Men Are Lonely

...so what?

There’s a new kind of headline making the rounds:
Men Are Lonelier Than Ever.
The Male Friendship Recession.
Why Men Have No One to Call in a Crisis.

It’s framed like breaking news. Like a rupture in the social order. Like something we should all be alarmed by. And maybe we should. But it’s hard not to notice who’s being asked to care.

Beneath the data and the soft-lit podcast interviews, there’s a quieter expectation building:
That women—once again—will step in.
That we’ll meet this crisis with compassion, curiosity, and emotional fluency.
That we’ll recognize this suffering as urgent, and not only understand it—but help carry it.

Because what’s unfolding isn’t just concern. It’s a return.
A return to something familiar:
The woman as balm. The woman as mirror. The woman as the emergency exit from male isolation.

But here’s the thing: many of us are still trying to survive the systems that made this loneliness possible.
We are still not safe. Not in offices, not on sidewalks, not in our homes.
We are still fighting to be believed. Still crossing the street when footsteps follow.
Still learning to speak calmly in rooms that don’t want our voice unless it soothes or serves.

So forgive us if we don’t rush toward this moment like nurses at the sound of a code blue.
We’ve been living in an epidemic for generations.
It just doesn’t trend.

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health crisis.
The headlines emphasized men.
That they have fewer friends than ever before.
That 15% of men report having no close friendships at all.
That rates of isolation are rising fastest among men under 30.
That loneliness now poses a risk to life expectancy comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

But this isn’t a crisis of modernity or phones or apps.
It’s the culmination of something older.
The fallout from a masculinity that taught boys to fear softness.
That made intimacy seem weak.
That turned vulnerability into shame.

The researcher Niobe Way has been saying this for years:
That young boys speak openly of love, affection, emotional need—
until adolescence, when masculinity is imposed like a muzzle.
Suddenly connection becomes dangerous. Suddenly, friendship becomes performance.
And then, over time:
quiet.

That quiet has now become epidemic.

But the urgency isn’t new. What’s changed is who the crisis is happening to.
Loneliness has always existed—only now it’s affecting the people we were taught to listen to.
It’s no longer feminized. No longer dismissed as melodrama or “neediness.”
It’s wearing flannel now. It’s stoic and sad.
It’s at risk of radicalization.
It’s a political threat.

Suddenly, we study it. Name it. Soothe it.

And yet: the question of who is being asked to solve it still falls along the same gender lines as everything else.
We’re not calling it mothering.
But we are asking women to be emotional first responders in a fire that has burned them too.

This is where something else starts to surface.
A shift not just in mood, but in posture.

Because while male loneliness is on the rise—so is something else:
a kind of refusal. A soft, clear boundary.
A new misandry—not the cartoonish, ironic kind—but a cooler disinterest.
Not hatred. Not cruelty. But detachment.

It’s the kind of misandry that sounds like: No, I’m not doing this again.
Not because we don’t care, but because we have cared for so long with so little return that it no longer makes sense to keep showing up.

And the shift is measurable.

In 2023, Pew Research reported that 63% of men under 30 are single—compared to only 34% of women. It’s the largest recorded gap in modern history.
Women aren’t partnering less because they’ve given up on love.
They’re partnering less because they’ve stopped accepting relationships that cost more than they give.

Psychologist Greg Matos called it a “relationship skills gap”—where women have raised their standards and men, by and large, haven’t risen with them.
In his words: “Men need to address a skills deficit if they want to meet the expectations of women today.”

In other words, women want emotional intelligence. They want reciprocity. They want connection that doesn’t require them to mother an adult man who calls himself a partner.

And they are no longer willing to settle for less.
They’ve learned that many heterosexual relationships ask them to do more emotional labor than they can afford—and that living alone often feels easier, freer, safer.

This isn’t a trend.
It’s not a “war on men.”
It’s the quiet consequence of watching men grow up expecting to be loved for existing, while women were taught to earn it through service.

And now, the women are leaving.

In relationships, in dating, even in marriage—where 70% of U.S. divorces are now initiated by women—the story is the same:
I didn’t want another dependent. I wanted a partner.

So no, this isn’t a backlash.
It’s a withdrawal.

What rarely gets named in these conversations is this:
Men are suffering in the very system they created.

They are being crushed by the architecture they built.
A system designed to reward dominance, discourage vulnerability, and protect emotional self-sufficiency at all costs.
A system that worked for them—until it didn’t.
Until it created a culture so emotionally arid that even the people at the top began to starve.

Meanwhile, the rest of us—women, queer people, people of color—have spent generations surviving on the margins of this system.
Building subcultures of support.
Calling each other late at night.
Talking in bathrooms, in group chats, in whispers.
Creating safety in the absence of protection.

We’ve been lonely too—desperately.
But our loneliness never got a surgeon general’s warning.

I’m not bitter. I’m tired.
I’ve done the listening. The reassuring. The translating.
I’ve been the woman men tell their feelings to before they go fall in love with someone who asks for less.
I’ve been the placeholder. The warm-up.
The woman who helps a man access his feelings just in time to use them elsewhere.

There’s a certain violence to being seen only as a stepping stone to someone else’s wholeness.

None of this means men don’t deserve connection.
Of course they do.
But deserving something doesn’t mean someone else is obligated to provide it.

Especially not the people who were taught to disappear so men could feel seen.

Especially not now.

Another twist:
This crisis is often framed around the “good men.”
The ones who say: We didn’t do anything wrong. Why are we being punished?

And that’s the problem.

They didn’t do anything.

They didn’t intervene.
They didn’t question.
They didn’t get loud when their friends joked about assault or talked over their wives or voted for cruelty.
They let it happen—because it didn’t affect them.

And now it does.

Now they’re lonely.
Now they’re confused.
Now they’re wondering why connection feels so out of reach.

But for many of us, that distance has a history.

We weren’t waiting for men to be perfect.
We were waiting for them to be present.
And they weren’t.

I want men to be okay.
Not because I owe them healing.
But because I know what it feels like to be alone in your head with no one to call.
I know the noise of it. The ache.

But knowing that doesn’t mean I want to carry them through it.

This time, they will have to carry each other.

The male loneliness epidemic is a reckoning with a version of masculinity that taught men to hoard power and outsource tenderness.
That told them they could rule without relationships, lead without listening, be loved without knowing how to love back.

That version is failing now.
And the repair must begin from within.

Not because women are angry.
But because we’re finally putting down the weight we were never meant to hold.

This time, we will not set the table.
We will not refill the glass.

We will not be lonely on their behalf.

We’ve done that already.

Now it’s their turn to stay at the table and learn how to speak to one another.

And if they do, maybe the next epidemic won’t need to be named.