559 - The Struggle of Loneliness

Why is loneliness a problem?

In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health crisis. This isn’t just a problem in the United States, either; countries like Japan and the U.K. have appointed Ministers of Loneliness to try to combat the health effects of the loneliness epidemic. The health effects are staggering — loneliness is associated with heightened risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. In fact, the mortality risk of social disconnection is comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day. And according to a January 2025 Pew Research study, about one in six Americans, or 16%, say they feel lonely or isolated “all or most of the time.”

But why?

A couple reasons this is happening right now:

1. We’re physically more alone. In the 1960s, the amount of single-person households started to skyrocket, when previously, under 10% of people lived alone.

2. Fraying social fabric, or a decline in “associational life,” or things like civic engagement and community groups, has been steadily declining since the 1970s.

There’s also a crisis within this crisis, what the public has been calling the “male loneliness epidemic.” There are some shocking statistics and nuances on this:

1. In 1990, 3% of American men said they had no close friends. By 2021, that number was up to 15%.

2. Virtues of traditional masculinity (hyper-independence, stoicism, emotional control) are the exact qualities that inhibit deep connection, which requires vulnerability.

3. Men learn as young teenagers to stop talking about their emotions, which leads to an over-reliance on female romantic partners for all emotional support later in life. Both men and women are equally likely (74%) to turn to their spouse or partner for emotional support, but women are more likely to also turn to a friend or family member. The fact that men are not likely to do this places a huge burden on romantic partnerships and leaves men vulnerable if it ends.

Let’s dive into some of the nuance that recent research has provided.

• Several studies have found a statistical tie between rates of loneliness among men versus women (16% and 15%). If men have fewer friends and limited support networks, it makes sense that they’d report feeling lonelier. But when you ask people directly, the gender gap diminishes almost entirely.

• A study from 1985 by Shelley Borys and Daniel Perlman found that women are more likely to admit to being lonely. Therefore, it comes down to how you ask the question. This study also measured the social consequences of being perceived as a lonely person, and the researchers found that female respondents rated the lonely people more harshly than the male respondents overall, and both genders rated lonely men more harshly than lonely women. This leads to the conclusion that men are less likely to admit to being lonely because the social consequences of it are higher.

Therefore, the male loneliness epidemic isn’t a crisis of prevalence, it’s a crisis of expression and coping. The social scripts that discourage men from admitting loneliness also rob them of the tools to address it.

Additionally, the Pew study found that regarding close friendships, the real difference isn’t in having friends, but in how those friendships are maintained. Women are more likely to connect with close friends via text messages and social media, and men are only slightly more likely to see friends in person, which suggests that it’s more about the nature and frequency of connection rather than simply number of friends.

In some of the countries where people say they have strong familial and friendly support, a large percentage of the population lives alone, which illustrates the difference between objective social isolation (physically being alone) and subjective loneliness (feeling alone).

Adults younger than 50 are more than twice as likely as those 50 and older to say they feel lonely often, which leads us to believe this “loneliness epidemic” is primarily about youth loneliness.

And what about factors other than age or gender? A recent analysis found that men without a bachelor’s degree are nearly twice as likely to report having no close friends as men with a degree. The gap is slightly smaller among women but still shows correlation with loneliness and not having a bachelor’s degree, which suggests that socioeconomic factors may be a more powerful driver of social disconnection than just gender.

So the epidemic we’re seeing might be more complicated than just lonely men. But that still doesn’t diminish the pain of being lonely. And loneliness can become a vicious cycle; it makes us feel vulnerable and defensive, which can make us withdraw, which in turn makes us feel even lonelier.

Actionable tools to combat loneliness

• Rewire Your Lonely Brain: A two-pronged mental reframing practice:

  • Challenge and Reframe.

    • Identify the negative automatic thought. When you feel lonely, what’s the immediate story you tell yourself? Write it down.

    • Gather counter-evidence. What’s the evidence against that thought? Be specific (i.e. my friend texted me a meme last week, I had a good conversation with a coworker yesterday, etc.).

    • Create a balanced reframe. Replace the negative thought with a more realistic and compassionate one. For example, “people are busy, but that doesn’t mean they don’t like me. I can try reaching out to make a plan, but if they’re busy, it’s okay.”

  • Practice Mindful Acceptance.

    • Stop resisting. Research shows that a crucial ingredient in mindfulness for loneliness is acceptance, or observing the feeling without judgment.

    • Acknowledge and welcome it. When loneliness appears, try saying something like “My dear loneliness, I know you are there. I hope to take care of you” (as suggested by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh).

    • This practice is believed to reduce the brain’s perception of social threat by lowering psychological defenses such as avoidance or cynicism that prevent you from making genuine connections.

• The Multiamory Angle: De-center Romance and Cultivate Solitude.

  • Build a life so fulfilling that romantic relationships are a wonderful component, not the entire foundation.

    • Reframe solitude as a green flag. Being happy and comfortable alone is a good sign of a healthy, secure person. It means you’re with your partners because you want to be, not because you’re afraid to be alone.

    • Practice the personal date night. Binge your favorite shows, order your favorite food, call a friend, work on a hobby, whatever you want to do that brings you joy.

    • Build your distributed support network. Consciously invest time and energy into your platonic friendships, family, and community. Don’t put the burden of all your social and emotional needs onto your romantic partners.

• Become Your Own Social Architect.

  • Socially prescribe for yourself.

    • Identify an interest.

    • Find a group related to that interest.

    • Schedule it. Put it on the calendar like a doctor’s appointment. The goal is participation in a shared activity, not explicitly making friends. The connection with follow.

  • Audit and cultivate your “third places.”

    • Understand “third places:” these are spots outside your home (first place) and work (second place) where informal community life happens, like parks, libraries, coffee shops, pubs, and community centers.

    • Audit: make a list of your current or potential third places.

    • The practice: Intentionally spend time in these places without a specific goal. Read a book in a coffee shop, sit on a park bench. This creates opportunities for "bumping into" people and building "weak ties" (acquaintances), which are the foundation upon which strong friendships are often built.

  • The 5-for-5 Connection Challenge.

    • For five days, take five actions that express gratitude, offer support, or ask for help.

    • For example: Text a friend a photo of a shared memory and say you're thinking of them. Ask a coworker for their opinion on a project. Call a family member just to say hi. Offer to help a neighbor with a small task.

    • The goal is a simple behavioral activation exercise that gets you back in the habit of reaching out in small, manageable ways.

Transcript

If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: I do feel like I also fall into judging men more harshly for their own loneliness, including myself sometimes. It's that weird thing of, it should be more acceptable for men to talk face to face with each other and open up and just get together for the sake of talking. And then I have a physical reaction of, ugh, I don't want to do that. There is something baked in there, probably just because I wasn't socialized to do it. I'm not sure because I do have friends who I've had more serious talks with. I have men in my life that I feel like I can reach out to for support if I need it. But there's not a lot of this ongoing sense of, I just want to check in and see how you're feeling with my male friends compared to my female friends. And so the stuff is there in the air that I breathe at least.

Jase: Welcome to the Multiamory Podcast.

Jase: I'm Jase.

Emily: I'm Emily.

Dedeker: And I'm Dedeker.

Emily: We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.

Dedeker: Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you and we're here for you.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about loneliness. There have been a lot of headlines about loneliness over the last several years. The pandemic, of course, really got people focusing a lot more on loneliness than they had been before. But this is actually something that's been researched fairly extensively since around the 70s. And today we're going to be getting into what some of the latest research shows, as well as some meta-analysis of lots of research leading up to this to try to get some nuance and understanding about what really is going on with the loneliness epidemic in the U.S. and around the world. And then of course, what are some things that we can do about it? What are some things that have actually been shown statistically, scientifically have been studied to be effective? So we're glad you're here with us together and that we can help you feel a little less lonely by the end of this episode.

