Is There A Female Loneliness Epidemic?

Not to brag about being ahead of the curve or anything, but I had been giving it some thought. I’ve written a few pieces about modern loneliness, especially in response to toxic dating dynamics and the self-disintegration that comes with being terminally online. I even wrote recently about how single women tend to fare better emotionally than single men, thanks to deeper friendships, stronger family ties, and more emotionally reciprocal support systems. Oh, and less of a preoccupation with sex. That helps, too.

What I hadn’t considered was that this truth—that women are more content in the absence of a romantic relationship because of their strong support systems—might be generationally capped. A bus that left the station one day and never came back, leaving countless younger women stranded without the same companionate opportunities their slightly older peers once had. And that’s devastating to hear from 23-year-olds like Natalia on TikTok, who are so worn down by repeated, sincere bids for connection that are never reciprocated that she’s given up entirely.

Natalia laments the female loneliness epidemic is something no one is talking about. At just 23-years-old, she’s had enough bad experiences trying to make friends to put her ahead of her time in the jaded department. She proclaims she’s officially done with looking for new friends. “Nowadays, girls are f***ing impossible to make friends with.” This is the point where most women might start rolling their eyes, but she prefaces her rant with an essential sequence of words, “Before you call me a pick me, hear me out.” Oh, so it isn’t going to be one of those videos. You have my attention.

“In my experience, young women today do not know what it means to be a friend,” she complained. “They expect everyone, including other women, to chase them the same way men chase them romantically.” This was an interesting framing I hadn’t heard before. Could it be true? She cited their poor friendship form: “It’s always me arranging reservations to make hangouts happen, only to be told, the day of, that something came up or straight up admit that they forgot.” When this happens, she’s met with empty apologies, “Oh, I’m so sorry, girl,” but these words ring hollow when they’re never backed up by attempts to make amends or extend an olive branch.

“All these girls want to do is just be Instagram mutuals,” she pessimistically observes. “They just want to like your post, they want you to like theirs. They want to swipe up on your story. They want little crumbs of your attention, but they are not actually looking for a real-life friend with substance and value.” If you’re considering using friendship apps like Bumble BFF to make friends, Natalia says don’t bother. “It is a bigger waste of time than actual dating apps for meeting men,” she claims, after having a handful of bad experiences with different women on the app. 

The First Bumble BFF Experience

One girl she matched with met up with her for a drink after some casual Instagram conversation, where they’d bonded over shared hobbies. By both of their accounts, the meetup went well, so she naturally assumed they’d see each other again. Only, trying to make that happen was more like pulling teeth than making plans. “I had to chase this girl for months to meet up again,” Natalia said, rubbing her temple as if just recalling the ordeal gave her a headache.

And just when I was beginning to wonder if she’d misread the vibe, she clarified: “It wasn’t me not getting the hint, mind you. She was still texting me every day, ‘Oh, I want to see you so bad.’” But the excuses piled up. Something always came up. She was so busy with college. On Natalia’s part, she seemed respectably self-aware and fair-minded. 

She admitted she probably had more free time working part-time while this other girl was studying full-time, so she extended grace. Again and again. She sent invites to different events, always met with some variation of not a good time, never followed by any effort to reschedule or suggest an alternative. Then March rolled around. The girl told her she’d be unavailable the entire month because it was “exam season.”

Are women really only interested in social media hype-women but emotionally unavailable for real friendship?

Natalia’s gut said that’s not really how college works. You start the semester, you go to class, and you have midterms or finals for, what, three days? Maybe a week? “There’s no month full of exams,” she said. Still, she gave her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe her major was more intense, she granted. As a business major, she knew people stereotyped their workload as “easier” than other majors. She backed off and left her alone for all of March.

Once April hit, she tried again, inviting her to an event on April 5. No luck. She “couldn’t make it.” The following invite wasn’t until the end of the month. Again, she claimed to have plans. That was the final straw. Natalia gave up. She stopped initiating and waited to see if the girl would ever make the effort herself. She didn’t. What she did continue to do, however, was send Natalia reels and random posts on Instagram—empty gestures that simulated connection but were really just hollow dopamine hits. Natalia stopped responding to this one-sided attemptuationship that seemed incapable of surviving outside Instagram’s confines.

Was this a miscommunication? A mismatching of vibes? Natalia does admit that her recent autism diagnosis has explained a lot, given her historical difficulty with female friendships. Maybe her lack of intuition re: social cues gives them the ick, I thought. But something about the anecdotal behavior of this other girl just didn’t sit right with me. Given Natalia’s radical honesty, including some details that weren’t the most flattering about herself, I didn’t get the sense that she was out of touch or misreading the situation here. That makes what she described all the more disturbing.

