September Wellness

Tag: Relationships

  • What If the Best Longevity Habit Is Having Somewhere to Be on Friday Night?

    What If the Best Longevity Habit Is Having Somewhere to Be on Friday Night?

    We count our steps, track our sleep, measure our protein and obsess over our “biological age.” But the people expecting us at dinner might be doing more for our health than all of it.

    There’s a certain kind of Friday night that gets more attractive with every birthday.

    It’s been a long week. The house is cozy. There’s something good queued up on TV, the fridge holds perfectly respectable leftovers, and the idea of showering, getting dressed, driving somewhere and making conversation feels like an unreasonable demand from society.

    Then your phone buzzes. We’re getting together at seven. Come.

    You hesitate. You’d have to fix your hair, find parking and put on real shoes instead of whatever you’ve been shuffling around in since noon. You were really looking forward to doing absolutely nothing.

    But you go. And three hours later you’ve laughed so hard your cheeks hurt, heard an outrageous story about someone’s dating life, argued about a restaurant none of you will ever actually try, and made plans with people you genuinely love. On the drive home, you’re so glad you didn’t stay on the couch.

    Funny how often that happens.

    We’ve gotten incredibly disciplined about certain parts of our health. We book trainers, monitor our sleep, take our supplements, talk about protein like we’re training for the Olympics and occasionally spend a small fortune finding out how old our cells supposedly are. But friendship? We assume it’ll just take care of itself.

    It won’t. And a growing pile of research suggests that having people in your life isn’t just nice. It’s tied to how well, and maybe how long, you live.

    So here’s my question. What if one of the most overlooked parts of aging well isn’t something we do to our bodies at all, but the people we make room for?

    The Research Is More Serious Than You’d Think

    In 2010, psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues published a study that should have been front-page news. They pooled 148 studies covering more than 308,000 people and looked at how social connection related to survival.

    The finding: people with stronger social relationships had about 50 percent higher odds of survival over the study periods than people with weaker ones.

    Before anyone ditches their cholesterol medication for a standing dinner reservation, a little perspective. That doesn’t mean friends cut your personal risk of dying in half, and it doesn’t prove friendship caused the difference. Healthier people may simply find it easier to keep up a social life, and income, disability and lifestyle all muddy the waters. But the link showed up across a huge range of people and measurements, and research since then keeps tying loneliness and isolation to worse health.

    In 2025, the World Health Organization released a major report estimating that about one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness, and linked loneliness to hundreds of thousands of deaths every year.

    We can, and should, debate exactly how to read those numbers. But we can probably stop treating friendship as a reward we get to enjoy after all the “important” health stuff is done. The people who remember your birthday, make you snort-laugh and notice when you’ve gone quiet deserve a lot more respect than that.

    More Ways to Talk, Fewer Reasons to Actually See Each Other

    Here’s a stat I can’t stop thinking about. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 38 percent of Americans 15 and older spent time socializing or communicating on an average day in 2015. By 2025, that had dropped to 30 percent. The average time spent fell from 41 minutes a day to 35.

    That doesn’t capture every chat that happens while we’re doing something else. But something has clearly shifted.

    And it’s such a strange contradiction. We can reach practically anyone, anytime. Group chats, video calls, social media, a thousand messaging apps. I can know that someone I haven’t talked to in six months had an oat-milk cappuccino in Barcelona last Tuesday. Keeping tabs on people has never been easier. Actually being in the same room with them? Somehow that’s gotten harder.

    We live farther apart. Work spills into the evenings. Families are scattered across time zones. Traffic turns a casual dinner into an expedition. And the older we get, the more our calendars fill with responsibilities that feel legitimate enough to cancel anything fun.

    Then there’s the convenience trap. Dinner arrives at the door. Movies arrive on the TV. Shopping arrives in boxes. Even meetings happen on a screen now. I’m not knocking it; I love grocery delivery as much as the next woman. But we’ve gotten frighteningly efficient at deleting all the little everyday moments where people used to bump into each other: the chat with a neighbor, the regulars at the coffee shop, the faces you saw every Tuesday whether you felt like going or not.

    Life got easier in a hundred ways. I’m not convinced it got any more connected.

    The People Who’d Notice If You Didn’t Show Up

    One of my favorite studies on this comes from the UK Biobank, which followed more than 450,000 adults for a median of about 12.6 years. Researchers looked at all kinds of connection: who people lived with, how lonely they felt, whether they had someone to confide in, group activities and visits with friends or family.

    People who said they never had friends or family visit had higher death rates than people who saw others more often, even after accounting for a long list of other factors. And here’s the part I love: visiting or being visited at least once a month seemed to mark a meaningful difference compared with less frequent contact.

    That’s not a medical prescription for one dinner party a month. It’s an observational study, and visiting patterns can reflect someone’s health or circumstances. But the idea is beautiful, because it’s not about having a dazzling social calendar. It’s about being woven into the ordinary fabric of other people’s lives.

    Think about who would notice if you just stopped showing up somewhere. Your walking buddy who expects you at eight every Saturday. The Thursday card group. The friend you always meet for lunch around the first of the month. The restaurant where they know your order and ask where you’ve been when you disappear for a few weeks.

