No one would blame you for thinking that we’re in the midst of an unprecedented global loneliness emergency. The United Kingdom and Japan have named “loneliness ministers” to tackle the problem. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness a pressing public-health concern, and then-President Joe Biden’s surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory warning about an “epidemic of loneliness.” American commentators have painted a bleak portrait of a nation collapsing into ever more distant and despairing silos. And polls do suggest that a lot of people are lonely—some of the time, at least.  

But a close look at the data indicates that loneliness may not be any worse now than it has been for much of history. It’s tough to track: Not many surveys look at the trends over time, and those that do don’t date back very far. Some measure the time that people spend alone or the number of close friends they have, but these metrics are proxies for isolation, which isn’t the same as loneliness (as my colleague Derek Thompson wrote earlier this month) and doesn’t always predict it. Comparing social habits across historical periods is tricky, too, because the context—what friendship means to people, what emotional needs they have, how much fulfillment they expect their relationships to give them—keeps shifting. A 2022 review of research on changes in loneliness concluded that existing studies “are inconsistent and therefore do not support sweeping claims of a global loneliness epidemic.”

The greatest difficulty with measuring loneliness—and deciding how much to focus on ending it—may be that we don’t really know what loneliness is. Different people, researchers told me, seem to mean different things when they say they’re lonely: Some want more time with friends; some yearn to be seen for who they are; some feel disconnected from a collective identity or sense of purpose. What those experiences tell us about society’s ills—or whether they tell any coherent story at all—remains unclear. And if nations are going to devote precious resources to solving loneliness, they should know what it is they’re trying to fix.        

This is not America’s first loneliness panic. For much of the country’s history, concern about loneliness has cycled through the national conversation, Claude S. Fischer, a UC Berkeley sociologist, told me. Often, those fears have been spurred by urbanization or technological development: In Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, a 1929 examination of Muncie, Indiana, two sociologists suggested that the telephone was keeping people from visiting their neighbors. Vance Packard’s 1972 book, A Nation of Strangers, described a country fractured by people traveling for jobs. Throughout the 20th century, writers and researchers worried about loneliness induced by the introduction of radio, of TV, of cars; now they fret about smartphones. The warnings sometimes have merit, but they also align with a popular kind of folk wisdom, Fischer said: “That once upon a time there was a lot of tight-knit community and everybody was happy and social relations were, quote, unquote, authentic.”

[Read: Why you should want to be alone]

That golden period may never have existed. Social interaction has changed; that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gotten worse. In preindustrial farming communities, people usually had to depend on whoever was around them—mostly family or neighbors—for support. That lack of choice was perhaps comforting but also “very restrictive,” Fay Bound Alberti, a historian of emotions and the author of A Biography of Loneliness, told me. After more people started moving to cities, it became common to make friends who provide distinct benefits—what Keith Hampton, a Michigan State University sociologist, calls “specialized” relationships. Pure friendship, the kind of relationship that’s just about having fun and bonding, blossomed. In fact, the greater cultural value now placed on friendship, Fischer has written, might be one reason people are so worried about loneliness; perhaps we expect deeper fulfillment from our friends than we once did.

Of course, the worry could be warranted this time. From all the distressing headlines, you’d probably think so. But the story of loneliness in contemporary America isn’t so straightforward.

Many of those alarming articles, for starters, cite studies whose results have since been called into question. One 2006 paper reviewed findings from two decades of the General Social Survey, a national poll that asks people about, among other questions, those with whom they discuss “important matters”—and found that from 1985 to 2004, the number of names that participants listed shrank by about a third. Even more shocking, the percentage of respondents who listed zero confidants nearly tripled. But several researchers have highlighted methodological flaws, including errors in coding cases and possible interviewer and respondent fatigue (the later in the survey this question was asked, the more likely interviewers or subjects were to skip it, and the 2004 version posed it near the end).

Hampton told me, too, that the average person might well have fewer people with whom they discuss all kinds of “important matters”; rather, they talk about specific issues with specific people. In one study, he asked about particular topics—with whom, for instance, participants discussed their career, or their health, or their “happiness and life goals”—and found that “almost everyone gets a near-full range of social support,” he told me. In 2011, one of the 2006 study’s authors published a “reexamination” of that initial paper, finding that “social isolation has not become more prevalent.” Other oft-cited socializing studies have suffered from similar oversights.