Are women really only interested in social media hype-women but emotionally unavailable for real friendship? And if these are among the cohort of women supposedly actively seeking friendship on friend-matching services, how bad must it be among the general populace?

Bumble BFF, Take II

This second experience was off to a more promising start. They reportedly had great chemistry through text, on a laugh-inducing wavelength, and sending each other voice memos. They were so aligned and vibe-matched. All good signs. When they finally met at a club where Natalia was out with a guy she was seeing, the girl showed up, danced with her for five minutes, and then abruptly said she’d be right back. She never returned. 

Still, they kept messaging afterward. Natalia asked when they could do a proper hangout. Something low-key, face-to-face, where they could actually talk. But this girl’s excuses were just as curious and overarching excuses as the previous one’s. “Girl, not this month, it’s Ramadan,” the girl told her, which gave Natalia pause. Ramadan doesn’t prohibit Muslims from leaving the house. People still go to work and to school. They just fast during the day. Natalia was more than willing to accommodate that; it’s not like she was planning a brunch. But she wasn’t about to argue with her about religion, so she let it slide. Maybe she just didn’t want their first real hang to be something awkward like walking through a park when something like grabbing dinner was more typical for a first catch-up. Fair enough.

The only problem is that later that month, Natalia saw her hanging out with other people on her Instagram story. Again, she gave the benefit of the doubt at first. “Maybe I’m not a priority,” she rationalized, “We don’t know each other that well.” But eventually, she decided to confront her, asking, “I thought you weren’t allowed to do anything this month?” She was met with hostility. 

“First of all, mind your business,” she said, claiming that half the posts were throwbacks and the rest were of her and her sister. “So if you don’t know any better, then close your mouth.” 

She never heard from her again. Comments on this video affirmed the pervasiveness of this experience: “Everyone is so self-centered these days, it’s impossible to have any sort of relationship with anyone” and “I think social media has made everyone numb.”

The Housewarming Party With Inconsiderate Guests

Natalia had recently moved into a new place and decided to throw a housewarming party, inviting her closest friends, roommates, and colleagues. This story revealed something deeper than just flakiness. It exposed a kind of social rot in basic etiquette. Two girls she invited didn’t show up, despite being told about the party two weeks in advance. The day of, she texted them a reminder with the time and address. The party was set for six. Neither responded until about two hours before it started.

One of them finally texted to say, very last minute, that she wouldn’t be coming because she was “so sick” she’d been “throwing up.” Natalia clocked the sketchy timing: “If you were that sick, it probably didn’t start today. You couldn’t have told me last night? You waited until after I texted you?” she wondered. What really stunned her wasn’t even the excuse. It was a total lack of consideration. “You couldn’t have just said, ‘Hey, I know you’re cooking for a bunch of people, don’t worry, count me out. You don’t have to make a portion for me.’ Something. Anything.”

The second girl also canceled at the last minute, claiming she “forgot” she had a school project due the next day; another hard-to-believe excuse. Natalia pointed out what anyone in college knows: major projects are never sprung on you out of nowhere. “I’m just saying,” she vented, “there’s no way one girl was actually sick, and the other had a surprise project. They just didn’t want to come. And if I hadn’t texted them, they wouldn’t have said anything. They would’ve pretended like nothing happened.”

These are but a few examples, but they’re telling. This is what it’s like out there trying to make female friends as a young woman. The stories are disheartening, surreal, and probably boosting the morale of disaffected young men everywhere. Tragically, Natalia’s takeaway is this: if she’s going to make female friends, one will have to fall from the sky or arise from natural circumstances. She’s done looking, initiating, trying to deepen anything that’s not receptive to her effort. It takes up too much mental space and gives nothing in return.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation Has Warned Us About This

As anecdotal as Natalia’s stories may seem, they’re far from isolated. They offer a case study into the world of lonely adolescents coming of age in both a post-analog and post-COVID world, emotionally and socially stunted by forces far larger than themselves. One of the central arguments in The Anxious Generation, the recent book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, is that we’ve unwittingly run the greatest untested experiment in history by digitizing childhood. 

His findings suggest that girls, in particular, have been uniquely harmed by early exposure to smartphones and social media for four major reasons: visual social comparison and perfectionism, relational aggression, emotional sharing and contagion, and predation and harassment. Platforms like Instagram, which displace real-world connections and amplify social comparison, are particularly harmful to young girls’ mental health.

Women may be surrounded by ambient interaction, but they’re lonelier than ever.