Jase: If you're interested in learning about our fundamental communication tools that we reference on this show all the time, you can check out our book, Multiamory: Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, which covers some of our most used communication tools for all types of relationships. You can find links to buy it@multiamory.com/book or wherever books are sold.

Emily: Were people really lonely in the '70s? It feels like the way people talk about it, it's like we just discovered loneliness in the last five to 10 years.

Jase: So, yeah, I was wondering about this, and it does seem like a lot of the research started around the '70s, and I can only assume it's because of the Beatles talking about all the lonely people, and all the researchers were like, oh, shit, I guess there's lonely people, I should research them.

Dedeker: Now, I've never noticed them before, but then as soon as Paul started singing about it, they're everywhere.

Jase: That's my theory.

Emily: That was right after the Vietnam War. Like, the Vietnam War was late '60s into '70s, I believe.

Dedeker: Okay, let me Google Eleanor Rigby.

Jase: Yeah, let's find our timing here.

Dedeker: Timeline Vietnam War. Okay, so Eleanor Rigby came out in 1966.

Jase: Vietnam War went until '75, so that's middle.

Dedeker: Yeah, the war went for a while, but it was not long after the first kind of early escalation of the Vietnam War.

Emily: Yeah. But stuff was happening around that time, and it was kind of like a big shift, I feel like, at least in our culture, in Western culture, in American culture. And I do wonder if that has something to do with it to a degree, that just this idea of loneliness of things changing in a really fundamental way, like what happened with the pandemic, where things are just changing rapidly, people aren't going out as much, and people are kind of needing to stay home and not see each other face to face and causing perhaps that loneliness as well here.

Dedeker: I guess some connections with like social upheaval and feeling detached from what's going on in weird ways. Sure, I'll put it on our conspiracy pin board.

Dedeker: String up some red yarn.

Emily: Is that where we're going?

Jase: Yes. Well, that is a little bit of the theme of this episode is that there have been a lot of these studies, and last year, the Pew Research Group put out a study about loneliness. And so there was kind of a resurgence of headlines about it. That was in January of 2025 is when that came out. But what's interesting is that different studies show different pieces of the picture and that there's a lot of nuance. And that's what we're gonna get into in the second part of this episode. But to start out, let's hit kind of, what are these big headlines? What are the things that people are talking about. And so with that, Dedeker and Emily, when you think about loneliness, what do you feel like is in the air? What are people saying about it? What have you heard about it? What comes to mind?

Dedeker: Just male loneliness. That's what comes to mind. Definitely now, that is the brand of loneliness of the day is male loneliness. Male loneliness epidemic is the phrase that is now tattooed on the inside of my eyelids by the media.

Jase: Yeah, same for you, Em.

Emily: Well, I just have this idea of a young man, or maybe even almost middle-aged man, at home alone in his basement playing video games, or on the internet with the curtains drawn closed and not going out and socializing perhaps in the way that he once did, or for a variety of reasons feels like he can't. Like the world is against him.

Jase: Yeah. Okay. So keep all that in mind as we dive into this.

Dedeker: Can we talk about hikikomori also? Because that's what comes to mind. I feel like that's been a talking point in Japanese media for the last five to 10 years is the rise of the hikikomori, which is essentially a shut-in.

Jase: Generally referring to someone still living at home with their parents, too.

Dedeker: Yes, specifically.

Jase: Even as an adult, when they're past the age, when that would be considered normal.

Dedeker: Predominantly men, but not exclusively men. And sometimes connected to mental health issues or extreme social anxiety or just a failure to launch.

Jase: Or a failure to thrive. Yeah, yeah. So that's all the kind of nuance we're gonna get into in this episode. So kind of the big headline about the loneliness epidemic is that in 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health crisis and called it an epidemic, and not male loneliness, just loneliness period. And that around this same time, a lot of this was spurred by the pandemic, I think, amplifying this, but countries like the UK and Japan even appointed ministers of loneliness and started incorporating various programs to try to address this loneliness problem. So this is not just something that people on the internet write about, but it's like, no, this actually is seen as a critical health problem.

Dedeker: I mean, the Ministry of Loneliness is definitely going to be the next Murakami novel.

Jase: Oh, dude, you're right. That's a really good novel title. Yeah.

Jase: The thing about this, and what was really interesting and really got highlighted strongly in this report, but actually, if you're interested, I do recommend checking out this report. It's a PDF. That you can download from the Surgeon General's website came out in 2023, but it's actually quite well written, has a lot of nice visuals and kind of outlines the problem as well as from a policy standpoint, some things that they're suggesting be done to help address this, like at a larger societal and community level rather than just the individual level. But the big thing here is that it's not just about feeling sad, but actually the health risks associated with loneliness are really significant.

Jase: It's associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. In fact, the mortality risk of social disconnection is comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and it's considered an even greater health risk than those associated with obesity or physical inactivity. So it's actually like a health concern.

Emily: Not just a mental health concern. I remember listening to a podcast during the pandemic on senior care communities, and when people in those communities basically were unable to go and speak to their friends or communicate with their loved ones, and the rate at which they died was so much higher and faster than if they had been able to communicate and go around and do their normal social activities. The rates spiked so much during the pandemic because nobody was able to speak to each other in the way that they usually were able to.

Dedeker: Yeah.

Jase: And so in this Pew Research study from January 2025, kind of the big headline statistic was that one in six Americans, roughly 16%, say that they feel lonely or isolated all or most of the time, and that that number is significant. But also, if you incorporate the number of people who reported being lonely some of the time or a fair amount of the time, it actually jumps up closer to, I think, a third of people or something like that, that it's significant, right? A significant number of people. So there are a couple things that get pointed out as potential reasons for this. So one statistic that gets trotted out a lot is the idea that we're alone more than we used to be. So for centuries, the share of people living in single person households was under 10%, right? That was a very rare thing to actually live on your own. And then starting around the sixties, that number began to skyrocket, right? Of more people living in their own apartment. They were in their own house, and that that's just drastically increased. So the logic there is, if we're more physically alone, then we must be lonelier too. And then the second one is looking at the fraying social fabric. If you want to be really dramatic and make a headline, you'll say something like that. And that's that researchers have documented the significant decline in what they call associational life, which is things like civic engagement.

Dedeker: Community groups, charity involvement, things like that. Also a lot of hand-wringing around not going to church.

Jase: Yeah, sure, sure. Another community activity, yeah.

Emily: There are a lot of great things about it, but even not having to go to work and working remotely now, a lot of socializing happens at work, but if people now all work remote jobs, I mean, that could also be a contributing factor.

Jase: For sure. Yeah. And this has been happening since the 70s, so this isn't even just pandemic. This was already on its way. And I do feel like we see this even more amplified now. One of the quotes that really struck me from the Surgeon General's advisory was this, quote, Trust in each other and major institutions is at near historic lows. Polls conducted in 1972 showed that roughly 45% of Americans felt they could reliably trust other Americans. However, the proportion shrank to roughly 30% in 2016. And this corresponds with levels of polarization being at near historic highs.

Dedeker: Yeah, I would hate to know what it is today.

Jase: I was just going to say, I think it's- if it was 30% in 2016,

Dedeker: and it's been a rough 10 years.

Jase: Maybe 10% now.