    That’s a quiet kind of accountability. Not the kind that sends you a passive-aggressive notification for failing to close your rings. The human kind. Someone expects you. Someone remembers you. Someone notices when you’re gone. And being expected somewhere turns out to be a pretty wonderful feeling.

    Your Social Calendar Doesn’t Need to Be Impressive

    This is where the wellness world could easily ruin a good thing. I can already picture someone turning friendship into another optimization protocol: three social encounters a week, two meaningful conversations, one community engagement activity, plus a tracker that measures your “laughter minutes” and your “friendship recovery score.”

    Please, no. We have enough to manage.

    Besides, a packed calendar isn’t the same as a connected life. You can go to parties every weekend, know hundreds of people, belong to the most exclusive club in town and still feel profoundly alone. And you can live quietly, see a handful of people regularly and feel completely loved.

    The WHO actually draws a useful line here. Social isolation is about how many connections you have and how often you see them. Loneliness is the painful feeling that your relationships aren’t giving you what you need. They overlap, but they’re not the same thing. And quality matters enormously. A friendship you keep out of guilt, a dinner party that leaves you anxious and drained, a marriage where two people barely speak: none of those are good for you just because other humans are technically present.

    The goal isn’t to collect people. It’s to have people you genuinely feel connected to. Sometimes that’s a loud table of eight arguing about whether the restaurant went downhill after the chef left. Sometimes it’s one person who knows your entire history and never needs the edited version. Both count.

    Midlife Has a Sneaky Way of Shrinking Your World

    When we’re young, friendships practically happen by accident. School hands you classmates. College hands you roommates. Your first jobs hand you coworkers just as broke and exhausted as you, who are always up for a drink after work. Your kids hand you other parents, whether or not you have a single thing in common with them.

    Then life rearranges itself. The kids grow up. Work gets more demanding, or ends. People move. Someone gets divorced. Someone gets sick. A parent needs care. A spouse dies. And suddenly all those structures that used to bring people together with zero effort are just… gone. A friendship that thrived on seeing someone three times a week now depends on two people finding a free Thursday somewhere between dentist appointments, travel and grandkids.

    That’s what makes our 50s, 60s and 70s so tricky. Keeping relationships going gets less automatic at exactly the stage of life when they may matter more.

    A 2024 study of older Americans found that many had cut back on going to restaurants, gyms, cultural venues and recreation spots after the pandemic, and some felt it was still affecting their social and emotional well-being. The researchers talked about the importance of “third places,” the spots outside home and work where we naturally run into other people: coffee shops, libraries, walking groups, neighborhood restaurants, community centers, places of worship. Not every moment has to be a deep conversation. Sometimes it’s just good to be somewhere other people are.

    Not Every Friendship Is Meant to Come With You

    There’s another side to friendship in midlife that we don’t talk about nearly enough. Sometimes the people who’ve been part of our lives for years aren’t necessarily the people who’ll be there for the next chapter.

    And sometimes that discovery hurts.

    I had a very close friend for years. We spent time together regularly, went out to dinner just the two of us, socialized as couples and shared the kind of history that makes you assume someone will always be part of your life. After my husband died, though, something changed. The friendship started feeling different, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

    A couple of years later, when I finally confronted the distance between us, she admitted something I wasn’t expecting. She preferred me, and our friendship, when I was still married.

    Well. That’s a difficult thing to hear.

    I don’t think she necessarily intended to be hurtful. And I can’t speak to everything she was feeling. But it made me realize how much a friendship can depend on the circumstances in which it developed. We weren’t just two women who enjoyed each other’s company. We were also part of a familiar social arrangement, with husbands, couples’ dinners and a particular rhythm to our lives.

    When my life changed, apparently the friendship changed with it.

    This isn’t some universal truth about married and single friends. Plenty of friendships become stronger through widowhood, divorce, illness and other major transitions. But some don’t. And when you’re in your 50s or 60s, you’ve lived long enough to discover that even relationships with years of history aren’t necessarily permanent.

    There’s a difference, though, between giving a friendship room to adjust and spending years trying to preserve something the other person no longer seems interested in maintaining.

    People get busy. They go through difficult periods. They sometimes say the wrong thing or don’t know how to show up when life gets complicated. None of that automatically makes them bad friends, and not every disappointing moment deserves a dramatic friendship breakup.

    But when the effort becomes consistently one-sided, when you no longer feel welcomed as the person you are today, or when maintaining the relationship requires pretending your life hasn’t changed, it’s reasonable to ask whether that friendship still belongs in your life.

    You can appreciate the years you shared without insisting there must be more of them.

    And maybe that’s one of the harder lessons of midlife. As much as we need connection, we also need friendships that can make room for the people we’re becoming, not just the people we used to be.

    So How Do You Actually Make New Friends at This Age?

    Here’s the part nobody tells you. Since my husband passed, I’ve been reinventing a lot of my life, and I can tell you there’s no rulebook for making friends at 50-something. Nobody hands you a syllabus. There’s no recess.

    But there is some research, and it’s both reassuring and a little humbling.

    Communication researcher Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas set out to answer a question most of us have never thought to ask: how long does it actually take to make a friend? His answer: roughly 50 hours together to go from acquaintance to casual friend, around 90 hours to become a real friend, and more than 200 hours to become close friends.