The male loneliness crisis has its own unique driving forces, including the erosion of traditional male roles and spaces, a dating economy increasingly skewed against men, cultural narratives casting men as oppressors or expendable, and easy access to addictive distractions such as porn and video games. Without strong male role models or structured environments to cultivate growth, boys are falling behind in education, relationships, and overall well-being. Men today are more likely to be single, lonely, and socially isolated, and face a higher risk of suicide. They’re increasingly turning to escapism to cope. 

However, Haidt notes that while men are certainly struggling, they’re still more likely to engage in synchronous digital activities, like online gaming or Discord, which offer real-time interaction and a sense of community. These activities are less harmful because they mirror archetypal forms of male bonding. He explains that male friends bond differently than women. Men tend to form large groups and then break off into teams to do sports or competition. They bond through shared activities. Online gaming, especially with voice chat, allows them to replicate this.

Even when mediated through screens, the activity is shared and simultaneous. They laugh, banter, and play together. And while video games, like porn, can become addictive and isolating, Haidt argues that gaming at least preserves a rudimentary structure of social connection.

Unlike the asynchronous, appearance-driven dynamics that dominate female social media use, boys are still doing something together, even if virtually. Haidt emphasizes that in-person connection is still ideal. He would rather boys game together in the same room, but this kind of interaction is a valuable substitute when that’s not possible. That said, he cautions against excess: playing more than three hours a day increases the risk of addiction and displacement of healthier developmental tasks.

Girls, by contrast, tend to thrive when they have a few close friends. Their preferred mode of connection is small-group conversation. Girls don’t so much partake in shared activities as they do shared conversation that is emotionally intimate, attentive, and reciprocal. We listen, understand, empathize, and exchange anecdotes. But once girls got on Instagram, that dynamic shifted. It was no longer just you and your two best friends catching up at lunch. It became hundreds of micro-interactions with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of acquaintances and peripheral peers (how many of us still have those random hanger-on mutuals we met in a vacation bathroom ten years ago?) 

When we first adopted this technology and embraced hyper-connectedness, Haidt notes, we thought it was good. It looked like girls were more connected than ever. But it turns out that this flood of communication displaces real closeness. The time and emotional bandwidth needed to sustain a few meaningful relationships get eaten up by the constant maintenance of a much larger, far more superficial network. Girls end up more virtually connected but less connected in real life.

The data confirms it: increased social media use correlates with rising loneliness among girls and women, even though the platforms were meant to foster community. This aligns with anthropological insights like Dunbar’s number, a theory proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, which suggests humans can maintain about 150 stable social relationships. While the exact number is debated, the underlying idea holds: our capacity for relationship-forming and nurturing isn’t infinite. Yet, modern social media platforms encourage numbers far exceeding this limit, spreading emotional resources thin and reducing opportunities for genuine closeness. 

That brings me back to the reported scarcity of female friendships that are emotionally or even physically available. Women are biologically wired for close, emotionally intimate friendships in small groups, but social media pushes them toward mass-scale, low-effort, performative interactions with people they barely know. It’s no wonder that women trying to revive the old recipes for connection are being met with apprehension. Maybe to a generation raised online and cut off from society during pivotal developmental stages during the pandemic, intentional plans, vulnerability, and presence feel high-stakes.

They may have thousands of Instagram followers and a dozen unread group chats, but no one who will show up to their housewarming party.

This mismatch between our social nature and our environment is leaving young girls overstimulated, overexposed, and emotionally undernourished, all while they’re being fed narratives about how over-nourished they are—how much social capital they take for granted, often by socially isolated, touch-starved young men who feel invisible and envy the appearance of connectivity that women supposedly have. The resentment festers online.

How often do you see a jaded young man dismiss a woman’s valid complaint or source of pain with something like, “If you were a man, no one would care”? In fact, the viral TikTok that inspired this piece is filled with exactly those kinds of replies—men complaining about the timing (because it’s Men’s Mental Health Month) or dismissing their pain, “So now you understand the struggles that a man faces” accompanied by a crying-laughing emoji. There’s a profound mutual misunderstanding here. Women may be surrounded by ambient interaction, but they’re lonelier than ever.

Female loneliness is real but under-acknowledged because it doesn’t always look like male loneliness. It’s true that few women face true isolation. They’re often surrounded by ambient connections but lack meaningful, reciprocal connection. They may have thousands of Instagram followers and a dozen unread group chats, but no one who will show up to their housewarming party. This new, generational problem won’t be solved by more “connection” but by reverse-engineering closeness. The illusion of connectivity is catfishing women at the expense of the relationships they truly need.