Jase: And I feel like I really see this even just walking around in my neighborhood, that there's this sense of guardedness or always needing to be prepared for threat. That I notice, and maybe I'm just projecting it, but I feel like I see this on the faces of all my neighbors. There's kind of this sense of, if I don't already know you, and even if I kind of do, my first reaction is to be hesitant and keep you at a distance because you're probably going to try to screw me over somehow. So that's just my anecdotal one. But when I read this quote from the report, I was like, yeah, yes, this makes sense. I resonate with this one.

Dedeker: Well, the story I always tell when I think about that was, when I went to Ireland several years ago for the first time and, my first night in Ireland, going out to a local pub and this old guy immediately striking up conversation with me. And my knee-jerk instinct was like, I gotta shut this down. This guy wants something from me, right? Either he's trying to come on to me or he's gonna try to scam me. He knows that I'm not a local, right? And so he's bombed on to me to take advantage of me in some way. And then was so surprised to learn, oh, no, actually he just wants to chat and be friendly. And I think over the course of my three weeks in Ireland, in pub culture realizing, oh, this is actually very different than in the States, where I can actually let my guard down and trust that maybe not 100% of the time, but that most of the time if someone's approaching me, it's because they really do just want to chat.

Jase: Yeah, I think this one's also an interesting one to think about the correlation between people living in cities more and being alone more. That I think that that's also a trend that we've seen. A larger percentage of populations live in cities compared to in more smaller towns, things like that. So that may also be part of it. That wasn't mentioned in the report, but it was just something that came to mind.

Emily: Because in smaller towns, people kind of are more insular and kind of know each other, and that is a community in which they engage and feel more comfortable than in a big city, or why would that be a reason?

Jase: Yeah, I think that the idea that in a city, because there's so many more people in such a more dense area, that it actually makes you less likely to know those people and also more likely to feel a threat from them. And I could even see this even just within a city in smaller neighborhoods versus more dense neighborhoods. I feel like I've just, again, anecdotally noticed that, and I feel like I've heard that before. So something to think about in terms of that. Okay, so now let's talk about men. We've been waiting all this time to talk about male loneliness epidemic. So yeah, this is the one that's really captured the public's attention, right? Is the idea that men specifically are in crisis. And there is a lot of evidence for it, right? So the most cited statistic is that in 1990, in studies, around 3% of American men said they had no close friends. By 2021, that number had quintupled up to 15%. So pretty significant increase in saying they have no close friends, which is quite a claim. So there's some potential explanations for this that get talked about.

Jase: And that a lot of it has to do with this idea that the virtues that we hold up for traditional masculinity include things like hyper-independence, stoicism, emotional control, not admitting weakness, strength, things like that, that are things that actually inhibit the kind of vulnerability that you need to have closer connections with people and to have closer friends. I've also heard people talk about the types of activities that men do together tends to prioritize doing an activity together, like playing a sport, playing a game, doing shoulder to shoulder activities, it's called, versus women tend to also have a lot of face to face social engagement where it is more about we're just here to engage with each other. That's the primary focus.

Dedeker: But is that still true? Like I've heard that one whipped out before and it makes sense, but then I'm always suspicious of it since it is so gender essentialist.

Jase: For sure, for sure. Yeah. And I don't have direct statistics on that, but that's often cited as a potential explanation.

Dedeker: Okay.

Emily: But also these traditional masculinity virtues that you're speaking of, they've always kind of been the case, right? Why all of a sudden has this made a potential difference to 15% of the population saying they don't have a close friend of the male population?

Jase: Yeah, those are great questions.

Jase: So Dr. Angelica Ferrara studied the development of feminized and masculinized speech patterns in adolescents. So in her research, she was looking at kids and what kind of words they used and how they talked as they aged from pre-teens to like 13 and 14, and then a little older than that. And what she noticed was that around the age of 13 and 14, she noticed with girls that they went from being very articulate about their feelings and their thoughts to then adopting phrases, which she calls the feminine language of feigning not-thinking. So using phrases like, I don't know, or I guess, to kind of soften the thinkingness of to feign that you're not thinking so much about these things.

Dedeker: Boy, am I sensing crawling a little bit?

Jase: Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Emily: But I definitely felt myself doing that at a time in my life, for sure.

Dedeker: Oh, no. The statistics on what happens to girls around like their tween years, like when they start going through puberty, is like really sad as far as like their loss in confidence and self-esteem. Yeah.

Jase: Absolutely. What she noted though that I thought was really interesting related to this is that at that same point she noticed with boys that they would do what she calls the masculine language of feigning not-feeling, which is starting to use more phrases like, I don't care, whatever.

Dedeker: Oh, it makes so much sense.

Emily: Yes.

Dedeker: It makes so much sense. Like the meth response.

Jase: Yeah. Like, oh, whatever. I don't care. No big deal. I don't care. Oof. Yeah. So it was really interesting that she kind of identified that divergence around that 13-14 years old that our language patterns change because of how we're socialized as men and women. And she was doing this around 2019-2020, right? So this is pretty recent stuff. This isn't old school. And basically with all of that, she developed this model that could look at youth and their use of language and then predict how likely they were to be depressed based on their language, which is fascinating. Not something that I went into this. Too deep in this particular study. But if you, if you Google Angelica Ferrara, she's at Stanford now as a postdoctorate doing research there. Anyway, basically the idea here is that all of this then also leads to an over reliance on female romantic partners for providing all of the emotional support for men.

Emily: There it is.

Jase: So coming back to this 2025 Pew study that came out is that they said that men and women are both about equally likely, 74% to say that they would turn to their spouse or partner for a emotional support, but that women are far more likely to turn to a friend. So 54% of women versus 38% of men to turn to their mother, 54% of women versus 42% men, or another family member, 44% women, 26% men, for that kind of support as well. So while turning to your partner isn't like, that's bad, it's just that for men, it tends to be their only place they would turn for that.

Jase: Puts a lot of burden on that romantic relationship, and then also makes men very vulnerable if that ends, right? Like the statistics about men's health after a divorce are pretty damning too, that men's health tends to decline pretty significantly after a divorce if they end up alone, so...

Emily: And women's gets better.

Jase: Well, at least it doesn't downturn in the same way.

Dedeker: Well, okay. Can I ask though, because sure, in my anecdotal experience, this tracks, right? Like long, long, long history of predominantly dating men, and most of the men that I'm dating not tending to have, like sometimes men who have a lot of friends, even a lot of good friends, even a lot of long-term friends, but those friends are not necessarily on the list of people they turn to when they're worried about something, need advice on something, or having a rough day, that that tends to fall on whatever female partner is in the room at that particular time. Now, the New York Times did a story on this a couple months ago, and it was, I forget what the headline was, it was something about people complaining about, I guess the term now is man keeping, quote unquote, and kind of women complaining about feeling this sense of this particular flavor of emotional labor falling on their shoulders, right? And I remember that there was a dude in the comments.

Emily: As there always is.

Dedeker: As there always is. You know, he made this argument of, this is frustrating because there's been this big push in the narrative around men of, hey, men need to open up. Men need to get more in touch with their feelings. They need to go to therapy. They need to start talking about some of the things that they're actually feeling under the surface and not trying to be so damn stic and keep it together all the time. And now you women don't want to handle it.

Dedeker: Or you complain now that we do it. And I was kind of like, okay, I mean, I think I could mount an argument against this particular perspective, but I also sort of understand that feeling. It's definitely very reductive and oversimplified of, I think, what's going on here. But I did think that that was interesting and could understand how a man could feel like a little bit damned if you do.

Jase: damned if you don't.

Dedeker: Yeah, absolutely.