    Two hundred hours! That’s not one great lunch. That’s a lot of lunches. Which explains so much about why it’s so hard to make new friends as adults. When we were kids, we racked up those hours without even trying: eight hours a day at school, every summer at camp, every weekend at the same soccer field. As adults, we expect a friendship to blossom after two coffees and a text exchange, then quietly decide it “just didn’t click.”

    The real secret isn’t charm. It’s repetition. Friendship is mostly what happens when you keep showing up near the same people.

    And there’s more good news. Psychologists have discovered something called the “liking gap.” After a conversation with someone new, people consistently underestimate how much the other person liked them. You walk away replaying the awkward joke you made, while they walk away thinking you were delightful. In other words, the person you’re nervous about approaching probably likes you more than you think.

    Researchers have also found that we underestimate how much people appreciate it when we reach out out of the blue. That “I was just thinking about you” text you’ve been too shy to send? The person receiving it will likely be far happier to get it than you’d guess.

    So here’s how the hours actually add up:

    • Pick something recurring. A weekly class, a standing walking group, a regular volunteer shift. Repetition does the heavy lifting.
    • Be the inviter. Most people are waiting for someone else to go first. Be the one who says, “A few of us are grabbing coffee after. Want to come?”
    • Follow up fast. If you click with someone, suggest a second meeting within a week or two, before life swallows the momentum.
    • Lower the bar. Not every acquaintance needs to become your soulmate. Some will be “walking friends” or “book club friends.” That’s not failure. That’s a full life.

    Yes, it can feel awkward. Nobody wants to be the 59-year-old version of the kid standing at the edge of the playground asking, “Want to play?” But honestly, I think it’s time we got over that particular embarrassment. Everyone else at the edge of the playground is secretly hoping someone will ask.

    The Secret Matchmaker: Picking Up Something New

    If making friends from scratch sounds exhausting, here’s a sneakier strategy: find a new hobby and let it do the matchmaking for you.

    When you join a pottery class, a pickleball league, a hiking club, a choir or a language course, you get a built-in reason to show up week after week, a built-in topic of conversation, and a room full of people who already share at least one thing in common with you. All those hours Jeffrey Hall says you need start piling up without anyone having to awkwardly propose a “friend date.”

    And here’s the bonus your brain will love. In a study called the Synapse Project, researcher Denise Park and her team had older adults spend about 15 hours a week for three months learning a demanding new skill: digital photography, quilting, or both. Compared with groups who did easier activities or just socialized, the people learning challenging new skills showed bigger improvements in memory.

    So learning something genuinely new and a little hard appears to be good for your brain. And doing it alongside other people is good for your social life. That’s a two-for-one deal you won’t find at any longevity clinic.

    A few tips for picking something that sticks:

    • Choose something slightly out of your comfort zone. Being a beginner again is humbling, but that’s exactly what makes it good for you, and it’s a great equalizer. Nobody looks cool on their first day of salsa class.
    • Pick something with a group built in. Solo hobbies are wonderful too, but if connection is the goal, choose something you do with other people.
    • Give it more than one try. The first class is always the weirdest. Commit to at least four or five sessions before deciding whether it’s for you.
    • Let it be fun. This isn’t another self-improvement project. If you hate it, quit and try something else. The point is joy, not a merit badge.

    Maybe it’s finally learning to paint. Maybe it’s the tennis you gave up in your 30s, or the guitar gathering dust in the closet, or that Korean cooking class you keep scrolling past. Reinvention doesn’t have to be dramatic. Sometimes it starts with signing up for something on a Tuesday night.

    The Best Social Habit Is the One You Don’t Have to Organize

    This is why I love the idea of a standing Friday-night dinner. Not because Fridays have some magical longevity power. They don’t. But because a recurring plan wipes out the single biggest obstacle to friendship: the exhausting work of arranging it.

    You know the routine.

    We should get together soon!

    Totally! Let’s plan something.

    Next month?

    Perfect.

    Six months later you’ve exchanged fifteen texts, a couple of holiday greetings and exactly zero meals. Nobody meant for that to happen. Everybody genuinely likes everybody. Life just has an incredible talent for filling every empty square on the calendar.

    A standing date fixes that. The Wednesday walk. The Sunday breakfast. The monthly dinner. The Thursday pickleball game, assuming everyone survives the competitive trash talk. It doesn’t need to be expensive or exciting. It just needs to become part of your life instead of something you have to keep remembering to schedule.

    And it sneaks other good habits in too. A walking partner gets you outside. Cooking for friends means a real meal instead of another dinner eaten standing over the kitchen sink. A plan gets you off the couch on a day you might have stayed planted there. Friendship isn’t a replacement for exercise, good food, sleep or your doctor, but it makes all of those a lot more fun, and a lot more likely to last.

    And If You Genuinely Love Your Own Company? Good.

    Before this turns into a lecture about being surrounded by people 24/7, a word for the solitude lovers. Being alone is not the same as being lonely.

    Some people need lots of quiet time. Some prefer a couple of deep friendships to a crowded calendar. Some are happily single, deeply content with their routines and have zero interest in joining a committee just to improve their odds of survival. All of that is perfectly fine. The goal isn’t to become an extrovert.

