Men Over 45 Report More Loneliness Than Women, but Only in One Survey Group

Checked against primary sources by the Editorial Team. Every figure in this article was traced to the study it came from, including the ones that contradict what we previously published. How we review.

You may have seen the headline: men are lonelier than women for the first time. We published a version of it ourselves. After tracing every number to its source, we think the claim needs to be narrower, and the explanation needs to be more modest than we made it.

What the AARP survey found

In August 2025, AARP surveyed 3,276 U.S. residents aged 45 and older through the Ipsos KnowledgePanel. Overall, 40% of them reported being lonely. Men reported it more often than women: 42% versus 37%.

AARP describes this as a shift from the gender parity it saw in 2018. That is the part of the story we can support: in this particular survey series, men and women used to look alike, and in 2025 they did not.

Two things we cannot support. First, the phrase "for the first time in survey history." AARP's own wording is narrower. It compares 2025 with its 2018 survey of the same age group, not with every survey ever run. Second, the specific 2018 percentages and a statistic about men and women having no close friends, both of which appeared in our earlier version. We could not open a source that states them, so we have removed them.

Why this is not a story about all men

The AARP sample starts at 45. When Pew Research Center surveyed 6,204 U.S. adults of all ages in September 2024, it found something different. Men and women were about equally likely to say they feel lonely all or most of the time: 16% of men and 15% of women. Pew also found that men and women were about equally likely to have at least one close friend.

The two surveys ask different questions, use different age ranges, and were fielded a year apart, so they do not contradict each other. Together they say that a man's loneliness risk is not a fixed fact about being male. It appears to depend on life stage, and the gap in AARP's data shows up in midlife and beyond.

Age matters a great deal on its own. Pew found that 24% of adults aged 18 to 29 feel lonely all or most of the time, compared with 8% of adults 65 and older. If you are a man in his twenties, the loneliness data looks quite different from what AARP found in his father's generation.

Where men and women do differ

The clearest difference in the Pew data is who people turn to when they need emotional support. Asked how likely they would be to turn to each source, men and women answered the same about a spouse or partner: 74% of each. After that the gap opens:

• Friend: 38% of men, 54% of women
• Mother: 42% of men, 54% of women
• Other family member: 26% of men, 44% of women
• Mental health professional: 16% of men, 22% of women

For many men, then, a partner is the main source of support and everyone else is far behind. That pattern leaves little cushion if the partner relationship ends, a spouse dies, or a job that supplied daily contact goes away. We want to be careful here: Pew measured where people say they would turn, not why they lack other options, and the data does not show that this pattern caused the AARP gap.

What we removed

Our earlier version listed four causes: remote work, the decline of lodges and civic clubs, more parental involvement, and divorce. It stated them as the reasons for male loneliness. We went looking for studies that test those explanations against the AARP gap and did not find one we could open and read. They may be sensible guesses, and some of them may well be part of the picture. We cannot call them findings, so they are no longer in the article.

We also changed how we describe the health stakes. The U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory says that lacking social connection can increase the risk of premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. We earlier wrote that it is equivalent to 15 cigarettes daily, which dropped the words "up to" and made the comparison sound exact. It also applies to people of any gender.

What this means if you are a man reading this

Nothing in these surveys says you are broken, and nothing says your situation is inevitable. They say that loneliness in midlife is common (four in ten of AARP's respondents), that men in that group report it somewhat more than women, and that many men rely on one or two people for emotional support.

The practical implication is modest and does not need a study to be useful: if your support runs through one relationship, adding a second and third source of contact is a sensible hedge. Keep the bar low. A standing weekly walk or a regular call asks very little of either person and tends to survive busy weeks better than an open ended plan to catch up sometime.