Jase: And so that's a good segue into part two of this episode, where we're gonna look at some of the nuance hiding in some of this data and some other ways of looking at it to kind of get a little more insights into what might be going on. Before we do that, we're gonna take a quick break to talk about some sponsors for this show. Please do give them a listen that does directly support our show. If you use our promo codes or our links, or even just listening to the ads honestly shows up well and helps make sure that we get sponsorship for this show. But if you would rather be the sponsor for For your own life, you can become one of our community members@multiamory.com/join. And for that, you'll get access to our amazing communities on Discord and Facebook, as well as ad-free episodes that come out a day early. So please go check that out@multiamory.com/join.

Jase: Are you two ready for some nuance?

Emily: Yes.

Dedeker: There better be nuance, Jase.

Jase: Okay, great. It's just cut and dry, really simple. So when I first started looking into this episode, what came up was some articles and podcasts that came out looking at this Pew Research study. And one of them is that in that study, 16% of men and 15% of women say that they feel lonely all or most of the time.

Dedeker: Okay, so pretty close.

Jase: Very close. And this led a lot of commentators to conclude that it showed, oh, this male loneliness crisis doesn't exist. Right. That's, and there's other studies too that show actually the amount of loneliness in men and women is about the same.

Jase: So what's the deal? Like what explains this? How does this make sense? And it turns out that a lot of it has to do with how you ask the question.

Jase: There was this classic 1985 paper that's called Gender Differences in Loneliness by Shelley Borys and Daniel Perlman that looked at 39 existing data sets. So a meta analysis of a bunch of existing studies from the seventies up to 1985. And what they found is that women are more likely to admit or self-label as being lonely.

Jase: So basically they found that if the way that the survey was worded was basically asking if you're lonely, that women and men would be about the same. But if you instead did your study where you indirectly tried to get at, are they lonely by asking other sorts of questions about who you go to for support or how many friends you have, other stuff like that,

Jase: men would tend to be higher or would more often show up with higher amounts of loneliness in the studies. And so they wanted to measure this. So they did their own study as part of this paper about the social consequences of being perceived as a lonely person.

Jase: So we're going to do a little experiment here. So what they did is they took a group of, I think it was like 116 people or something, not a huge study, but they split them into two groups and they gave them all a story to read or a little explanation of a person. And the story was identical between the two groups, but in one group, the person was called Jim and used he pronouns, and in the other group, it was called Sue and used she pronouns. But otherwise, word for word, exactly the same. And that this comes from a sort of archetypal description of a lonely person that had kind of been worked on before. They do note that there's a lot of similarities with the description of a depressed person, actually, which It was sort of a side note I thought was interesting that it's not quite the same. There's some more nuance with depressed, and there's a lot of different ways depression can look, but you may notice some overlap here. So I'm gonna actually just read you this story. Do you want me to read you the male version or the female version?

Emily: I know that's tough because I feel like we're gonna be swayed one way or the other, depending on which one you read.

Dedeker: We'll read the Lonely Man.

Jase: Here we go. Allegedly. Okay, so here's what they read in the study. Jim, aged 18, is a first-year student in university. He's very quiet and reserved, and he spends a lot of his time thinking about himself and his situation. Jim feels that he's alienated from other students on campus, and that he is excluded from events that are happening around him. There's no one he feels he can turn to or depend on. He has no close friends, although he often wishes he did. However, he feels that he doesn't know how to make friends, so he tends to avoid any social contact.

Jase: He never initiates any social activities, and whenever he is with a group of people, he feels like an outsider and doesn't have a good time. Therefore, Jim isolates himself from others, spending long hours concentrating on his coursework. Often, Jim feels that he is inferior and rejected and wonders if something is wrong with himself. He feels that other people don't like him, and this makes him unhappy. Sometimes, he becomes angry and can only see the worst in everything. So that's the story.

Dedeker: Pretty bad. Sounds pretty bad.

Jase: So you could also imagine that story where Sue, aged 18, is a first-year student in university. She's very quiet and reserved, and she spends a lot of time thinking about herself and her situation, right? So you'd imagine the whole thing told that way. So you would have gotten one or the other story. And then they asked them a series of questions that they would rate from one to five on a Likert scale on things like, How disturbed do you think this person is?

Jase: Or how acceptable would this person be as an acquaintance, as a coworker, as a friend, as an employee, as a date, as a boyfriend or girlfriend? And they kind of went through this series of questions and then totaled up those scores to kind of get this overall, like, social standing, like, how do we perceive this person? And they found that they had a couple axes to measure, right? One was, Was it Jim or Sue in the story? And the other was the gender of the person answering. Of the respondent.

Jase: And what they found was two significant things, one significant thing in each category, and that's that they found female respondents overall rated the lonely people more harshly than the male respondents, and that men and women both rated the lonely man more harshly than the lonely woman.

Dedeker: Really? Interesting.

Jase: Yeah. So in this case, the worst rating came from a woman rating a man on average. So the woman reading Jim's story gave the worst, like, harshest marks about how acceptable this person is. And then the gentlest case was, on average, if it was a man, rating Sue, the lonely woman.

Dedeker: Interesting.

Jase: Right? Really fascinating results.

Dedeker: I would not necessarily have guessed that. I mean, I wasn't really sure exactly how it would play out, but I don't think that would have been my first guess. But I suppose it makes sense since we tend to assign hyper-agency to men. And not in all contexts, but in many contexts, we tend to have this sense that, like, men can't really be victims of their circumstances or their surroundings. They are hyper-agent, which means that they should be able to be a mover and shaker and make things happen and change their situation if they were just motivated enough to do so. And it does seem like, like, when I see the discourse playing out around this whole male loneliness thing, I do think that, like, that's often a pretty dominant narrative, you know, is this sense of like, well, if men are feeling lonely, it's their own dang fault.

Jase: Yeah, definitely lack of sympathy going along with that hyper agency that we assign to men.

Emily: Interesting that the men feel more sympathy towards the women in this scenario as well.

Jase: Both men and women had more sympathy toward the lonely woman.

Jase: But that men in general had more sympathy or rated less harshly, we should say. It's not exactly sympathy, but we're less condemning of a lonely person regardless of their gender, but both groups more so for women.

Emily: Fascinating.

Jase: Well, yeah. So what I took away from this kind of looking at the data more holistically is that this isn't maybe a male loneliness crisis of like prevalence or this is necessarily way more common in men, but there is a big difference in the expression of it and coping resources, coping skills, things like that. That like the social scripts that discourage men from admitting loneliness are the same ones keeping them lonely, making it harder to have those connections and that those social consequences feel higher. Sure. Right? The next nuance I wanted to get into is this thing about not having any close friends. So this whole five-fold increase in men with no close friends, right? That's pretty significant. That trend is real. The data does seem to corroborate that. What's interesting is that that 2025 Pew Research study found that men and women were about equally likely to say that they have at least one close friend. So while there was like this increase in men who say they have no friends, that overall though, past that point of like the extreme, I have no friends, it was about equal of saying like, oh, I have at least one friend, at least one close friend. But where the difference shows up again isn't just about having the friends, but about how those friends are maintained. And so what they found is that the Pew Research data shows that women are much more likely to connect with their close friends frequently via text messages, social media compared to men. So like 66% to 56%, 45% to 33%, you know, pretty significant decrease for the men reaching out on social media or text messages. Men are just slightly more likely to see their friends in person than women are, which I thought was interesting. And this kind of suggests that there might be some importance to like the nature of the friendships or what types of outreach you do for the friendships. It wasn't looking specifically at that, so we're kind of having to guess a little bit about, you know, what does this data mean? No one really had a conclusive answer that I found about what you were saying, Dedeker, of like questioning the whole, men hang out doing an activity and women hang out face to face.

