Debunking the Male Loneliness Epidemic

An optimistic look at the contemporary dating climate

Artwork: “Eye Raise” by the author, Joe Duncan

My friend Bob¹ was ninety-three years old when we were talking back in 2018, in Los Angeles. Bob endured war (either WWII or the Korean War), then got hooked on heroin, his life spiraling out of control, and eventually, he wound up in prison.

He got clean in the late seventies in prison and has been sober ever since. He said eight words that profoundly changed the way I view relationships—“Marriage is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” He’d been through war, addiction, and prison in the 1970s, but none of it was as arduous as marriage. Unlike the intensity of combat, the rollercoaster of drug addiction, and the brutality of prison, marriage is a slow burn.

It’s not just difficult, it’s a humdrum flavor of difficult. Marriage obliges you to show up and care for someone every single day. I once heard someone say being in the military during combat is months and months of listless boredom followed by a few hours of the greatest adrenaline rush you’ll ever experience—then it’s back to the boredom.

For many, marriage is the opposite. It’s a consistent, monotonous drudgery with infrequent periods of excitement. If you’re lucky, you’ll find someone whose company you verily enjoy. Every day will feel like a gift. You’ll laugh, joke, and speak in bizarre, coded, pet languages to each other—utterances you wouldn’t dare stammer in the presence of the outside world—while other couples sit silently across from one another, seething in contempt over their morning coffee. This kind of happy ending is the dream of many. And yet, it seems so few can find it in this Year of Our Lord, 2024.

We’ll come back to Bob in a bit, but, for now, let’s talk about other, younger guys.

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Much ado has been made about the crisis of single young men these days.

If you consult a plethora of pessimistic, clickbait headlines, dating is in shambles these days. It's 2024 and, allegedly, finding love has never been more of an absolute hellscape. We have dating apps, porn sites, and an alarming number of singles. They speak of a "loneliness epidemic" and a crisis of single men under thirty. Of course, whenever ad-based media dive into statistics and stories, they tend to find the most unnerving facts they can and promote those right to the very top—the headline. 

This is everything that’s wrong with the 2010s model of the Internet, and why we’re now course-correcting with sites like Substack. Free media relies on ads, and the incentives of the ad-based business model focus on getting the click, not substance.

Take this recent Fox News interview with Aldo Buttazzoni of right-wing think tank PragerU titled What is a passport bro? Growing number of men are ditching American women to find love overseas. In it, Buttazzoni sticks to the usual politically-motivated, right-wing talking points: pornography, video game culture, dating apps, and more, have come together to create a torture scenario of people who no longer want to go out and experience a real-life, in-the-flesh date with someone else. 

He cites Pew's research data from last year, which found that 63% of U.S. men under thirty are single, which Pew defines as "not married, living with a partner, or in a committed romantic relationship." This figure has been touted across the board, by outlets such as The Hill, The New York Post (a Fox-News-owned tabloid) who listed the "disturbing reasons why," and, of course, Breitbart.

Even Psychology Today jumped on the bandwagon and, predictably, every outlet listed its pet and partisan reasons for this. The aforementioned right-wing sites leaned heavily on pornography being a problem and many in the right-wing manosphere blame, either covertly or overtly, women's liberation. Ben Shapiro called the sexual revolution "disastrous" while the right-wing American Principles Project President Terry Schilling explained to Breitbart the problem is rooted in the death of gender roles:

Men are more under attack than ever. A majority of college graduates are now women, and men are making less in the workforce. And because women expect their partner to make more than them, it’s leading to a great isolation of American men. On top of the economic attacks on men, there’s been a rise in unfettered access to pornography online so now we’re seeing a rise in not just involuntary celibate men, but a growing number of men opting out of relationships altogether,” he continued. “The service economy combined with the disastrous sexual revolution have wreaked havoc on our country. We need to recalibrate.

The panic is reaching epic proportions. Breitbart described young men as being "in crisis." It seems like everything's in crisis, these days. But the panic isn't limited to the political right—it's not partisan.

Writing for Psychology Today, Gregory Matos PsyD, attacked several things as the causes of "why so many young males are single and sexless." Citing bogus, outdated, and debunked research, pornography was one reason, saying men aren't interested in women anymore and find it difficult to enjoy real-life romance with a partner. He says:

Faced with the choice between an energy-intensive, highly competitive dating environment and the low-effort rewards of porn, young men appear to be taking the path of least resistance.

