Is There Really a Male Loneliness Epidemic? What the Data Say When You Ask the Question Three Ways

In 2019, a team of psychologists led by Marlies Maes, then at KU Leuven, finished the largest analysis ever conducted on a simple question: are men lonelier than women, or the other way round? They pooled 751 separate effect sizes drawn from studies of 399,798 people, spanning childhood to old age. The answer, published in the European Journal of Personality, was close to nothing. The overall difference came out at a Hedges' g of 0.07, an effect so small that in practical terms men and women report about the same amount of loneliness across the lifespan.

Two years later, a different team published the largest single survey of loneliness ever run, the BBC Loneliness Experiment, with 46,054 respondents in 237 countries and territories. That study found that men were lonelier than women, at every age, with the gap widest among the young.

And in 2021, the Survey Center on American Life reported that the share of American men who say they have no close friends at all had risen from 3 percent in 1990 to 15 percent. Headlines about a "male loneliness epidemic" have been running on that number ever since.

So which is it? The honest answer is that these three findings do not contradict each other, because they are not measuring the same thing. "Are men lonelier?" turns out to be three separate questions wearing one coat. Do men feel lonelier? Do men have fewer people? And do men say they are lonely when they are? The evidence on each is different, and the phrase "male loneliness epidemic" survives mainly by blurring them together.

Question one: do men feel lonelier? Barely, if at all.

Start with the meta-analysis, because it is the strongest kind of evidence available. Maes and her colleagues, including Pamela Qualter of the University of Manchester, did not run a new survey. They gathered every study they could find that had measured loneliness in both males and females and combined them statistically. The pooled result was a small tilt toward males being lonelier, but so small that the authors described mean loneliness levels as "similar for males and females" across the lifespan.

They also checked whether the gap changed with age, with the type of loneliness scale used, with the country, or with the year the study was published. Most of these moderators made no difference. A few did: age, the geographic scope of the sample, and publication year each shifted the estimate slightly. None of them opened up a large gap.

That is the headline most coverage of male loneliness leaves out. When you average across hundreds of studies, the sexes report roughly equal loneliness. If there is an epidemic, it does not show up as men feeling markedly worse than women on the standard scales.

The BBC Loneliness Experiment, led by Manuela Barreto of the University of Exeter and published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2021, is the main counterweight, and it deserves a careful look rather than a dismissal. Its 46,054 participants, aged 16 to 99, completed a four-item version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale, and men scored higher than women. But the effect was small (a standardised coefficient of about 0.08), and the sample was self-selected: people who chose to spend time on an online survey about loneliness. The authors themselves flagged this, and they also raised a possibility that matters for everything that follows. An anonymous online format, they suggested, may have made it easier for men to admit to loneliness than the interview-based or paper surveys that dominate the older literature.

Hold that thought.

Question two: do men have fewer people? Yes, and the gap is widening.

Loneliness is a feeling. A social network is a fact about your life. The two are related but not identical, and on the second one the evidence for a specifically male problem is much stronger.

The clearest data come from the May 2021 American Perspectives Survey of 2,019 adults, led by Daniel Cox at the Survey Center on American Life. Compared with a comparable national poll from 1990, the share of all Americans reporting no close friends had quadrupled, from 3 percent to 12 percent. For men the rise was steeper: from 3 percent to 15 percent. At the other end of the distribution, the share of men reporting six or more close friends had halved, from 55 percent to 27 percent.

The same survey asked what people actually do with their friends, and here the gender pattern was stark. Forty-one percent of women said they had received emotional support from a friend in the previous week; for men it was 21 percent. Nearly half of women (48 percent) had shared a personal feeling with a friend in that time, compared with 30 percent of men. Half of women had told a friend they loved them; a quarter of men had.

Two caveats. This is a single US survey, and the comparison with 1990 relies on a different poll with different methods, so the exact size of the change should be read loosely. But the direction is consistent with a wider literature on men's friendships, and the within-survey gender differences do not depend on the historical comparison at all. On the same day, with the same questions, American men were half as likely as women to have leaned on a friend that week.

So here is the first piece of the puzzle. Men's networks are thinner and their friendships carry less emotional traffic, and the trend has been in the wrong direction for decades. That is a real deficit. It is just not the same thing as feeling lonely, and the meta-analysis says the feeling has not diverged the way the networks have.

Question three: do men say they are lonely? It depends how you ask.

If men have fewer confidants but do not report more loneliness, one explanation is that the loneliness measures are not catching it. There is direct evidence that this is at least partly what is happening.

In 2014, the Norwegian researchers Magnhild Nicolaisen and Kirsten Thorsen published a study in the International Journal of Aging and Human Development that asked the same Norwegian respondents about loneliness in two ways. One was a direct question: are you lonely? The other was the six-item De Jong Gierveld scale, an indirect measure that asks about feelings of emptiness, missing people to rely on, and so on, without ever using the word "lonely."

