Loneliness isn’t the lonely person’s problem | Opinion

Jeffrey S. Barkin, MD, DLFAPA, is a practicing psychiatrist in Portland and the former president of the Maine Medical Association. He co-hosts “A Healthy Conversation” on WGAN.

As a psychiatrist, one of the more poignant and frequent things I hear from single people is also one of the simplest: “I would love to meet someone. I just don’t know where to meet them.”

I hear versions of this from people in their 20s and 30s, but also from people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond. Some have never married. Others are divorced or widowed and assumed they would eventually meet someone again. Many are educated, successful and interesting, with friends, careers and otherwise full lives. They haven’t given up on romance.

They simply cannot figure out where everyone went.

“Michael” is 31, educated, employed, funny and thoughtful. He wants to marry and have children but hasn’t been on a date in almost two years. Dating apps became demoralizing after months of swiping produced few meaningful encounters, while approaching a woman at work, the gym or a coffee shop seemed increasingly awkward. His evenings gradually migrated online.

“Susan” is 62, divorced for six years, with grown children and a successful career. She has close friends, exercises, travels and genuinely enjoys her life. She would also very much like someone to share it with. After numerous first dates arranged through apps began feeling like job interviews, she finally deleted them.

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What she missed most, she said, wasn’t sex or even romance. It was having someone who would notice the small things that happened during her day.

Both eventually asked essentially the same question: “Where am I supposed to meet somebody?”

Their experiences reflect something larger happening in American life.

Pew Research Center found that 47% of Americans under 30 were single in 2022, including 63% of men under 30. Yet being unattached doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting relationships, marriage or children. Many young people still want those things but struggle with getting from wanting a relationship to actually having one.

Sexual activity has declined as well. An analysis of the General Social Survey published in JAMA Network Open found that among men ages 18 to 24, the percentage reporting no sexual activity during the previous year increased from 18.9% from 2000–2002 to 30.9% from 2016–2018.

Dating apps were supposed to solve the problem of finding one another, and for millions of people they have. Pew found that 1 in 5 partnered Americans under 30 met their current partner through a dating site or app.

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Yet the same technology can be discouraging. Online dating can transform courtship into something resembling a marketplace, with hundreds of people available for inspection and rejection in minutes.

Pornography illustrates a related technological paradox. It didn’t create loneliness, and it would be simplistic to blame it for declining dating, sex or fertility. But like social media and dating apps, it demonstrates how technology can deliver pieces of experiences that once required interaction with another human being. Convenience can remove not only inconvenience, but vulnerability.

We have therefore created an extraordinary paradox: perhaps the largest romantic marketplace in human history exists at precisely the moment when so many people say they cannot find anyone to meet.

Maybe the problem isn’t that we have too few potential partners. Maybe we have too few places to encounter them naturally.

There is evidence that those places really are becoming scarcer. A 2024 national survey by the Survey Center on American Life found that Americans are participating less often in organized activities, joining fewer community groups and spending less time with friends, neighbors and family. Only 17% belonged to a hobby or activity group, 15% to a neighborhood association and 10% to a sports or workout group.

In other words, some of the social infrastructure through which strangers once became acquaintances — and acquaintances sometimes became partners — has weakened.

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Earlier generations, despite social constraints of their own, more often encountered potential partners through the infrastructure of ordinary life: workplaces, neighborhoods, religious institutions, civic organizations, clubs, extended families and circles of friends. These weren’t necessarily places people went looking for dates.

That was precisely the point. People encountered one another repeatedly while doing something else. Attraction had time to develop.

Someone who might be dismissed after three seconds on a dating app could become appealing after three conversations. You could watch someone tell a funny story, help a friend, behave kindly toward a waiter or laugh at themselves. People arrived with context. Friends could vouch for them. Familiarity could become friendship, and friendship could become something else.

Much of that social infrastructure still exists, of course. But enormous portions of our lives have migrated onto screens.

A 25-year-old can spend Friday night looking at hundreds of potential partners without meeting a single person. A 55-year-old can communicate with dozens of online friends while eating dinner alone.

Being single, of course, isn’t synonymous with being lonely. Many single people have rich, connected lives, and plenty of married people experience profound loneliness. Nor does everyone want a romantic relationship.

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The problem is more specific: people who genuinely want companionship increasingly describe difficulty finding the ordinary circumstances in which relationships can begin.

Technology introduces another complication: seemingly unlimited choice. Someone can be kind, intelligent, attractive and interesting while still losing to the possibility that someone even more appealing might appear with the next swipe. There will always appear to be someone “better” out there — richer, smarter, funnier, thinner or more attractive.

But successful relationships don’t require discovering the objectively best person available. They require two imperfect people eventually deciding to stop searching and begin knowing each other.

The consequences can extend beyond loneliness.

America’s fertility rate has generally been declining for years for many reasons: economics, later marriage, changing opportunities and priorities and the fact that some adults simply don’t want children. Dating technology cannot plausibly explain something so complex.

Still, hidden inside all those statistics is an elementary biological and social fact: Most children begin with two people finding each other.

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If fewer people form durable partnerships, that eventually affects family formation. Demography moves slowly, which makes its consequences easy to overlook.

But demographics aren’t what concern me most.

Human beings learn intimacy through other human beings: through faces, voices, touch, humor, irritation, disappointment and forgiveness.

Technology can offer partial substitutes for those experiences. The danger comes when the substitute becomes easier than the human experience it was supposed to facilitate.

Because real people are inconvenient. They misunderstand us, interrupt us, sometimes bore us and occasionally hurt us. They also surprise us, comfort us, challenge us, laugh with us, grow old beside us and hold our hands when life becomes frightening. No algorithm can eliminate the vulnerability required to obtain those things.

Perhaps we also need to stop treating the difficulty of finding companionship entirely as the single person’s responsibility.

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For generations, matchmaking was part of ordinary community life. Friends invited two single people to dinner because they thought they might like each other. Cousins made introductions. Neighbors knew neighbors. Religious communities, clubs and workplaces allowed people to encounter one another repeatedly without declaring in advance that they were searching for a romantic partner.

We have largely outsourced that function to algorithms. Maybe we should take some of it back.

When a friend says, “I can’t meet anyone,” those of us who are married or partnered shouldn’t simply suggest another app. We should ask ourselves a different question: “Whom do I know?”

For someone in middle age, finding a relationship may require overcoming the fear that the opportunity for love has passed. It hasn’t.

For younger people, it may require remembering that courtship was never supposed to resemble an online marketplace in which human beings are sorted by photographs and preferences. For everyone else, it may require recognizing that communities have a role in helping people find one another.

The encouraging news is that our desire for one another remains remarkably durable. Beneath all our astonishing technology remains the ancient human longing to know another person and to be known in return. We haven’t lost that capacity. Perhaps we have simply become less practiced at creating the circumstances in which it can happen.

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Loneliness isn’t only the lonely person’s problem, and helping people find one another shouldn’t be either.

Introduce two friends. Invite someone along. Put away the phone and look around the room. Take the chance of being rejected, or give someone a chance you might otherwise have overlooked.

Because an entire marriage, a family, perhaps even generations of people who don’t yet exist, can still begin with one person looking at another and saying the most ordinary word imaginable: “Hello.”

Sometimes an entire future begins there.

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