I've debunked the porn myth extensively on The Science of Sex, so I won't spend a lot of time on that now but, suffice to say, he quotes some outdated data and others that's since been shown for what it is—false or misleading. In another article from Psychology Today, Matos blames dating apps, relationship standards, and skills deficits, which means that men don't have the skills required to secure dates and make women, who've raised their standards, happy.

Avrum Weiss, Ph.D. also wrote for Psychology Today about “the high cost of male loneliness.” You’d think it was an epidemic or something. And that’s not even scratching the surface of the legions of right-wing YouTube and Internet personalities who’ve been pushing this narrative that men are losing out since women’s liberation.

Stories like these follow the cliché, ad-based media playbook: write the striking headline, highlight the most provocative part of the data (while neglecting the rest), provide a few suggestions, and then everyone plugs in their pet peeves, screaming, “See! Society’s falling apart! I was right all along, and here’s why!”

The main narrative and reasons listed for this supposed crisis rest on four pillars:

• That men are overwhelmingly lonely and can’t get into a relationship.

• This is not by choice, but something systemically wrong with our society.

• This is not just bad, but worse than usual (or worse than it’s ever been)

• This is happening because of porn, video games, women’s liberation, poverty, an unfair society that’s harming boys and young men, or a minority of men are taking all the available, “fertile” women, or, insert whichever pet gripe you have.

Now, please don’t cast your rotten fruit at me when I say this, but, pretty much all of this is wrong. Digging into the guts of the research tells a very different story and while there's a nugget of truth in Matos' view, doing so will help us understand the contemporary dating climate for what it is. And for the cherry on top, we’ll debunk another myth about casual sex along the way. Let’s take these pillars one by one.

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The Reality of Modern Dating

First, let's talk about the Pew Research data itself. When I first encountered it, alarm bells were going off in my head for several reasons, not least of which is the simple fact that there's a group of people who are unaccounted for thanks to the design of the questions. To make it easier to digest, I’ve come equipped with a chart:

Number of under-thirty singles vs. people in relationships by sex under by the author, Joe Duncan.

Men are on the left, women are on the right. Blue represents the single people, and green represents the people in a relationship. Note, that this only applies to people under thirty, the age group to whom this apparent crisis is happening.

63% of men under thirty reported being single, while 34% of women under thirty reported being single. This means that only 37% of men under thirty reported being in a relationship while 66% of women under thirty did. You can see the disparity, with more blue (single) on the left (men) than on the right (women).

Let’s start with the obvious—what the hell is up with the 29% of partnered women causing this discrepancy? In other words, if you took 200 people—100 men, and 100 women—and you told me that 66 of the women were dating someone while only 34 of the men were, my first question would be, “So who are the other 29 women dating?”

This group:

If they’re not happily paired with the 29% of extra single men, who are they with?

This question goes unanswered, and it’s a limitation of this kind of survey. By only asking if they’re dating, we have no idea whom they’re dating. The extra singles (green) on the women’s side (right) have some explaining to do! Considering only 7.6% of U.S. individuals identify as LGBTQIA+, and the vast majority of them are bisexual, the women can’t all be dating one another. So who are their partners?

Love in History

In 2010, researcher Sven Drefahl wanted to see if who you marry affected your odds of survival in a research paper published in the science journal Demography. He diligently tracked when men and women first married over the years and the average age at marriage, which includes both first and subsequent marriages. It’s an interesting topic. Does who you choose to marry impact how long you live?

Even better, he included a lengthy history of how old people were when they first got married, spanning from 1920 to 2010:

Sven Drefahl: How Does the Age Gap Between Partners Affect Their Survival? National Library of Medicine.

While this research only counts the age when people got married, not people cohabitating and in relationships, a hefty limitation, no doubt, it’s still extremely informative. Why? Glad you asked. Because there’s something I didn’t tell you about Sven’s research. It was conducted in Denmark.

So it’s meaningless? Not quite. Take a look at what happens when we compare what’s happening in Denmark with the United States census data on marriage age:

United States Census Bureau.

These trends—trends that Americans have, through their Americentric lens, interpreted as being a crisis of America—stretch well beyond our borders.

Not only do we see a near-identical pattern, but a couple of things stand out immediately. One thing is that people are getting married later in life. The age people marry keeps getting higher. Another is that men in the U.S. have always settled down later than women, just like in Denmark. This data also extends beyond Sven’s 2010 data, up to 2023—when the Pew Research survey was given.