On the direct question, women came out lonelier. On the indirect scale, men did. Same people, opposite answer, depending on whether the word "lonely" appeared. The authors' interpretation was that men understate loneliness when asked directly, because admitting to it reads as vulnerable and unmasculine, and that indirect measures partly bypass that reluctance.

This is why Barreto's aside about her online sample matters. The BBC study used an indirect scale (the UCLA items ask how often you feel left out or isolated, not whether you are "lonely") in an anonymous setting. It found men lonelier. Much of the older literature in the Maes meta-analysis used a mix of methods, some direct and face to face. Averaging across them, the gap washes out. It is at least plausible that the "no difference" finding and the "men are lonelier" finding are both artefacts of the same thing: a group of people who feel the deficit but do not name it.

Barreto's team went on to test the stigma side of this directly, using the same BBC dataset, in a 2022 paper in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. The findings were not what the simple story predicts. Men held more stigmatising views of lonely people and perceived more stigma against loneliness in their communities, but reported less self-stigma, meaning less shame about their own loneliness, than women did. Young people scored higher than older people on almost every stigma measure. And the group most likely to blame themselves for being lonely, rather than their circumstances, was young men in individualistic countries. The same group the 2021 paper had identified as most lonely.

Read together, the two BBC papers describe a specific trap. A young man in a country like the UK or the US is more likely than anyone else to feel lonely on an indirect measure, more likely to believe his community looks down on lonely people, and more likely to conclude that his loneliness is his own fault. Whether he will tell you any of this when you ask him plainly is a different matter.

What "epidemic" gets right and what it gets wrong

Put the three questions side by side and a more precise picture emerges than either "men are in crisis" or "there is no gender gap."

• Felt loneliness: roughly equal between the sexes on the best pooled evidence, with a small tilt toward men on anonymous, indirect measures, concentrated among young men in individualistic cultures.
• Social networks: markedly thinner for men, with less emotional exchange, and deteriorating over time in the one country with long-run data.
• Disclosure: men systematically under-report loneliness when asked directly, and the men most affected are the ones most likely to blame themselves.

The word "epidemic" implies a surge in the feeling. The evidence supports something narrower and, arguably, more worrying: a structural erosion of men's friendships that the standard loneliness questions are only partly picking up, combined with a norm that discourages the people most affected from saying so. It is less an epidemic of loneliness than an epidemic of thin networks and quiet mouths.

That distinction has consequences. If the problem were an excess of felt loneliness, the response would be emotional: campaigns telling men it is fine to feel lonely, hotlines, awareness. Those may help with the disclosure problem. But if the underlying deficit is in networks, the remedy is structural: settings where men repeatedly encounter the same people, and forms of contact that produce the emotional exchange men's friendships currently lack. The intervention literature, which we reviewed in what actually works to reduce loneliness, points the same way. Programmes that change the amount and quality of contact tend to outperform programmes that only change how people think about loneliness.

What we still do not know

Several gaps remain, and pretending otherwise would defeat the purpose of this site.

The long-run trend data are American and rest on a comparison between two surveys thirty years apart. Whether men's networks have thinned in the same way in, say, Spain or Japan is not established by this evidence. The Maes meta-analysis pooled studies from many countries, but its literature search closed several years before publication, so it cannot tell us whether the gender gap has changed recently. The BBC sample, for all its size, was self-selected and skewed toward the UK and other individualistic countries. And the measurement story, while well supported by Nicolaisen and Thorsen, has been tested in a limited number of populations. It is an explanation that fits the data. It is not yet a settled fact.

There is also a deeper question the field has only started to ask. In a 2025 paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Barreto argued that gender and loneliness should be researched differently, moving beyond simple comparisons of men's and women's scores. One implication worth testing, and it is a hypothesis rather than a finding, is that if some men's loneliness surfaces as irritability, overwork, or withdrawal rather than as the feelings the scales are designed to detect, then even indirect measures may be undercounting it. That would make the deficit larger than the numbers here suggest, not smaller.

A closing thought

The most useful thing the research does is separate the feeling from the facts. Men, on average, do not feel dramatically lonelier than women. They do, on average, have fewer people, tell those people less, and stay quieter about the gap. Any serious response has to work on the network and the norm at the same time: give men repeated, low-stakes contact with the same people, and make it ordinary to admit that the contact was missing.

That second part is why the anonymous, indirect setting in the BBC study is such an interesting detail. When the word "lonely" is taken off the table and nobody is watching, men tell you more. Platforms built around low-pressure, repeated contact, YaraCircle among them, are in effect an attempt to build on that observation: to create the conditions under which people who would never say the word can still do the thing.

We wrote about the parallel problem of why people fail to reach out to friends they already have in why we don't reach out to old friends. The male version of that reluctance, it turns out, starts earlier and runs deeper than most of the headlines suggest, and it does not show up where the headlines are looking.