Understanding Age and Loneliness

Being alone may have a different meaning at different ages.

Photo by Bob Price on Pexels.

My colleagues and I recently published a paper examining how the proportion of time a person spends alone relates to feeling lonely. My last post explained how this paper used a more time-intensive and more accurate way of measuring being alone than did previous research: having people carry around a recorder all day for several days and then having researchers listen to these sound files to see what people were up to.

We found the relationship between spending time alone and being lonely is weak and curved. However, the paper also contained a few other insights about loneliness and being alone that I wanted to share.

Who Is Alone?

We examined how three variables are related to the amount of time a person spends alone: gender, age, and relationship status (single or not). When the three variables were used to predict time spent alone, we found that age and relationship status were significant predictors.

• Single people spend more time alone than those in relationships.
• Older people spend more time alone.
• Gender was not related to spending time alone.

Our modeling allowed us to tease apart a specific relationship between being alone and being older. Older people are more likely to have settled down into relationships. So overall, it looks like older people are no lonelier. But when you adjust the prediction to account for who is and isn’t in a relationship, a different association appears.

• Among people in a relationship, being older is not related to spending more time alone. If you’re 20, 40, or 60 in a relationship, you’re likely to be spending a low amount of time alone.
• Among single people, however, being older is related to spending more time alone. For every decade older a person gets, we would expect them to spend about 30 more minutes alone. So a single 60-year-old would be expected to spend about two hours more alone every day than a single 20-year-old.

As single people get older, they spend more time alone. Partnered people's time alone stays constant.

Source: Image by A Danvers created on Canva

Who Is Lonely?

We used the same variables—gender, age, and relationship status—to predict who feels lonely. We found that only being single was related to loneliness. People who were single reported feeling lonelier, on average.

Again, there was a more complex relationship between age and relationship status.

• Among single people, being older was related to feeling lonelier.
• Among people in a relationship, being older was related to feeling less lonely.

Another way to think of this was that when people were around 20, being single or partnered up made no difference to their loneliness. But as we looked at older and older groups, we found that being in a relationship provided more and more benefits.

Looking at our model, we find that as people get older, their relationship seems to make them less and less lonely. It suggests to me that maybe relationships make us feel less and less lonely the longer we are in them. Maybe this has to do with feeling like you are known by another person. After a long time together, the relationship might make you feel even less alone because you have a deeper connection—and a deeper understanding of each other.

Lonely and Alone Across the Lifespan

The final complex relationship we found is, in some ways, the most interesting. Overall, we found that being alone and being lonely are not strongly related. If you know how much time someone spends alone, you won’t be able to predict very well how lonely they are. But there’s a twist.

As people get older, the relationship between being alone and being lonely becomes stronger.

• When you’re younger (say, 20 to 30), being alone isn’t very strongly related to being lonely at all. Knowing someone spends a lot of time alone doesn’t tell you much about how lonely they feel.
• When you’re in middle age (say, 40 to 50), being alone is moderately related to being lonely. If someone in this age spends a lot of time alone, they’re a little more likely to feel lonely.
• When you’re an older adult (say, 60 to 70), being alone is strongly related to being lonely. Knowing someone of this age spends a lot of time alone is cause for concern: they’re much more likely to feel lonely.

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Our research team speculated that this relationship may be related to people’s social options at different stages of life. Among younger people, it seems easier to form new friendships and potentially start a relationship. Being alone feels more like a choice, and more reversible. As people get older, it becomes harder to start new friendships and form new romantic relationships. Time spent alone begins to be less about choice and more about limitations on a person’s social world: they might want to spend more time with others, but finding like-minded people—and matching up schedules!—becomes harder. Being alone, in this case, might signify a lack of desired social contact—in other words, loneliness.

Overall, our research found that age and relationship status are an important part of the story about loneliness and being alone. The data suggest that, as single people get older, they spend more time alone and feel lonelier. As people in a relationship get older, they continue to be around other people, and they feel less lonely. Further, we find that being alone seems to be worse for people the older they get. Together, this suggests that finding a strong primary relationship and a community are particularly important as people get older. As we get older and more set in our ways, making time for social connection may grow to be more important.