Not only are men getting married and into relationships later, but women are too. Age thirty is an arbitrary cutoff point, only currently dividing men and women. Men and women have never married, on average, at the same age. That’s because we still harbor some relics of patriarchy, like men building careers first, and families later.

It’s not that women don’t build careers, it’s just that women are more likely to start families younger and get married younger. If we raised the bracket of thirty and under to thirty-five, or lowered it down to twenty-five, we’d get radically different results because that scale is arbitrary, and women and men would likely be similarly single.

This destroys the first pillar of the narrative—that the gap between the number of single women and single men under thirty is evidence that men are overwhelmingly lonely losers who can’t find love. And it answers the question: who are the 29% of women under thirty dating if not men under thirty? The answer: older men.

Is this really a surprise? Women hit puberty faster than men, and some research shows that women’s brains and bodies develop significantly faster than men’s. Some research found that “men have an 11-year lag behind women when it comes to maturing,” thanks to slower development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC).²

Decadence and Moral Panic

The next two parts of the narrative—that this gap is not by choice but due to external factors (like porn, dating apps, society falling apart, whatever) and that it’s getting worse—are thoroughly debunked by the simple fact that the age gap at first marriage between men and women is lower than ever. It’s getting better, not worse.

In 1890, the gap was much wider, as it was in the 1940s and 1950 as well, a period that a lot of right-wing talking heads idealize and that many Americans mistakenly consider a better time when settling down into a family was easier.

A brief aside about rising marriage rates. There’s a corresponding narrative that people getting married later is further evidence that society is falling apart. You hear this more on the political right. Boys and young men are lonely and despondent, nobody’s getting married anymore because we’re all living lives of absolute decadence since women’s liberation. Let’s debunk this, too.

Compare the above charts to life expectancy:

Aaron O’Neill via Statista

While not exact, it loosely tracks alongside the rising marriage rates. Is it possible that people are getting married later simply because they can, enjoying the years of youth in their twenties and early thirties before settling down for marriage? Absolutely.

What’s with the high-pressure rush to find love?

I’ll remind you of Oscar Wilde’s characteristically witty quote, “One should always be in love. That’s the reason one should never marry.” Now, we’ll get back to the loneliness epidemic, but first, let’s tread into another public panic—the sex epidemic.

Puritanism and Hookup Culture

Remember all the hell that was raised throughout the 2010s about hookup culture? Over the past 15 or so years, a lot has been made of “hookup culture” among young people and on college campuses. One can’t help but feel a sense of whiplash as we went from “young people are having too much casual sex, and it’s destroying their mental health” to “young people aren’t having any sex, and they’re lonely and isolated” in just a few short years. How quickly that happened! I have my theories about why, and I’ll get to them soon, but for now, let’s just say that there was a moral panic that young people were having a ton of casual sex that made them miserable.

Everyone from NPR to Psychology Today covered “hookup culture” over the years. ³ I’ve covered this at length, teasing out the science of casual sex and mental health, and, surprise, the story’s more complex than meets the eye. TL;DR version: casual sex is only bad for young people’s mental health if they’re using it to try to secure a relationship. Everyone else enjoys themselves.

Furthermore, not only is “hookup culture” not bad for people’s mental health, it’s not even happening. During the height of the “hookup culture” moral panic, research by Eastwick and Hunt indicated that only 6% of people were “unacquainted prior to becoming romantically involved,” while 41% were friends and 53% were acquaintances. Considering people report having better sexual experiences with friends and lovers, not strangers, this is good. For all the fear and panic whipped up by news outlets and some academics, “hookup culture” wasn’t real.

I’ve covered casual sex vs. relationships here, and there are frameworks people have for making such decisions. Why do I mention all this? Because the same Pew survey that found that 63% of men under 30 aren’t in a relationship found that 57% of singles weren’t looking for a relationship or dates. This alone should’ve been a reason not to print the “63% of men are lonely” headlines. But it just gets worse. Another 22% were looking for casual connections only. That means 79% of single people aren’t seeking a committed relationship.

Media outlets and political pundits don’t report this because it’s not provocative. It doesn’t allow them to plug in their pet theory of what’s wrong with the world. It’s not conducive to those precious clicks that drive ad revenue, I guess.

Technology and Perception

All of this leads us to the fourth and final pillar, the idea that this “loneliness epidemic” is culturally-driven by our technologies. Right-wing figureheads like Matt Walsh say this is caused by pornography. Jordan Peterson implies that it’s because of women’s equality, something I’ve addressed (and debunked) at length, though he persists in pushing the message that a “tiny minority of men take all the women” and all the rest of the guys are left alone. He traffics in his usual unscientific noise, saying porn isn’t just harming men because it’s a “super-stimulus” that real people and connections can’t compete with, he also explains that it turns people into psychopaths. Lies!

