Younger American men may be lonelier than young women - and than their counterparts in other wealthy nations, according to a new Gallup World Poll analysis.
Twenty-five percent of men ages 15 to 34 surveyed in the United States said they experienced loneliness during a lot of the previous day, compared to 18% of women in that age range, the polling firm reported Tuesday, citing aggregated data from 2023 and 2024. The finding offers a counterpoint to research showing a minimal loneliness gap between genders.
Across a group of 38 higher-income democratic countries, a median 15% of men that age said they experienced loneliness, suggesting a large gap between American men and their peers around the world. The data underscore existing research showing that younger people broadly are more likely to be lonely and could help shed light on the debate about whether young men are actually lonelier than other Americans.
Across studies, data has suggested that there is essentially no difference between genders when it comes to loneliness, said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University who studies loneliness. But the question has persisted in public discourse in recent years amid larger debates about politics and culture since the pandemic.
As researchers attempt to understand the most recent changes in loneliness, the results of the Gallup poll are worth paying attention to and learning more about, said Holt-Lunstad, who is a member of the World Health Organization’s technical advisory group on social connection.
“The ‘young’ part is extremely consistent with the data out there. The ‘male’ part is really interesting and intriguing,” said. “It is worth considering this data amongst the larger literature and paying attention to what we can learn from it.”
Loneliness has been prominent in public discourse since the pandemic, and research on the topic has proliferated in recent years. In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued an advisory warning that loneliness presents a severe public health threat and calling for societal change.
Being lonely has been connected to various health problems, including heart disease, stroke, dementia and other chronic illnesses. It also is distressing in itself, and it increases the risk of depression, anxiety and other mental health issues. Holt-Lunstad’s research found that loneliness increases the risk for earlier death from all causes, excluding suicide, by 26%.
“It’s miserable to be lonely,” said Richard Weissbourd, a Harvard University lecturer who has studied loneliness. “It’s a sign of societal failure, too, like we’re not taking care of each other, and that should concern us.”
Understanding how lonely Americans are and whether it has worsened in recent years, however, has been challenging. The data is complicated, in large part due to how differently loneliness can be measured by researchers or defined by respondents, Weissbourd said. Murthy, in his advisory as surgeon general, said half of Americans experience loneliness, while a Pulse survey in 2024 found that 60% of people never or rarely feel lonely.
“It’s a puzzle with many pieces. When you put together the pieces, I think that loneliness has gotten worse,” Weissbourd said. “But there’s so many measurement issues, it’s hard to assess. It is murky.”
How loneliness is measured and how polling questions are worded can affect the results, Weissbourd said. The Gallup polls, following standard Gallup wording, asked whether people had experienced loneliness “during a lot of the day yesterday.”
Because that asks respondents to report on a single day rather than their general experience, Holt-Lunstad cautioned against assuming the results indicate the same rates as ongoing loneliness.
“We do have evidence that loneliness tends to be relatively stable, so I can’t say for certain that this doesn’t correlate with that,” said Holt-Lunstad, who was the lead scientific editor for Murthy’s 2023 advisory. “But we do just need to be cautious in assuming it’s more of a stable experience versus a transient experience.”
When comparing men and women of all ages, their answers were similar, noted Gallup senior global news writer Benedict Vigers, who wrote the analysis, but breaking the data down by age revealed the discrepancy.
“It’s certainly a wake-up call, a flag to address this issue that does seem to be weighing heavily on the American young male population,” Vigers said.
The Gallup data also showed that 57% of younger men in the United States said they felt stressed every day, compared to 48% of other adults. They also reported daily worry at a higher rate.
The United States ranked second for loneliness reported by younger men among the 38 higher-income democratic countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental organization that advises governments on policy. Only Turkey had a higher percentage among men 15 to 34 - 29% - while France, Ireland, Canada and Spain followed the United States with at least 1 in 5 men that age reporting loneliness.
The United States was one of only three countries, along with Iceland and Denmark, in which young men were significantly more lonely than the rest of the population, the data found. The difference between American young men and the rest of the population was striking, Vigers said.
The data also revealed a discrepancy among American women ages 35 to 54, 20% of whom reported loneliness in the previous day, compared with 15% of men their age. Among those 55 and older, 16% of men and 17% of women reported loneliness.
Across all U.S. adults, 18% reported feeling loneliness for much of the prior day; the median across all countries surveyed was 16%.
Loneliness can be thought of as the gap between someone’s desired level for connection with others and their actual level of connection, Holt-Lunstad said. It can be caused by isolation, a lack of social relationships or a dissatisfaction with the quality of those relationships, among other things.
Weissbourd said the things that cause loneliness may vary for men and women to some degree, but that young people tend to report it at higher rates than older adults.
“Both young men and women are experiencing high rates of loneliness,” he said. “It may be caused by different things and it may be expressed in different ways, so the nature of the loneliness is different.”