    It’s also worth acknowledging that socializing isn’t equally easy for everyone. Limited mobility, caregiving duties, unreliable transportation or money worries can make accepting invitations much harder. And some relationships are sources of stress, not comfort. More contact isn’t always better contact.

    What matters is whether the connections you have are enough for the life you actually want. For one person, that’s a partner, two close friends and a weekly call with a sister. For another, it’s a house full of people every weekend. There’s no correct social personality. But it’s worth paying attention if your world is getting smaller in ways you didn’t choose.

    We’ve Made Longevity Complicated. Friendship Was Complicated Enough.

    There’s something almost comical about modern longevity culture next to the ordinary work of keeping friends.

    We’ll happily book elaborate medical workups, buy gadgets that measure bodily functions we didn’t know existed, and research molecules whose names require a chemistry degree to pronounce. But inviting someone over for dinner can sit on our to-do list for three months.

    Maybe it’s because friendship doesn’t feel like a measurable achievement. Nobody hands you a score afterward. There’s no supplement promising to boost your social connectedness by 37 percent. Nobody sends a congratulatory email when you’ve spent a perfect evening laughing with people you love.

    And unlike a wellness purchase, relationships ask something of us. We have to show up when we’re tired. Listen when someone else needs to vent. Remember what’s going on in their lives. Forgive the occasional annoying habit. Make the effort when we’d rather stay home. There’s no one-click subscription for any of that.

    But maybe that’s exactly why relationships matter so much. They make us part of a life bigger than our own. And as we get older, when careers change, kids leave and the familiar scaffolding of daily life shifts, that sense of belonging may be one of the things that helps us feel most like ourselves.

    I’m not promising that a busy social life guarantees a long one. Nobody can promise that. But in our very serious quest to add years to our lives, we might want to pay a little more attention to what makes those years worth living.

    THE SEPTEMBER TAKE

    We’ve gotten so good at treating longevity like a solo project. We measure our bodies, manage our diets, schedule our workouts and chase the next thing that might buy us a few more healthy years. Meanwhile, a friend has been trying to get us to dinner for three weeks, and we still haven’t texted back.

    Friendship after 50 doesn’t happen by accident anymore. It takes repetition, a little courage and probably a new hobby or two. It also means recognizing that some friendships will change, and some won’t survive the changes in our lives. We can appreciate the people who were part of our past without feeling obligated to carry every relationship into our future.

    But the people who make us laugh, notice when we go missing, accept us as we are today and give us something to look forward to deserve a permanent spot in our wellness routine.

    Do This Week

    1. Say yes to the thing you’d normally skip.

    The dinner, the walk, the coffee, the invitation that sounds lovely but requires putting on real shoes. You don’t have to say yes to everything. Just notice how often convenience makes the decision for you.

    2. Put one friendship on the calendar.

    Not “we should get together sometime.” An actual day. An actual plan. Ideally one that doesn’t require twelve texts and a scheduling committee.

    3. Make something recurring.

    A monthly lunch, a weekly walk, a standing Sunday breakfast. The less organizing it takes, the better the odds it actually happens.

    4. Sign up for something new.

    A class, a club, a league, a choir. Pick something a little outside your comfort zone that meets regularly, and commit to showing up at least four or five times. Let the hobby do the matchmaking.

    5. Send the text you’ve been putting off.

    There’s someone you genuinely like whom you haven’t talked to in ages. “Hey, I was just thinking about you. How have you been?” is all it takes, and research says they’ll be happier to hear from you than you think.

    6. Become a regular somewhere.

    A café, a walking group, a volunteer shift, a neighborhood spot. Somewhere you’ll see familiar faces without having to plan an event every time.

    When we picture living longer, we usually imagine the things we’ll still be able to do: travel, walk without pain, think clearly, stay independent, have the energy to enjoy the life we worked so hard to build. All worth chasing.

    But I keep coming back to that Friday-night text. Because sometimes what makes a life feel rich isn’t one more improvement we’ve made to ourselves. It’s a familiar voice across the table, someone who’s heard our favorite story a hundred times and still laughs, and the comfort of knowing there are people who want us around.

    If getting older gives us anything worth protecting, having people to share it with belongs right at the top of the list.

    This article is for educational purposes and is not individualized medical or mental health advice. Research linking social relationships with health and longevity is largely observational and does not establish that any particular social activity will prevent disease or extend an individual’s lifespan. Social needs vary, and not all relationships are beneficial. Persistent loneliness or emotional distress may warrant support from a qualified healthcare or mental health professional.