Jase: Like, I think anecdotally, a lot of us are like, yeah, that tracks. But I didn't find, at least in my research for this, I didn't find like a clear smoking gun. Like, yes, we've got the evidence to prove that that's true. It might be out there. I didn't spend a ton of time looking for it, but just to throw that out there. A third piece of nuance, and this is actually more of a red herring, and that's the whole living alone thing I mentioned way back at the beginning. So we mentioned that there's this dramatic rise since the 60s of people living alone, and this assumption is like, oh, look, see, that's why people are more lonely because they live alone, but the data actually shows that living alone is not a good predictor of feeling lonely. So an example of this is countries where people are most likely to say that they have strong support from family and friends, such as in Scandinavian countries, they report less loneliness, but a huge portion of their population lives alone. So it's not about that, there's more of a social difference there of like they've got a lot of family support even though they live alone. And then the other part is that being alone and feeling lonely are two different things.

Jase: That social isolation, which is sort of an objective measurable thing of like how many people are in your social network, how many people can you rely on for support, that's social isolation, which is measured in some of these studies and you can kind of put a number on it. But then loneliness is more of that subjective feeling. Of I feel lonely, I feel sad about this, and that you can have one of those without the other. The whole thing of someone feeling lonely while they're at a party with all their friends. That can happen.

Emily: Or with a partner.

Jase: Or if you think about a monk going to live in a cave for 10 years, not feeling lonely. They might not identify with feeling lonely because they've entered into this in a different way.

Dedeker: with a different mindset. I felt really ripped off when I read this book, Cave in the Snow. It's actually a really fascinating book. It's about the woman who wrote it. She interviewed a British Buddhist nun who had gone to literally go live in a cave in the snow by herself in the Himalayas for, like, 12 years alone. Twice a year, other people from the monastery would come up and deliver her some extra food. And I read this book when I was preparing to go into hotel quarantine. This is in the pandemic. And I thought, maybe reading about a woman living 12 years by herself in a cave will prepare me for two weeks in a hotel room. And I felt so ripped off. Well, because this woman, I mean, she was amazing, but she was, through the whole interview, was just kind of like, yeah, it was easy. It wasn't so bad.

Dedeker: No, it wasn't that bad. Wow. Didn't really bother me. I'm just like, come on. I mean, good for you.

Emily: She was so zen that she was fine.

Dedeker: She was, yeah, she was pretty chill.

Jase: But great evidence right there for loneliness and social isolation not being the same thing, right? Those don't necessarily go hand in hand. Now, in this data, there was some interesting trends that I'm actually surprised weren't being talked about as much. There were a few studies that focused on this, but not as many as you would think. And that's that, yes, men might be experiencing more loneliness, but there was this big, huge meta analysis called, Is loneliness in emerging adults increasing over time? It says it right there on the tin. But that was by Booker et al in 2021, which looked at 345 previous studies. It's like a huge amount of data going all the way back to the 70s and identified this significant linear increase in loneliness over those 43 years, specifically among adults 18 to 29.

Emily: So people were entering into adulthood. Yeah.

Jase: And they actually found in some other studies that loneliness among elder people was actually decreasing up to the pandemic. And then it jumped during the pandemic, but is actually actually fallen back down to pre-pandemic levels now.

Emily: That's great.

Dedeker: That's good news, I guess.

Jase: So it's actually the kids who might not be all right is what I'm getting at here.

Jase: So in that Pew research from last year, it says adults who are younger than 50 are more than twice as likely as those over 50 to say that they often feel lonely. So when people over 50, it was only 9% that said they often feel lonely. But people under 50, 22%.

Jase: And most of that was in the 18 to 29 year olds, 24% of 18 to 29 year olds report being lonely most of the time, or that they often feel lonely. And for those 65 and older, it's only 6%. Which goes in the face of some other things I've read about, like this crisis of older people being lonely with, like, they don't have the family support, they're sent off to live somewhere.

Jase: But maybe the fact that there is kind of this trend for retirement communities, things like that, maybe that actually helps to avoid some of that. I'm not sure, but I think it's worth looking at the fact that we may actually be seeing a youth loneliness epidemic, even more so than a male loneliness epidemic.

Dedeker: Okay, but I want to be the contrarian for no good reason. To me, this feels like this all tracks, but there's always the part of my brain that wants to be a contrarian. Like, were you able to find any comparative data to how youth were feeling 10 years ago,

Dedeker: 20 years ago, how lonely youth were feeling pre-internet? Because I guess I think about my own youth, my own lost teenage years, early 20s, and thinking about how couldn't there be an argument to be made that a certain amount of alienation is a part of growing up, like when you're a teenager and in your early 20s, like don't we all feel that way? I think for some people, for some people like a certain lonely phase, this is me purely just shooting from the hip. But I guess I wonder, is this really something that's actually increasing or is this something that's a part of youth?

Emily: But don't we think that the emergence of phones and social media and needing to be on screens all the time, I mean, that, at least for the three of us, was less prevalent, I feel, when we were also emerging adults.

Emily: Now that we are current actual adults, I think it is very, very prevalent. And of course, we have to, you know, take stock of that and, I think, try to tear ourselves away from all of these screens all the time. But we live in a society where youth has never had that opportunity to not live in the way that all of us do now online or with social media or with phones strapped to our head since we were four years old. It's just a very different way in which to grow up that is very specific to this current period of time.

Dedeker: I mean, yeah, I think that makes sense. And I know for myself as a current day adult, we are no longer emerging adults. No. The more time I spend on my phone, the more I get a distorted sense of what people are like. And then the more I get a distorted sense of how much I can or cannot trust other human beings, and that is definitely a distortion towards the negative, the less time I spend on my phone and the more time I spend face to face around people, not just people I love, but also these like, quote unquote, weak ties in my neighborhood, you know, or my acquaintances, the more I have a restored sense of faith in humanity and maybe a little bit more of a restored sense. Oh, yeah, people are good and I can trust them. And so, yes, I can't imagine.

Dedeker: our generation still grew up on the internet, you know, during those formative years. It was a softer time, sure, but also still, I think, imbued this sense of, wow, people are, like, really horrible or can be really horrible for no good reason on the internet. And so, yeah, I would imagine that at least I, if I imagine myself as an emerging, if I were an emerging adult today and my primary form of socialization was also linked to social media or being on the internet, yeah, I think that would give me a skewed sense of, like, how safe it is to connect to people in general that could skew me in the direction of choosing to not.

Jase: So while I don't have any data to talk about how the internet has contributed to our lack of trust of our community members or our fellow Americans or whatever, this meta analysis I was just talking about that looked at these 345 studies since the 70s, what they found was that the quote is significant linear increase in loneliness over those 43 years. Okay. So the couple things there is one is that it was an increase over that whole time, but also interestingly that it's linear. It's not like an exponential thing, or it's not something that jumped at a certain point because of the internet or phones or something, but that it was actually just linear is interesting to me. That there's something else going on that's not just the result of some specific event or some specific technology. That maybe all of those are part of some larger trend. But that headline of, this is actually in the Surgeon General's report, is something along the lines of, in this day when we're more connected than ever, why do we feel more lonely than we ever have?

