Loneliness kills. Life without friends and family is not just dreary but difficult, especially as we get older.
Strong social relationships boost a person’s chances of staying alive by 50 percent, according to a comprehensive 2010 review of 148 studies that followed 309,000 people for an average of 7.5 years. That’s about the same improvement to mortality as the one that comes from quitting smoking.
It’s hard to say whether Americans are lonelier now than in the past. But they’re certainly more independent than ever. Almost half of U.S. adults are now single. Americans are waiting longer to get married, they’re having smaller families, and about half of all marriages still end in divorce.
Researchers are worried about what these trends mean for Americans as they get older. Will seniors of the future get enough support? Or should we prepare for an epidemic of end-of-life loneliness and isolation?
Thirteen percent of U.S. adults were living alone in 2015, according to a recent study by the National Center for Family & Marriage Research. While that’s up only about 1 percentage point since 1990, different age groups are behaving differently. The share of people under 45 living alone hasn’t budged in 25 years. People 65 and over are living alone slightly less often. That’s partly because, thanks to increased longevity, fewer older people are widowed.
Americans aged 45 to 65, though, are increasingly living on their own.
Living alone isn’t the same thing as being lonely, of course. “Most people who live alone and age alone are quite active socially,” said Eric Klinenberg, a New York University sociology professor.
What worries Klinenberg and other sociologists is older people feeling isolated, especially from family members. This is a relatively new problem. “For most of human history, almost all older adults have been part of dense kin networks,” write sociologists Rachel Margolis and Ashton Verdery.
One of the biggest concerns is aging people who have no close living relatives. Margolis, of the University of Western Ontario, and Verdery, of Penn State University, tried to figure out how many Americans fall into this category, analyzing survey data from 1998 to 2010. They found that 6.6 percent of U.S. adults 55 and older have neither a spouse nor biological children still alive. Just 1 percent of older Americans have essentially no relatives at all alive, including a spouse, partner, children, or biological parents or siblings.
Those numbers are expected to rise. The divorce rate for 55- to 64-year-olds more than doubled from 1990 to 2015, the National Center for Family & Marriage Research estimates. Once divorced, people are also remarrying less often.