This article is featured in the Australian Financial Review and is republished with permission.
Sam Freeman knows only too well that making friends as an adult isn’t as easy as it was at school. It’s something the 37-year-old battled with in 2023 when he moved to Sydney from India, where he and his wife had worked for 10 years.
With so many people locked into established friendship groups and seemingly closed off to outsiders, getting that first toe in the door felt frustratingly elusive. Freeman hadn’t gone to a school that Sydneysiders recognised, had no kids at the time to help him form a bridge with parents and, because he grew up in Brisbane, he was building his network from scratch.
“It was just as the weather was becoming quite cold, and [with] very little network around us and very little support … I really struggled to make any connection, to meet anybody or to do anything social,” Freeman says.
And so, like an estimated 2.3 million other Australian men that year, he was struck by loneliness – that unsettling and often frustrating feeling of sadness and disconnectedness that can occur even when we’re surrounded by other people.
It’s a feeling that peaks in men in their 40s, before declining once they turn 50 and rising again at 70, according to an analysis of longitudinal Australian survey data published last year in the journal BMC Public Health.
But while research shows loneliness peaks for men in middle age and has been increasing across the board since 2009, the evidence to support a “male loneliness epidemic” is perhaps not as strong you may have thought.
As men climb the corporate ladder, get busy raising families or pour hours each week into improving their fitness, they can often lose sight of the value of close friendships and inadvertently let them wither and die.
While some become recluses who rely on their partners to organise their social lives, others keep in regular contact with other men through WhatsApp chat groups and visits to the pub, but still feel lonely because the connections are too superficial to sustain the type of conversations that make them feel heard.
Major life transitions, like Freeman’s international relocation, often play a role, too, and perhaps more so for men than for women. Research by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in 2017 found that male friendships operate according to the principle of “out of sight out of mind”, whereas female friendships can be sustained using long phone conversations to bridge physical distances.
“What determined whether [friendships] survived with girls was whether they made effort to talk more to each other on the phone,” Dunbar told The Guardian at the time. But boys’ friendships only survived if they did stuff together. “Going to a football match, going to the pub for a drink, playing five-a-side [soccer]. They had to make the effort. It was a very striking sex difference.”
Dunbar wasn’t the first to make this point. In 1982, an oft-cited paper published in the journal Sex Roles found that while female friendships emphasised emotional sharing and talking, male friendships emphasised activities and doing things together.
Suffice to say, then, that we’ve known about the inherent weaknesses of male friendships for a long time. And yet, it wasn’t until after the pandemic that the idea of a “male loneliness epidemic” became deeply entrenched in the zeitgeist.
The forced isolation of the COVID-19 lockdowns underscored the crucial importance of meaningful connection and helped to de-stigmatise loneliness, which suddenly became not just a topic discussed only in the context of mental health, but something that just about anyone could experience, and at any time in their lives.
What’s more, we reasoned, our modern-day addiction to screens and technology was making our loneliness so much worse. Instead of choosing the sometimes tricky task of bumbling through awkward social encounters to form new real-life friendships, social media and Netflix were encouraging us to stay home instead. And the data does indeed show that we socialise with friends and relatives outside our household less frequently than we did 10 or 20 years ago.
Amid all this, the World Health Organisation in 2023 declared loneliness “a pressing health threat” and named then-US surgeon general Vivek Murthy the co-chair of a new commission to tackle it. That year, Murthy resurfaced a more-than-decade-old statistic that loneliness contributed to early death about as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day did.
And so, when this writer was commissioned to write a story about male loneliness, he fully expected rates of loneliness to be at all-time highs in Australia. But they weren’t. The research paints a more complicated picture. That is partly because loneliness, a subjective feeling of distress caused by a lack of meaningful social connections, differs from social isolation, which describes when somebody has objectively few social relationships.
Data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, which has followed 7500 households since 2001 and annually interviews all members aged 15 and over, indicates loneliness was at its worst in 2001, when 21.2 per cent of Australians were classified as lonely. Since then, it has been fairly stable, having never strayed above 20.1 per cent or fallen below 16.2 per cent, and in 2023 it ended up at 18.6 per cent.
The most worrying trend has not been among men but what’s happening to teenagers and young adults. In a reversal of a long-running trend, Australians aged 15 to 24 became the loneliest demographic in the country in 2016, an unwanted title they have held on to ever since. Their loneliness rates have been steadily increasing since hitting a low of 15 per cent in 2009, two years after the first iPhone was released, and spiked significantly during the pandemic.