Jase: Like that kind of headline and narrative does show up a lot, but in studies like this, do you make me question that a little bit? Of is it really that, or is that just an easy scapegoat? Or maybe that is contributing to different problems. I don't know. I don't know the answer there, but it's something to look at. And maybe some future studies will look at that more. One other thing that came up in looking a little bit deeper at this research is that so far we've talked about gender a lot, and then we've talked about age some, but in a recent analysis that's called Male Loneliness and Isolation: what the Data Shows from the Institute for Boys and Men, what they found is looking at the data, there's actually a more significant difference if we look at men without a bachelor's degree who are nearly twice as likely to report having no close friends as men with a degree. In the data they looked at. And the same is true for women, but it's less significant in women, but still significant and more significant than the gender difference. That was the thing that really jumped out is that actually there's potentially a class or education or socioeconomic, some other indicator here that actually might be more significant than these ones that are easy to look at, like age, which is still very significant, and gender, which really in the big picture is less significant than age or this level of education that they looked at in some of these studies.

Emily: I mean, no, that does make sense, actually.

Dedeker: Yeah. And this tracks with, and I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to cite it because it was in a newsletter I read a couple of weeks ago, but with research that showed that people in college, your likelihood of becoming friends with somebody jumped this astronomical amount depending on how close you ended up to each other in your dorm. Huh, right? Sure. That, you know, like if we think about our traditional schooling going through primary school and secondary school that, yeah, you develop friends during that time often through proximity and living your lives together every day for better or for worse. And that then college offers this secondary chance at that once again, right? That like you're put into proximity with people and then you become friends with them. And if you don't go to college, if let's say, you know, you're poor and you're having to hop around a bunch of different, like low wage, high turnover jobs with a revolving door.

Dedeker: Like, yes, there's still potential there that because of proximity and repetition, you become friends with people that you're working with, but maybe not in the same way as, hey, we can all afford to be sent to college and just focus on our studies and going to class together and living together. Again, I know this is like maybe a messy analysis, but that would be my, my armchair sociologist.

Jase: theorizing.

Emily: Yeah, definitely. And just that I think privilege allows for a little bit more mental bandwidth to be a little bit more leisurely and make friends and spend time cultivating those friendships. Yeah, absolutely. Like doing fun things as opposed to just needing to survive, needing to find work in order to live your life in order to, you know, make enough money to keep a roof over your head or food on the table or whatever it might be.

Emily: I can imagine there's a variety of reasons why somebody may be less or more lonely based on class structure and what kind of degree they got or not.

Jase: Yeah. And using economic class and level of education as like saying that those go in lockstep, like while there is evidence there, that's not 100% a correlation, right? Like that isn't always how it works. So there's other potential explanations. Things like if you think about the whole mistrust of others, there's this sense of who's in your in-group versus who's in your out-group. And that when you're going to school that's just based on where you live, right? So you're in primary school and secondary school, that you're all just kind of there in the school, right? So there's kind of this sense of maybe some of these are my in-group because of certain classes that I'm in, but others are kind of more out group from me versus when you go to university or college. And I would say this is probably especially true the smaller the school is that you go to. There's this sense of like, oh, but we're all here because we applied and got in and chose to be here versus like, we're just here by circumstance of where we live. That maybe there's also a certain amount of like, you get a few extra points of like trust or in-groupness or positive affect or something like that that could show up. Up again, also armchair analysis.

Jase: Okay, so we've gotten a lot of nuance here, but I think the key takeaway from this is that there's a lot of factors going on and that it is this vicious cycle, right? That loneliness makes us feel vulnerable and it makes us feel defensive and scared and withdrawn, which in turn makes us lonelier, makes it harder to make connections, and it's a hard cycle to break out of on your own. And so we're gonna get into some actual actionable steps that you can do.

Jase: based on some of this research. So that's what we're gonna get into next.

Jase: We'll take another quick break to talk about some sponsors. Again, if you'd rather have ad-free episodes and directly support the work that we're doing here, you can go to multiamory.com/join. Join our communities, get ad-free episodes a day early, join our monthly video processing groups, which are fantastic. You can do all of that on a sliding scale so it's accessible to everybody@multiamory.com/join.

Dedeker: So, Jase, you appear to be a man.

Jase: I concur.

Dedeker: Like, what do you personally feel about all of this?

Emily: As the resident man of the show?

Dedeker: Yeah. Yeah.

Jase: Yeah. I've thought a lot about this while researching this episode and putting this all together. And it's a hard thing, 'cause thinking about a lot of experiences and impressions I have, I do feel like I also fall into this judging men more harshly for their own loneliness, including myself sometimes. And it's that weird thing of like, yeah, okay, it should be more acceptable for men to talk face to face with each other and kind of open up and just get together for the sake of talking. And then I have like a physical reaction of like, Ugh, I don't want to do that. Like there is something baked in there and that there's like a, I don't know, like a scariness to it.

Jase: Like it just feels weird. Probably just 'cause I wasn't socialized to do it. I'm not sure. I have been pondering this a lot while putting this episode together because I do have a lot of, I have friends who I've had more serious talks with, conversations with. I have men in my life that I feel like I can reach out to for support if I need it. But there's not a lot of this kind of ongoing sense of like, I just want to check in and see how you're feeling kind of a thing. With my male friends compared to my female friends. And so there is-- the stuff is there in the air that I breathe, at least.

Dedeker: And so then what do you think about that? Do you end up coming to the conclusion of, oh, maybe that's just how it is and that's fine? Or do you feel like you want to change that or shift that in some way? Or where do you end up landing there?

Jase: Yeah, it is something that I would like to change and grow. Just partly, I think, being a little more conscious of it. And then also, I think some of the tools that we're going to get into here are things that I'm curious to try myself. And so we're going to talk about some different options. We're going to start with more internal personal work, and then we're going to look at more external things you can do. And I think specifically in the things you can do category is what jumped out for me. Whereas for other people, you might feel like the internal side of it's more like, oh man, yeah, that's what I got to work on.

Jase: And looking back, I actually think maybe even just a year or two ago that the internal would have been more the thing for me. And I think that being related to depression, actually. Because we talked about loneliness and depression do have a lot of traits in common there, and I think one can help cause the other as well.

Emily: I was going to ask, like, where's the chicken? Where's the egg there? Regarding that.

Jase: Okay, so let's get in. Tool number one.

Jase: Or tool category number one, I guess we could say. This is about rewiring your brain. This is the internal work. So this is about how do we break out of the cycle in terms of the internal self-talk that we have, right? When we heard that description of the lonely man from that 1985 study, it focused on not only not having friends and not having social activities, but also feeling like people don't like them. He's not getting invited to things that it's hard to make friends. He doesn't know how, all those sorts of things, right? So there's also an internal aspect to it. And within this CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy often comes up as one that's cited as being, you know, having research. The amount of difference it shows is small-ish but significant. So it does make a difference, but it's not like a magic bullet. This will cure you overnight kind of a thing. So what I've put together here is what I'm calling CBT Lite that you can do on yourself.

Dedeker: It's basically just following the CBT steps just kind of on your own without an actual trained therapist going through it. See, I think the joke these days, because light, you know, it's like, yes, in the 90s diet culture, that's what we attached to everything was light. And I feel like nowadays it would be more like prebiotic CBT. It's healthy for years.

Jase: Interesting.

Dedeker: Or protein CBT. Like, yeah, these markers that are like.

Jase: No, it's good for you. Okay, yeah. Because I was thinking more emphasizing not light as in diet light, but light as in it's not the full version.

Dedeker: Okay.

Jase: So I always think of it as the free tier.

Dedeker: It's the free tier.

Jase: You're on the free tier, yeah, exactly.

Jase: Okay, so the idea here is kind of the cornerstone of CBT is this idea that your beliefs influence your thoughts and that then your thoughts influence your beliefs and those influence your actions, right? That there's kind of this link between your behavior and your thoughts and your beliefs.

