There is a particular picture we tend to have of loneliness. Someone sitting alone in an empty room. No friends. No phone calls. No social life.
But I don’t think male loneliness always looks anything like that.
A man can have a job, go to the gym, talk to people every day, have hundreds of contacts in his phone and still have nobody he feels he can really talk to.
He can look completely functional from the outside.
That is what interests me.
We often judge whether somebody is doing well by what we can see. Is he working? Is he socialising? Is he keeping himself busy? Does he seem confident?
None of those things necessarily tell us whether he feels connected.
There is also an important difference between being alone and being lonely. I can enjoy spending time on my own. Plenty of people do. Loneliness is something different. It is that feeling that there isn’t really anybody there you can be completely honest with, particularly when life isn’t going particularly well.
The Australian figures are worth paying attention to. In 2024, around 18% of Australian men were experiencing social isolation, compared with 12% of women. Across almost every age group, men have consistently reported higher levels of social isolation than women.
[Source: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare]
There is another figure I found even more interesting. In 2025, 87% of Australian men reported having family or friends they could confide in, compared with 92% of women. Men were also less likely than women to say they could get help when they needed it.
[Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics]
Those percentages look relatively high until you think about the men sitting on the other side of them.
And having someone you could talk to doesn’t necessarily mean you actually do.
Men are still surrounded by some very old messages about how we are supposed to deal with difficulty. Sort it out. Keep moving. Don’t complain. Don’t make a fuss. Don’t burden other people with your problems.
Individually, those messages can sound almost harmless. Put enough of them together over a lifetime and I wonder what they teach us.
Perhaps one of the reasons male loneliness can be difficult to see is because men can become very good at functioning through it.
We go to work. We talk about football, property, cars, music, the gym, whatever we’re interested in. We joke around. We ask another man how he’s going and accept “yeah, good mate” as the complete answer.
Then everybody goes home.
There is nothing wrong with those friendships or conversations. Men don’t need to turn every beer or coffee into a counselling session.
But somewhere between saying nothing and turning every conversation into therapy, there has to be room for honesty.
This is where the wider conversation around masculinity becomes important to me.
I’m not interested in telling men that masculinity is the problem. I don’t believe it is. But I do think some of the rules we’ve attached to masculinity deserve examining.
Why should admitting you’re lonely make you less of a man?
Why should saying you’re frightened, struggling or simply having a bad time somehow diminish you?
Perhaps strength isn’t always being the person who needs nothing from anybody.
Sometimes strength might be sending the message you nearly didn’t send.
“Fancy a coffee?”
“Can we talk?”
“I’m having a rough week.”
Three fairly ordinary sentences. Yet for some men, they can feel remarkably difficult to say.
Male loneliness doesn’t necessarily announce itself.
Sometimes it goes to work.
Sometimes it trains at the gym.
Sometimes it makes everyone laugh.
Sometimes it posts photographs online and appears to have a perfectly full life.
Which is probably why we shouldn’t wait until somebody looks lonely before we make the effort to stay connected.