Ferdi Botha, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne who works on the HILDA survey, says the data partly reflects how younger people today are encouraged to report mental health difficulties and feelings of loneliness more than they were 20 or 30 years ago. “So, it’s a lot less stigmatised,” he says.
But at least part of it can also be attributed to how young people today spend less time hanging out in person and more time glued to a screen. “The way people socialise has changed a lot,” Botha says, adding that social media probably has some role to play. “While some people make friends online or find it beneficial, a lot of people feel increasingly disconnected.”
These societal shifts have not affected everyone evenly, though. Loneliness rates have progressively fallen in the 65 and over cohort, which has gone from being the most lonely in 2001 to the least lonely in 2023.
As for the gender differences, women actually report feeling lonelier than men, with 20.4 per cent of them in 2023 classified as lonely in the HILDA study, compared to 16.9 per cent of men. Yet, to muddy the waters even further, researchers say those differences are probably driven by men’s unwillingness to admit when they feel lonely rather than their actually having a better time of it. Which helps explain why reported loneliness rates are lower for men than women, even though men are less likely than women to socialise with friends or relatives at least once a week.
“If you ask them, ‘are you lonely?’, women are more likely to say yes, and men are more likely to say no,” says Michelle Lim, chief executive and scientific chair of peak body Ending Loneliness Together. “But if I look at meta analyses, aggregated studies from all around the world, what they have shown is the prevalence of loneliness in men and women is equivalent.”
Put it all together, and it’s clear that we can’t say based on the available data that men are lonelier than women, as some may have come to believe given all the talk about a “male loneliness epidemic”, and younger people appear to be struggling the most. But there is also some truth to the stereotype of a lonely middle-aged man, and to the concept that traditional ideas about what it means to be a man may be hurting rather than helping them.
Botha says loneliness in men is at its worst “when men are at prime working age”. He was the co-author of the paper that analysed how loneliness ebbs and flows over a man’s life, finding that average loneliness levels peak in men in their 40s, before declining at age 50 and rising again at age 70. The paper also looked at the reasons why.
“One of the things was … men who have traditional views about family tend to be more lonely,” Botha says. The more strongly men believed they should be the main breadwinner in a household, the more likely they were to experience loneliness, the study found, while other research has indicated that societal expectations around masculine gender norms can discourage men from acknowledging and seeking help with their loneliness.
Other risk factors identified in the study included having fewer friends, lacking close male friendships, not having a romantic partner, undergoing divorce, being a single dad, living alone or in a place you feel you don’t belong, and having an insecure job or being unemployed.
Australian Psychological Society chief executive Zena Burgess says any major life event can contribute to feelings of loneliness, whether it be bereavement, separation, divorce, migration, relocation, retirement or the pressure of caregiving.
“All of a sudden you realise the way you used to do things isn’t working for you any more,” she says. “As a teenager, your life’s pretty structured. You have school, you have sport, you have things that create opportunities for connection with people. But as you get older, you have to create that for yourself, and sometimes that is easier to do than [it is at other times].”
And when it goes wrong, it’s not just bad news for the lonely individual. A 2012 report by the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre found that a lack of social connection was associated with poor health outcomes costing the nation up to $2.7 billion each year, which worked out as $1565 for each person who becomes lonely.
“People who become lonely, or remain lonely, visit their GPs more often and present at hospital more frequently. Social isolation is also associated with less physical exercise, a greater prevalence of regular smoking and excessive alcohol consumption,” report co-author Alan Duncan said at the time.
Fortunately, there are community-led solutions trying to tackle the issue head-on when men are willing and able to act on it, such as the long-running Australian Men’s Shed Association and men’s book clubs.
David Pointon, co-founder and chief executive of The Men’s Table, a charity that helps men across the country organise monthly dinners to candidly discuss the highs and lows of their lives, says while most men have some great friendships growing up, they often lose access to them when people move cities or busy themselves with their career or their family.
“We’re not great at investing in those friendships to keep them going,” Pointon says, adding that this is then compounded by men’s difficulties with forming new connections.
“Women will meet each other at a party or some sort of event. They’ll get into the conversation, there will be some sort of connection 10 minutes in, and then they will pull out their phones and say, ‘why don’t we catch up, or let’s share phone numbers’. Men don’t do that last bit.”
Pointon says men sometimes don’t realise they are lacking in this area until a major life event underscores how they don’t have a good friend to discuss it with – a realisation that is often a catalyst for change.
“They hit a low point in their life – maybe they are going through a relationship breakdown or a family breakdown, or they’ve had a massive hit in their career – and suddenly they’re on the canvas, and they go, ‘Well, alright, this is pretty shit. Who do I talk with, who do I connect with around this?’ Then they realise, ‘God, I don’t have that close group of people around me’. And that’s often the awakening.”