Jase: Your behavior and your thoughts and your beliefs. So the idea here is that you start off by working on identifying those negative automatic thoughts that happen. So when you're feeling that loneliness or that depression, because you feel alone, try to put in this reminder for yourself somehow in your brain. Like when you have that, try to stop and write down, like, what is the thought that I'm having? Is it no one wants to hang out with me? Is it I'm gonna be rejected if I reach out? Or like, no one's gonna have time for me, or I'm boring, or kind of whatever it is. Like, try to identify, like, specifically what are those internal thoughts that you're having. Then the second step is to, you know, maybe after a few times you've collected this list, or maybe after that first time, you're like, oh, I know for sure it's always this thought, is to then try to gather counter evidence. So think of yourself like a, you know, a lawyer preparing for a case. Like, what is the evidence against this? And be specific, right? So it's like, My friend texted me a meme last week, or I had a good conversation with a coworker yesterday, or someone complimented my shirt, or people at work laughed at the joke that I made. Like something that you can point to, even if you might have the knee-jerk reaction to go, But, well, but it didn't count, or they were just pitying me or whatever, but just collect the evidence, right? Collect the concrete thing that doesn't have you projecting meaning onto it, but just the concrete what happened. To counteract that previous belief, and then try to combine those and to come up with a more realistic and compassionate belief instead of that negative one that you automatically had at first. So things like people are busy, but that doesn't mean that they don't like me. I can try reaching out to make a plan, and if they're busy, that's okay. It's not a reflection on me. Again, you're not trying to go to this whole, like, everyone's going to like me, and when I reach out, they'll all hang out automatically. You're going for realistic rather than over-the-top optimism.

Jase: Great. Okay, so now the second tool within this category is about mindful acceptance. We love to talk about mindfulness on this show. And what's interesting here is that there's actually some really interesting research which we'll get into in a second. And it can seem counterintuitive, but it seems to suggest that one of the keys to overcoming loneliness is to stop stopping denying that you feel lonely and actually learn to accept that fact more can actually help you get out of it.

Jase: Yeah. Really interesting stuff. So basically, the research shows that having mindfulness for loneliness acceptance of observing the feeling without judging it. So taking away that, oh, it's because I'm a bad person. Oh, no one likes me. I can't make friends. But just accepting how you that I feel lonely. I feel sad about this. I feel scared to reach out. That kind of acceptance. And so one way you could look at that is when loneliness appears, to try saying to yourself, this comes from Thich Nhat Hanh, so this might be a little overly poetic for some of you out there, but his is, My dear loneliness, I know you are there. I hope to take care of you.

Emily: That's very sweet.

Dedeker: That's sweet. Yeah.

Jase: Kind of acknowledging it.

Dedeker: But in a compassionate way is his approach.

Jase: And what's interesting is that this practice is believed to reduce the brain's perception of social threat by actually accepting our loneliness versus fighting against it. And it lowers our psychological defenses like avoidance or cynicism that prevent you from then making connections with people. So there was this really interesting study from 2019 by Lindsay et al. called Mindfulness Training Reduces Loneliness and Increases Social Contact in a Randomized Controlled Trial.

Jase: They basically wrote the abstract into the title. So this was interesting. This was a study of people, this was actually older people, like in a retirement community, but they specifically identified people who identified as having stress, who were stressed. And then they split them into three groups. One was like a purely control group. One was a group that had lessons on their phone or whatever, or like reminders on their phone that would just ask them about how they're feeling. And then the third group, the actual test group, was on their phone. They would get these notifications every day for two weeks of a mindfulness training that they could do. It's kind of like a guided meditation type thing. It had to do with acceptance, right? And what they found is that they surveyed how they were doing before they started, during the two weeks, and then a few days after it ended, and they found a 22% decrease in loneliness, and an increase in social interactions in the groups that did the mindfulness and acceptance training, and no difference at all in the other two groups. I was actually surprised at how significant that difference was that they found there. Unfortunately, the training they did, they didn't, in the study paper, they didn't like link to how you could access that or whatever. There are lots of mindfulness and acceptance trainings out there you could look for. They did mention specifically that they developed it for the study with Shinzen Young, who, oh, He's at the University of Vermont.

Dedeker: Yeah, man. No, I mean, if people are interested in Shinzen Young's work, he has a free book that's just called Five Ways to Know Yourself. That was my first crawling into a rocket ship and getting blasted off into the space of a meditation practice.

Jase: I should check that out.

Dedeker: I highly recommend. It's awesome.

Jase: That's awesome.

Dedeker: Yeah, it's an easy read.

Emily: Yeah, anecdotal evidence. I have a friend, a good friend, who is a man that started a meditation practice this year, and just from being around him is so much more calm and feels really content with his life. In a way that he hasn't before. And he really says meditation and mindfulness has helped him a great deal this year.

Jase: That's awesome.

Jase: Yeah. I feel like the reminder I always want to give people, if you're new to mindfulness practices and meditation and stuff, is to think of it like exercise of, you know, going for a walk, going for a run, going to the gym, something like that, that it's not like, oh, you do it once and everything feels stronger and better and great. It's like, no, it's, it can be a little bit hard. It can be a little painful, a little scary getting started, like being sore from working out. But after doing it, for just a couple weeks already, you can start to notice like, wow, I can move a lot better. Or in the case of mindfulness, that like, oh, I can think more clearly, right? My mind is more clear. All right, tool number two. This is the multiamory angle. We're going to bring in some non-monogamy here. So there's this assumption that having more partners would cure your loneliness, right? But as many people in the community know, that's not true. And sometimes actually polyamory can amplify loneliness by presenting you with situations where you're hyper fixated on how alone you are.

Jase: Are, like when your partner's out on a date without you, or when all of your partners are on dates or out of the country or whatever they're doing, right? So that you're extra alone. Or like if you're the mono part of a mono poly dynamic, or if you feel like you're the secondary partner to everyone, but you don't have anyone who's a primary partner. Like there's actually a lot of things that can kind of throw the aloneness in your face and actually trigger more of these feelings of loneliness. So our suggestion on this one is build a life that's so fulfilling that romantic relationships are a wonderful component, but they're not like the foundation that it's built on. And I know that's counter to a lot of kind of our societal messages about what our partner should be to us. So step one for this is to reframe solitude as a green flag. And this, I think, is a really interesting idea. So think about, you know, you're dating, you're talking to people on apps or meeting people or whatever. Over, look out for does this person seem to be comfortable being alone? And if so, mark that as a green flag. This is a healthy, secure person. And that means that they're going to be with you because they want to be and not because they're trying to fill some gap. And also it can help you to have more of that feeling yourself as well of like, I'm not in this relationship because I need it. I'm in this relationship because I and it's adding to my life. And so that just, I love this idea of like, look out for that green flag.

Jase: And I think once you start looking for it, it'll be interesting to see where that shows up. You know, who in your life do you kind of see of like, I remember I had a friend when I was in beauty school, I had a friend who loved to go to the movies by herself. And that just blew my mind. I was just like, that sounds like a terrible thing. Like, why would you, aren't you sad? Like, why would you want to do that? And she's like, no, I love it. Like, that's great. That's my me time. That's like my favorite thing to do. And it's just things like that, looking back, I'm like, okay, I should have seen that. It's like, oh, that's a green flag. This is a good friend to have, someone who has that strength.

Dedeker: I like that. So how do you test that? Do you invite them out to the movies and then you bail on them last minute? But secretly, you hide out in the movie theater and watch them the whole time to see what they do. Do they leave? Do they tune in on their phone the whole time? This is some real espionage polyamory.

Jase: No, I wouldn't suggest anything like that.