    Sources & Further Reading

    1. Holt-Lunstad J, Smith TB, Layton JB. Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review. PLOS Medicine, 2010.A landmark analysis of 148 studies involving more than 308,000 people, finding a substantial association between stronger social relationships and survival.
    2. World Health Organization Commission on Social Connection. From Loneliness to Social Connection: Charting a Path to Healthier Societies. World Health Organization, 2025.A major global report examining loneliness, social isolation, their effects on health and the importance of strengthening social connections.
    3. Office of the U.S. Surgeon General. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023.A comprehensive review of how social connection relates to physical health, mental wellbeing and the communities in which we live.
    4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. American Time Use Survey — 2025 Results. June 2026.National data documenting how Americans spend their time, including changes in daily socializing and communication between 2015 and 2025.
    5. Foster HME, et al. Social Connection and Mortality in UK Biobank: A Prospective Cohort Analysis. BMC Medicine, 2023.A large study examining how living arrangements, loneliness, group activities and visits with friends or family relate to mortality risk.
    6. Finlay J, Meltzer G, O’Shea B, Kobayashi L. Altered Place Engagement Since COVID-19: A Multi-method Study of Community Participation and Health Among Older Americans. Wellbeing, Space and Society, 2024.Research exploring how changes in older adults’ use of restaurants, recreational facilities and other community spaces affected their social lives and wellbeing.
    7. Hall JA. How Many Hours Does It Take to Make a Friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2019.Research estimating the time people typically spend together as relationships develop, including the widely discussed 50-, 90- and 200-hour friendship milestones.
    8. Boothby EJ, Cooney G, Sandstrom GM, Clark MS. The Liking Gap in Conversations: Do People Like Us More Than We Think? Psychological Science, 2018.Research demonstrating that people often underestimate how much others like them following a conversation, helping explain why making new friends can feel more intimidating than it needs to.
    9. Park DC, Lodi-Smith J, Drew L, et al. The Impact of Sustained Engagement on Cognitive Function in Older Adults: The Synapse Project. Psychological Science, 2014.A study finding that older adults who spent several months learning challenging new skills, such as photography or quilting, showed improvements in episodic memory relative to comparison groups.
    10. Liu PJ, Rim S, Min L, Min KE. The Surprise of Reaching Out: Appreciated More Than We Think. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023.A series of experiments showing that people frequently underestimate how much someone else will appreciate an unexpected message or gesture of connection.
  • What Happens to Men When They Stop Feeling Desirable?

    What Happens to Men When They Stop Feeling Desirable?

    The male loneliness epidemic, the new rules of dating, and the slightly uncomfortable question of what makes a man feel wanted after 50.

    Get a table of single women in their 40s, 50s and 60s talking long enough, and somebody will eventually bring up the male loneliness epidemic. Usually with a raised eyebrow and a refill.

    The conversation tends to go like this. Men say they’re lonely. Women say maybe men should think about why so many women are perfectly happy alone. Men say dating is impossible, the expectations are ridiculous and women only want guys with money. Women say they pay their own mortgages, thank you very much, and would just like a man who can hold a conversation, pull his weight and load the dishwasher without needing a standing ovation for it.

    It’s a fun argument. Right up until you notice how much real hurt is sitting underneath it.

    Because somewhere out there is a 57-year-old man who just got divorced. Money’s tight. Younger guys at work are getting the promotions he used to get. And the dating world he’s walked back into looks nothing like the one he left in 1994. He can’t swing the fancy gym, the hair transplant or the trainer, and some nights he can’t even swing the dinners that seem to come with the territory. He’s quietly wondering if anyone will ever find him attractive again.

    Across town, another man the same age has all of it. The money, the gym body, a little discreet work done, and the confidence to walk up to women twenty years younger. On paper he’s winning. And yet he might be lying awake over the exact same question.

    Meanwhile, plenty of women their age have discovered they’re rather enjoying their independence. They’ve built careers and friendships and homes they love, and they’re genuinely puzzled why a relationship should count as an upgrade unless it actually improves something.

    That’s quite a collision.

    We’ve spent decades rethinking what women are allowed to want out of life. Careers, independence, money, sex, companionship, or none of the above. I’m not sure we’ve spent nearly as long thinking about what happens to men when the old measures of their worth (the paycheck, the muscles, the sex appeal, the ability to provide) start to slip.

    So the question I keep landing on isn’t why some men are lonely, or why some women don’t want to date them. It’s this: what happens when everything a man was raised to believe would make him valuable stops guaranteeing that anyone wants him?

    The Loneliness Epidemic Has an Inconvenient Little Wrinkle

    Let’s start with a fact that doesn’t fit the narrative.

    Men don’t actually report being lonelier than women. In a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 6,000 American adults, men and women said they felt lonely or isolated all or most of the time at about the same rates. Around 16 percent of adults felt that way often. And the loneliest group wasn’t men over 50. It was young adults.

    So if you’ve been picturing millions of abandoned 60-year-old men sitting in dark living rooms while their ex-wives sip rosé at book club, the data doesn’t really back you up.

    But that same survey turned up something more interesting. Women were much more likely to say they’d reach out to someone when they were struggling. When asked how likely they’d be to turn to a friend, 54 percent of women said very or extremely likely. Only 38 percent of men said the same.

    And the friendship numbers for men are honestly a little heartbreaking. The Survey Center on American Life found that in 1990, just 3 percent of American men said they had no close friends. By 2021, it was 15 percent. Men with six or more close friends dropped from 55 percent to 27 percent. Women’s circles shrank too, but men’s took the bigger hit.

    These are different surveys asking different questions, so I won’t pretend they add up to one tidy epidemic. But they point at something real. Feeling lonely is one problem. Having nobody you’d feel comfortable telling that you’re lonely is another, and for a lot of men, I suspect it’s the bigger one.

    When Your Wife Is Your Entire Emotional Support Department

    Think about how adult friendship works for a lot of us. Many women have the girlfriend they call twice a week, the sister they tell everything, the group chat that’s survived three decades of kids, divorces, job changes and bad haircuts. Obviously not every woman has that, and plenty of men have wonderful, close friendships.

