and sad and tends to aggravate political divisions. It reminds us of income inequality, a problem that most people hate but still deepens and persists. The “poor loneliness crisis” would make for bad hot takes and worse comedy sketches. Conceiving of it like this forces us to grapple with our collective responsibility for those who are definitionally outcasts: the lonely.

But it’s worth it. Looking at their loneliness means looking at the social architecture. By examining it, and retooling it where we can, we’ll all be more connected.