Pointon says this happened to him when he moved from Adelaide to Sydney. It wasn’t that he didn’t know anyone in his new home; more that he didn’t have anyone with whom he could “just be me, with all of my different feelings”. And so, when a man from his mixed-gender business network group got up at the end of their weekly meeting and said he wanted to start a men’s group, Pointon was one of a dozen men who put up their hand and said they were keen to join him.
“We met in a private room of a restaurant in June 2011, and we knew from the start that we wanted to have a different sort of conversation than we had access to anywhere else, and that was really just to talk about how we were really doing,” Pointon says. The 12 men have met for dinner once a month ever since.
“We had plenty of places to talk about business, and we had plenty of places to shoot the shit and talk about politics and the big issues of the world. But, actually, we didn’t have that place where we could talk about what was real for us, about what was in our hearts.”
That dinner was the first meeting of what would become the first “men’s table” facilitated by the charity that Pointon later co-founded. The not-for-profit organisation has since expanded to more than 260 tables nationwide, bringing together thousands of men for a monthly meal to share, listen and support each other.
“It’s definitely a middle-aged cohort. [On] a bell curve [with] age across the bottom, the bulk of men [would be] in the 45 to 65 category, and then [there would be] lesser percentages at each end, [though] we’ve got a real interest and desire to get more young men involved,” Pointon says.
For Brent Thyssen, 48, attending his local Men’s Table helped him get back on track after the breakdown of his marriage about two years ago. At the time, Thyssen felt none of his friends could really relate to what he was going through, and he also felt a strong need to walk away from some friends and rebuild his social network as many of his friends were his partner’s friends first and his friends second.
Walking into a room full of strangers for his first table was “daunting”, he recalls. “But I quickly found that there was a real sense of camaraderie and community there because [while] I had my reasons to go in there, so did a lot of other men, whether it was retirement or other transitions in their own life, or just looking to connect with other men.”
Fast-forward two years and Thyssen says many of those men are now “like brothers” to him. “We always reach out to each other outside of the table, so there’s a good sense of commitment and reciprocity, which I’ve found has come in so handy,” he says, adding that he also gained a mentor through the table and doesn’t know where he would be today if he hadn’t made the leap of faith two years ago.
“It’s just given me such a network of guys from different work backgrounds, and that’s just really expanded my horizon to other men other [and their] experiences … sometimes you think that your problem can be bigger than anyone else’s, and then when you hear what other guys share, you go, ‘OK, well they’re going through some stuff too, sometimes it’s not all about me’.”
Like Pointon, Sarah Mathews is also in the business of bringing people together, as the chief executive of registered charity Little Big Foundation. Among other things, the charity has a physical space (Little Big House) in the Sydney suburb of Summer Hill that volunteers can use to host events and run programs that bring people together, whether it be a knitting group, book club, beer tasting session or investing meet-up.
More than seven in 10 locals surveyed by the charity in its 2024 report said they had met someone new at a Little Big House event, while 44 per cent agreed that they interacted with more people in the community after attending just one event at the house.
“We now have over 90 community events a month, all run by local leaders and volunteers,” Mathews says.
“The percentage of people who are meeting one another at the Little Big House has increased, social connection outside the home has increased, and residents report feeling they can rely on their neighbours at much higher rates than the national average.”
This is how Freeman ended up beating his loneliness when he moved to Sydney. After about six months of trying to form new social connections, and receiving a few indirect rejections along the way, he responded to Little Big’s plea on social media for assistance with grant writing and offered to help.
“I got involved in a volunteer capacity, but then I also went to a lot of events personally, and have built a lot of friendships with other people that participate in the same events that I’ve been going to,” Freeman says.
Repeatedly frequenting the same place and having a reason for going there made it easier to form new connections because he automatically had something in common with everyone else who was regularly showing up. Within about six months, he was starting to bump into familiar faces, making new friends and beginning to catch up with people for knock-off beers on a Friday afternoon.
“More so now than ever before, there are avenues in which guys can be vocal and talk about their feelings. But, broadly, there’s still a real sort of, ‘Aussies suck it up and get on with it,’ kind of attitude,” Freeman says.
Which is why one of the Little Big House events that he attends religiously is called the men’s supper club.
“It’s just a table. We get together, we order dinner once a month, and we just chat about whatever we want to chat about, with no rules,” Freeman says.
“It’s built those deeper friendships because it’s a group of guys where that stigma doesn’t exist, and people are happy to talk about the positive, the negative, whatever they want.”