    But a lot of men have historically routed most of their emotional life through one person: their wife.

    In a 2021 Survey Center analysis, 85 percent of married men said their spouse was the first person they’d go to with a personal problem. For married women, it was 72 percent.

    Now imagine that marriage ends.

    He hasn’t just lost the person he ate dinner with and slept next to. He may have lost his best friend, his therapist, his social secretary, his link to half his friends, and the one person who knew something was wrong before he said a word. Suddenly finding a new partner doesn’t feel like dating. It feels like finding his way back into the world.

    That’s a lot to put on a first date.

    She thinks she’s meeting a nice man for a glass of wine. He’s sitting across from her, quietly interviewing her for girlfriend, best friend, emotional support system and weekend social director, all at once. She’s still trying to decide whether his jokes are funny. He’s already picturing how much better Sundays would be with her in them.

    Nobody’s doing anything wrong here. They just walked in with wildly different needs.

    Which makes me wonder whether some of what we call a dating crisis is really a friendship crisis that only becomes obvious once dating doesn’t work out.

    Some Women Aren’t Holding Out for a Better Man. They’re Not Looking at All.

    Here’s a number that deserves more attention than it gets.

    According to Pew’s 2022 data, half of single American men were looking for a relationship or casual dates. Only 35 percent of single women were. And interest drops off a cliff with age. Among single adults 65 and older, just 16 percent were looking for romance at all.

    Think about what that means for a man in his 60s. He assumes he’s competing with other men for women his age. In reality, a big chunk of those women aren’t in the competition. They’re not waiting for someone richer, taller or younger. They’re just busy enjoying the life they spent decades building.

    Maybe she raised the kids, ran the household, took care of her parents and survived a marriage or a messy divorce. Maybe she’s discovered she loves deciding things without a committee, keeping the house exactly how she likes it, and traveling without negotiating over whether anyone else wants to see the museum.

    For some women, being single isn’t an awkward layover between relationships. It’s the destination.

    That doesn’t mean older women have stopped wanting love or sex or company. Plenty are dating with enthusiasm, and plenty of older men are happily single themselves. But it does mean a man who wants a partner shouldn’t assume there’s an equally eager woman waiting in his age bracket. There may just be fewer of them than he thinks.

    And when she says no, it may have nothing to do with him. Sometimes the competition isn’t another man at all. It’s her own peaceful, uncomplicated, really quite lovely life.

    So What Exactly Are Women Asking Men to Bring?

    This is where things get a little combustible.

    Ask single women why some men struggle to date and you’ll hear about emotional unavailability, lousy communication, and men who want a traditional wife without noticing that women’s lives changed about forty years ago. Ask frustrated men and you’ll hear about impossible financial standards, dating apps, expensive first dates and never knowing what women actually want.

    Before picking a side, it helps to see how much the money side of marriage has already shifted. A 2023 Pew analysis found that in 29 percent of opposite-sex marriages, husbands and wives earned about the same, and in another 16 percent, the wife was the main or only breadwinner. Yet even when the paychecks were equal, women were still doing more of the housework and caregiving.

    You can see the friction. A woman who earns her own money is going to ask, fairly, why she should also do most of the cooking, cleaning and remembering everyone’s birthdays. Meanwhile, a man raised to believe that being a good husband meant working hard and providing for his family may be honestly confused when that’s no longer enough.

    Nobody has to be a villain for this to be true. The job description for a good partner just got longer.

    Money still matters to plenty of people. So do attraction, kindness, reliability, chemistry and shared interests. But for a woman who can already support herself, whether a man actually shows up in daily life may matter more than it ever did for our grandmothers, who frankly didn’t get much say.

    He’s proud he never missed a day of work in thirty years. She’d mostly like to know if he listens when she’s had a rotten day. He thinks he’s describing commitment. She’s evaluating companionship. Half the time, neither of them realizes they’re speaking different languages.

    And Money Still Matters. Quite a Lot, Actually.

    Before we congratulate ourselves on having completely modernized romance, let’s be honest: money hasn’t left the building. Especially for men.

    A 2023 study in Biodemography and Social Biology analyzed census data on roughly 7.1 million Americans across several generations. In the oldest groups, a man’s income barely predicted whether he’d ever marry. In the most recent group, it predicted it much more strongly.

    That doesn’t mean women are all gold-diggers, and it doesn’t prove money causes marriage. Income shapes where you live, who you meet and how stable your life is, and marriage can boost earnings too. But it does blow up the comforting idea that a man’s finances no longer matter to his love life.

    Now picture that divorced 57-year-old again. He may be competing with younger workers, trying to rebuild his retirement account, dealing with a cranky knee or blood pressure, and walking into a dating scene where an ordinary night out can cost a small fortune. If he believes being a provider is the core of who he is, a thin bank account doesn’t just feel like a budget problem. It feels like proof that he’s failing at being a man.

    And midlife careers are not exactly a safe harbor. AARP research updated in 2026 found that 64 percent of workers 50 and older had seen or experienced age discrimination at work, and 22 percent said they felt pushed out of a job because of their age. Those are reported experiences, not proven cases, but they explain why job security after 50 isn’t something anyone should take for granted. AARP’s 2025 loneliness survey also found that 63 percent of adults 45 and older earning under $25,000 a year met its definition of lonely. That includes women too, but it shows how often money trouble and isolation travel together.