Dedeker: It's a grand polyamory I'm going to drop on all y'all. I will not suggest that, no.

Emily: No, I think if somebody is very intentionally presenting you with, oh, I have a day of my week that is just for me, where I don't have anyone else to hang out with, I just want to have quality time by myself, that seems like a great green flag for sure.

Dedeker: I guess it would be a good question to ask about somebody's relationship with alone time or solo time, or how much alone time they need, or how do they preserve that. Yeah, that's probably conversationally a good place to explore.

Jase: Even more indirectly on kind of a like, what do you like to do on your days off? Kind of a question that I think sometimes, I know I've felt there's a certain pressure to like have interesting things that I do on my day off. And if I say like, oh, I usually like to just hang out at home, watch some shows or maybe work on a project, like I, you know, just wanna do that. That maybe I shouldn't feel bad about that. Maybe that's a green flag of showing that I kind of enjoy my alone time. I don't know. Well, that's all good. I'm going to be hiding in a movie theater with my binoculars, and I'll let you know how it goes.

Jase: And then you'll identify the green flags, and you'll be like, you had green flags because you were cool being alone in the movie theater. And they were like, cool, and you stood me up. So see you never. Bye.

Jase: You stood me up and then spied on me. Weird how. Okay, so going along with this is the idea of a personal date night. Like you just said, Emily, do they have a regular time they like to have for themselves? Right? So do this for yourself. Set alone time for you and don't see it as this is a time of lack, of like, this is a time defined by not being able to be with anyone, but like, Hey, this is where I get to work on what I want to work on. Maybe it is a time to call a friend or make your perfect food or work on a hobby, but it's just like about, this is my time.

Jase: I'm not having to base this around someone else's time right now. And then step three, or the third part of this, is just building up more of that support network outside of your romantic relationships, right? That's something we've been talking about in all of this. And actually the next tool category is where we'll get into how you do that. So the third section, final section today, is the external work. So that internal work is really important to get over some of our barriers to connecting with other people and our fears. But there's also the like, how do you get out there and do it? So the first one here is to socially prescribe for yourself.

Jase: So this actually comes from something that was implemented in the last few years, I think in the UK, where doctors can actually prescribe community activities to patients. That there's like certain community groups that they would prescribe, like you should go weekly to this thing. And it's worth noting here that social support and loneliness doesn't just have to do with having lots of close friends. But also having what Dedeker mentioned earlier, these weak ties, right? The kind of the more casual relationships, the people that you just run into somewhere, you know them, maybe you say hi, they don't have to be a close friend. That's still part of not feeling lonely and feeling connected to your community. So how can you prescribe this for yourself? Step one is find something that you're interested in or just curious about, right? Is it art, hiking, board games, a charity, a cause, habitat for humanity. There's lots of things out there. Think about what you're interested in. Look for groups, look on Meetup, look on Facebook communities, whatever it is, but try to find something that meets in person to do this thing. And then put it on your calendar. Treat it like a doctor appointment. Because when it comes around, you might be like, I don't feel like it, but treat it like you just have to go. And to try to just develop that habit, kind of pull off the band-aid of just like, yeah, okay, I'm going to be around people. And don't go in with this expectation of like, I'm gonna make a bunch of friends right away. Just go to show up and be there and let the connections happen. Like, let those weak ties happen. The second version of this is cultivating your third places, right? So this whole concept of third places is like home is the first place, work is the second place, but the third place is the other places you spend time, right? And so it's like parks, libraries, coffee shops, pubs, community centers. Some of this might overlap with the social prescription you write for yourself, yourself, just make a list of all these potential third places for you, like places you feel comfortable just being, and then intentionally spend time in those places without a goal. So like reading a book in a coffee shop, sitting on a park bench, when the weather's nice, I guess. You know, and this creates those opportunities for just bumping into people and building those weak ties, those acquaintances of like, oh, I just see that this person's here every day walking their dog at this time.

Dedeker: Or getting to know the barista.

Jase: Who's there every morning when you do your coffee order. Exactly, exactly. And Dedeker, I wanted you to share your story about meeting the older couple on your walks in Japan.

Dedeker: Oh, I have accumulated so many old river people now.

Emily: That sounds like something you do.

Dedeker: Yeah, there's this river, this really nice walk that I do every single morning. And anyone who has spent any time in Japan will know that generally, culturally, Japanese people tend to be very more reserved, more on the shy side, right? Like, especially as a foreigner, people often complain about the difficulty of making friends. And so I found like, you really do have to do this kind of exposure to a weak tie sort of pathway that, yes, like spending enough time doing that river walk at the same time each morning and like saying hello or like saying good morning in Japanese to enough old people that now I've got like my little collection of river people and it's great, you know? And, and yeah, it's, it's not like they're my best friends or anything, But it is something that, at times when I've been in Japan and have felt really alone, that that's actually been something that's been really nice, that has helped me just kind of keep on keeping on, like still being able to, like, see a face that you recognize and say hello and have, like, a short conversation still helps to fill the tank.

Jase: And that those were ones where you-- I remember you doing that walk regularly, and you would start to tell me about the people you would see. You're like, oh, there's this couple that has this cute dog. Sometimes it's the man, sometimes it's the woman, but one of them's walking the dog. And I'll say hi to them, but they don't really talk to me besides saying hi back. And then after a few weeks of that, then you started having conversations with them. But it's like it kind of had to gradually happen, and it's not like you went in trying to be friends with them, but that weak tie just became a slightly stronger weak tie, I guess.

Dedeker: Yeah, as a foreigner, you really got to rely on the mere exposure effect.

Jase: Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. For sure. And then the third option to look at here is, this is actually from the Surgeon General's report that I was talking about that came out in 2023. And this is called the 5-for-5 Connection Challenge. So for five days, you take five actions that express gratitude, offer support, or ask for help. So examples of this would be like text a friend a photo of a shared memory and say you're thinking of them. Ask a coworker for their opinion on a project. It's like asking for help on something. Call a family member just to say hi. Offer to help a neighbor with a small task. You offer to help your neighbor with a small task. Neighbor change their tire if you see them out there with the tire iron. I don't know what it is, it's something. But to kind of take this challenge of for five days, I'm going to do one thing each day that's expressing gratitude, offering support to someone else, or asking for help. And I think in this case, it's like asking for small help, right? Like the asking your coworker to review a project you're working on or something like that. And the goal here is just to get you back in the habit of reaching out and connecting in these small, manageable 'cause overall, with all of these external things, the key here is to face your fears, but to do it in really small, manageable steps so that it's not so scary, and that you can kind of build on that and gradually feel less freaked out and scared by it. Wow. What a journey of loneliness we've had.

Emily: It feels hopeful, though, by the end here.

Jase: Yeah. It's a serious problem, but there are some things that we can do, right? Especially if we can work to build our communities to be more promoting of these things, of having these third spaces, and building more trust where we can, or at least making places where we feel safe. So thank you all for listening. We would love to hear from you. We're doing a little poll on our Instagram stories this week, and that is, how often do you feel lonely? Almost all the time, fairly often, occasionally, or almost never? Really curious to see how our listeners stock up on this. So go check that out on our Instagram @multiamory_podcast. The best place to share your thoughts with other listeners if you want to discuss this further is in our episode discussion channel on our Discord server or in our private Facebook group. You can get access to these groups and join our amazing community by going to multiamory.com/join. In addition, you can share publicly on Instagram @multiamory_podcast.

Jase: Multiamory is created and produced by Dedeker Winston, Emily Matlack, and me, Jase Lindgren. Our production assistants are Rachel Schenewerk and Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode’s page on multiamory.com.