And, let’s not forget, there’s an army of journalists and writers out there pining to convince you that this “loneliness epidemic” is caused by dating apps like Tinder. Gregory Matos PsyD listed dating apps at the top of one of his lists (that weren’t congruent) of things explaining the loneliness epidemic in Psychology Today.

Fortune Well says, “technology helped fuel” the loneliness epidemic, while Nancy Jo Sales writes in LitHub that Tinder specifically is ushering in the “dating apocalypse.”

But, as you can see, the trend of people getting married older began about 1960 and slowly crept up over several decades. If it was really digital technology driving this trend, you’d expect to see it take off around the year 2000, not the 1960s. But from about 1994 to 2010, we see a slight dip—marriage age rising slower.

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Now, just to be clear, the Washington Post and New York Times also wrote about the “loneliness epidemic.” they’re talking about something else—that people report higher rates of loneliness than in decades past. That’s categorically different from the assumption that because people in their twenties are unmarried, they’re lonely.⁴

And there’s the rub. What irks me so much about this persistent narrative is the idea that just because someone is single, that means they’re lonely. That’s bullshit. People are lonely if they say they’re lonely—not because a survey found that they were single, rather than settled, at a later age than generations prior, or because the same discrepancy that’s always existed between men and women still exists. ⁵

But those lonely people (who say they’re lonely) might be very different people from the single men under thirty, and focusing exclusively or uniquely on this group can do a lot of harm. You’ll notice a considerable gap in the number of people who’ve paired up from casual sex (6%) and the number of people who want exclusively casual relationships (22%). It’s at least plausible that many of the 22% from Pew’s research are men looking for short-term encounters but not getting it, and those men might be in college and perfectly okay with that. They’re immersed in studies and parties.

The thing is, we don’t really know because this kind of research can only tell us so much. The people who report wanting casual connections only might primarily be widows over 65. When a lot of us see this data, we read ourselves into it. It’s no surprise that Diet Coke machismo right-wing personalities hone in on the single young men like a hungry hawk spots a field mouse. Our perceptions are warped.

These kinds of headlines—whether about “hookup culture” or the “single young men epidemic” are a sort of plug-and-play that allows people to insert their frustrations into the data. Some people look at it and see porn as the problem, others social media, dating apps, video games, decadence, women’s equality, and more.

But what if it’s not that simple? What if we can’t cast blame on our favorite faceless technology, institution, or political policies because loving another human being is actually quite hard? It requires emotional, physical, personal, and financial risk. It requires a considerable investment of time. It requires humbling ourselves and curtailing our egos. What if, by doing so, we’re taking the easy way out, instead of undergoing the necessary self-reflection required to understand relationships?

What if we just need to accept the stakes of love and relationships? In the words of Erich Fromm, “There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started out with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet which fails so regularly, as love.”

What if, as Bob said, relationships are the hardest thing we’ll ever do or try? And, what if, love is so incredibly hard because love is so unspeakably worth it?⁶

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Check this article out if you missed it:

What the Dating Lives of Goats Can Teach You About Relationship Expectations

1. Name changed for privacy reasons.

2. Take the 11-year-lag research with a bit of salt, as it was commissioned by Nickelodeon UK, but it does confirm previous findings.

3. Elena Weissman was a rare shining star at the time, dialing down the temperature on the “hookup culture” moral panic back in 2015 in Psychology Today.

4. I’m not saying that dating apps and social media aren’t making people lonelier by depriving them of time with friends, family, and partners. But I am saying that we can’t infer this because a certain percent of people in an arbitrary age group are single. None of this is to say that people aren’t lonely. It’s to say that “lonely” and “single” aren’t synonyms, and we shouldn’t make sweeping conclusions on inference.

5. Another thing that bothers me about this narrative is it implies several things at once: 1. That casual sex is either bad or unfulfilling, and thus only pair-bonding (marriage, cohabitation) is fulfilling. If there’s any group of people this claim is untrue for, it’s the under-thirty age group, especially men, many of whom are arguably looking for casual sex. I’m not saying casual sex is fulfilling for everyone, but it appeals to many people.

6. Next time you read a headline about the dating apocalypse, just remember to take it with a grain of salt and a healthy dose of skepticism.