    So the wealthy man wonders whether she likes him or his money. The struggling man wonders whether anyone could like him without it. Different problems, same fear underneath. Would anyone still pick me if I couldn’t offer what I always thought made me worth picking?

    The Men Who Seem to Have It All

    Money brings its own drama at the other end of the spectrum.

    In certain zip codes around here (you know the ones), it’s not hard to find men in their 50s and 60s putting serious effort into staying competitive with guys half their age. Perfect hair. A physique that clearly has a personal trainer and possibly a chef. Very nice clothes. A face that looks suspiciously well rested.

    And every so often, there’s the unprompted announcement that he “usually dates women in their 20s and 30s.” Which is interesting information to volunteer to someone who didn’t ask.

    To be clear, adults of different ages can date whoever they like, and caring about your looks doesn’t automatically mean you’re insecure. Some men just enjoy looking good and prefer younger partners. Fine.

    But when a man makes a point of telling you how young the women he dates are, it’s fair to wonder whether he’s sharing a preference or showing you a trophy. Being wanted can be a very seductive kind of validation. He may have the career, the money and the beautiful house and still need proof that he hasn’t gone invisible to younger women. Or it may have nothing to do with that. I’m not going to diagnose anyone over a martini.

    The bigger question is still worth asking, though. What happens when getting attention stops being fun and becomes something you have to keep proving?

    And notice how rigged the rules are. Look your age and people wonder why you let yourself go. Look twenty years younger and they wonder what you’re so afraid of. Apparently the goal is to stay attractive without letting anyone see you try. (We’ll dig into that particular contradiction, and how money decides who gets to fight aging, in a separate piece.)

    For now, here’s the point. Having the money to stay conventionally desirable doesn’t cure the need to feel desired. Sometimes it just makes the need more expensive.

    When Disappointment Curdles Into Resentment

    This is the hardest part of the whole conversation, so let me tread carefully.

    When women talk about dating, there’s a common view that men are responsible for a lot of their own misery. And sometimes that’s fair. There are men who won’t go anywhere near emotional intimacy, who expect a 1955 marriage, who neglected every friendship they ever had, or who handle rejection very, very badly.

    But it’s a mistake to assume every lonely man earned it.

    A man can be kind, emotionally available and genuinely looking for companionship and still not meet anyone. Maybe he lives somewhere with slim pickings. Maybe he’s got health problems, works brutal hours, or just doesn’t have the confidence or the cash to get out much. Rejection stings even when nobody did anything wrong.

    The real question is what he does with it. One man pulls back. Another reaches out to old friends, rethinks what he’s looking for, or makes more of an effort to build a social life. And some start looking for someone to blame. Women want too much. The game is rigged. Younger guys have every advantage. Things were better before women got so independent.

    The internet is more than happy to hand those men a microphone and an increasingly nasty vocabulary. But there’s an interesting complication in the research. A 2025 study of younger British men found that loneliness itself didn’t significantly predict hostility toward women, and romantic rejection explained relatively little. Being lonely, in other words, doesn’t automatically make a man angry at women. Something more complicated is happening when disappointment turns into blame.

    But it’s exactly why we need to hold two things at once. A man can be genuinely suffering. He may have been treated unfairly. He may feel embarrassed, shut out and hopeless. None of that makes women responsible for giving him a relationship.

    And the flip side matters too. The fact that some men are hostile doesn’t make male loneliness a punchline, or something men deserve, or not worth caring about.

    You can feel for someone’s pain and still disagree with the story they’ve decided to tell about it. I’d argue that’s what grown-ups do.

    Maybe We’ve Been Asking Men the Wrong Question

    When we talk about aging well around here, it’s usually about health. Muscle, heart, brain, sex life, independence. All worth the attention.

    But there’s a part of aging that gets almost none: how you stay connected when the roles that organized your whole life start falling away.

    For a lot of men, work supplies the structure, the status, the sense of achievement and most of the social contact. Marriage supplies the companionship. Kids supply the purpose. A strong, capable body supplies the confidence. Then midlife shows up and starts rearranging the furniture. The kids leave. The career shifts. Parents die. The marriage ends, or gets quieter. The body gets less predictable. The social calendar that used to fill itself now requires actual effort.

    If a man has always measured himself by what he earns, provides, accomplishes or attracts, those changes can feel like losing himself.

    But maybe he hasn’t stopped being valuable. Maybe he’s just been using a very narrow ruler.

    Think about the men you know who seem genuinely at ease with getting older. Not just the rich ones or the handsome ones. I mean the ones with real friends, actual hobbies, a good sense of humor, a generous heart and a life that doesn’t depend on being admired. They may still want romance. They may still care how they look and enjoy their sex lives. They might miss parts of being young. But they don’t seem to need constant proof that they’re still winning.

    That’s attractive. Truly. And unlike money, great hair or an impressive title, it’s available to anyone, no membership required.

    I’m not pretending it’s easy to build that kind of life, especially for men dealing with disability, money trouble, grief or real isolation. Connection takes time, opportunity and sometimes help that isn’t equally available to everyone.

    But maybe the conversation needs a new direction. Instead of only asking why women aren’t choosing certain men, we could also ask how men can build lives where being chosen romantically isn’t their only source of connection. And instead of assuming every single woman is a reluctant player in the dating game, we could accept that a full life doesn’t look the same for everyone.

    It won’t settle the dating debate. But it might make it a lot less bitter.

    THE SEPTEMBER TAKE

    We’ve gotten so wrapped up in arguing over whether modern women expect too much and modern men bring too little that we’ve almost forgotten the actual people in the middle. Some men are genuinely lonely. Some women are genuinely happier single. Some people’s expectations are ridiculous, and plenty of others are just trying to find someone kind, attractive and compatible without it turning into a second full-time job.

    The answer isn’t to talk women into wanting men they don’t want. It’s to stop teaching men that being wanted is the final verdict on what they’re worth.

    Do This Week

    1. Count your people, not your relationship status.

    If something truly awful happened tomorrow, who would you call? Not just someone to watch football with or grab a drink, but someone you could tell the truth to. If you can’t name anyone, that’s worth addressing whether you’re married, dating or happily solo.

    2. Look at the expectations you inherited.

    If you expect a partner to bring financial security, emotional support, a clean house or a social life, ask yourself what you’re bringing in return. It doesn’t have to be identical. It does have to be mutual.

    3. Stop treating “no thanks” as a referendum on your worth.

    When someone turns down a date, she’s not grading you as a human being. Attraction is weird, compatibility is specific, and nobody appeals to everybody. It can hurt without meaning the universe has it in for you.

    4. Build a life that has nothing to do with dating.

    Call an old friend. Join something you’d actually enjoy. Volunteer, take a class, become a regular at a coffee shop where they know your name. A social life isn’t the consolation prize for not having a partner. It’s part of having a life.

    5. Get curious about how the other side sees it.

    Men and women can have completely different frustrations in the same dating pool. Understanding theirs doesn’t mean agreeing with every complaint. It just means your experience isn’t the whole story.

    There’s nothing more human than wanting to be wanted. It doesn’t expire at 50, 60 or 70, and there’s nothing embarrassing about it. We all want to feel attractive and interesting and important to somebody.

    But if there’s one thing worth rethinking as we get older, it’s how much power we hand other people’s approval over the way we see ourselves.

    Being desired is lovely. Having a life worth living whether anyone’s desiring you at the moment or not? That’s the real prize.

    This article is for educational and editorial purposes. It discusses population-level research, cultural attitudes and relationship experiences rather than providing individualized psychological or mental health advice. Survey findings describe associations and self-reported experiences; they do not establish the motivations or behavior of any individual man or woman. People experiencing persistent loneliness, depression or emotional distress may benefit from support from a qualified mental health professional.

    Sources & Further Reading

    1. Goddard I, Parker K. Men, Women and Social Connections. Pew Research Center, 2025.A national survey examining loneliness, friendships and where men and women turn for emotional support. The findings complicate the popular idea that men are necessarily lonelier than women.
    2. Cox DA. The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss. Survey Center on American Life, 2021.Research documenting the decline in close friendships among Americans, including the growing proportion of men reporting that they have no close friends.
    3. Cox DA. Can Married Men and Women Be Friends? Marriage, Friendship, and Loneliness. Survey Center on American Life, 2021.An examination of how married men and women maintain friendships and rely on their spouses for emotional support.
    4. Pew Research Center. 5 Facts About Single Americans for Valentine’s Day. Pew Research Center, 2023.Survey findings comparing single men’s and women’s interest in dating, including the particularly low proportion of older singles actively seeking relationships.
    5. Brown A. Nearly Half of U.S. Adults Say Dating Has Gotten Harder for Most People in the Last 10 Years. Pew Research Center, 2020.An exploration of modern dating experiences, changing expectations and the frustrations men and women encounter while looking for relationships.
    6. Fry R, Aragão C, Hurst K, Parker K. In a Growing Share of U.S. Marriages, Husbands and Wives Earn About the Same. Pew Research Center, 2023.Research examining changes in married couples’ earnings and the persistent differences in household work and caregiving responsibilities.
    7. Fieder M, Huber S. Increasing Pressure on US Men for Income in Order to Find a Spouse. Biodemography and Social Biology, 2023.An analysis of millions of U.S. census records showing that men’s income has become a stronger statistical predictor of whether they have ever married across successive birth cohorts.
    8. Perron R. Age Discrimination Persists Among Older Workers. AARP Research, updated 2026.Survey findings documenting reported workplace age discrimination and concerns about job security among American workers aged 50 and older.
    9. AARP Research. AARP Survey: Why Are Older Adults So Lonely? AARP, 2025.Research exploring loneliness among adults aged 45 and older, including differences associated with income and other demographic circumstances.
    10. Zhang J, Mollandsøy AB, Nornes C, Erevik EK, Pallesen S. Predicting Hostility Towards Women: Incel-Related Factors in a General Sample of Men. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 2025.A study of 473 single heterosexual British men aged 18–35 examining loneliness, romantic rejection and other factors associated with hostility toward women. Its findings challenge the assumption that loneliness alone predicts misogynistic attitudes, although the younger sample limits how directly the results apply to men in midlife.