In recent years, some seemingly solid studies have suggested that Americans are spending more time alone. According to the American Time Use Survey, leisure time spent with other people declined by more than 20 percent from 2003 to 2023. Yet it’s worth noting that the poll considered only the time people spent with others in person. It doesn’t account for the virtual connections that are crucial for so many: those with disabilities; older adults; ostracized queer teens; recent immigrants alone in a new country; anyone who enjoys texting random thoughts to family group chats or old friends throughout the day, or who likes to keep in touch with far-away loved ones. When a book club decides to meet on Zoom because more members can attend, Fischer pointed out, the result is interaction among more people. Even if you think that time spent physically together is superior, discounting remote hangs entirely might give you a picture of American life that sounds more profoundly isolated than it is.        

[Read: The new age of endless parenting]

Perhaps most important, measuring isolation isn’t a good way to track loneliness. Someone with lots of unsatisfying friendships, or in an unhappy marriage, could easily be lonelier than, say, an introvert who lives alone and has a few close confidants. Some polls do ask participants to report how lonely they feel, or use a measure called the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which asks subjects to rate, for instance, how often they feel excluded, or how often it seems as if “people are around you but not with you.” But according to Fischer, that scale is used in experiments with small samples more often than it is employed systematically in large-scale longitudinal studies meant to track trends over time. And comparing data from various polls taken at disparate points in history isn’t a good solution, because each might use entirely different questions, scales, or thresholds at which someone is considered lonely.

Of course, given the dearth of reliable data, it’s also difficult to argue with certainty that loneliness hasn’t gotten worse. Findings vary depending on what period you’re looking at and what population you’re talking about. Young adults, as I’ve written, do seem to be reporting more loneliness than in the past. That might be related to something as prosaic as housing costs, which have driven many people to move in with their parents—and away from where their friends live. But even the coronavirus pandemic didn’t seem to spur a clear increase in reported loneliness, perhaps because hunkering down in early 2020 felt like being part of a communal experience, or because so many started reaching out to loved ones virtually. People are resilient. And in general, across groups and over time, the “idea that there is evidence of large-scale upheaval,” Hampton said, “is really not supported by any kind of data.”

It’s hard to square a finding like that with all the dire warnings—warnings that have become so common as to feel unimpeachable. Thompson argued in his Atlantic cover story that the lack of a loneliness surge suggests that Americans have become so comfortable in their solitude that they’re no longer feeling an instinct to seek out social time. That’s possible. It’s also possible that many Americans are getting the social time they need—and that the ways they interact are, as always, simply evolving.       

If substantial numbers of people report feeling lonely, that’s a problem regardless of how rates stack up against those from other points in time. Richard Weissbourd, a psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me he was alarmed by the results of a survey of 1,500 American adults he conducted last year: 21 percent of respondents said that in the past 30 days, they’d felt lonely either frequently or almost all of the time. “There are a lot of people who are suffering,” he told me. “We have to do something about it.”

The trouble is that it’s not clear exactly what needs to be addressed. Weissbourd’s survey took the extra step of asking participants why they’re lonely and got all kinds of answers. Some people described an existential loneliness: They don’t feel connected to their country, or they don’t feel that their place in the world is important. Some said they can’t be their authentic self with others. Some said they don’t feel good about who they are. “Are people looking for a name for a sort of amorphous stew of feelings they’re having right now?” Weissbourd wondered. Or perhaps they’re experiencing depression or anxiety, both conditions alongside which loneliness commonly occurs, he noted. Fischer mentioned that after John F. Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11, researchers recorded spikes in reported loneliness—even though these events were unlikely to suddenly reduce people’s social ties. Maybe the respondents were just expressing distress.

[Read: How much alone time do kids need?]

This might all seem like splitting hairs, but it is possible—essential, even—to be precise about shaggy concepts. Take happiness, Fischer said: Researchers have studied what people mean when they say they’re happy or unhappy, how the wording of the question can affect survey answers, and the conditions under which people are likely to answer one way or the other; those empirical inquiries have led us to a deeper understanding of a sprawling, multifaceted experience. Given the cultural moment that loneliness is having, Fischer told me he wouldn’t be surprised if we have many more studies—and hopefully more nuanced ones—to draw on in 10 years. But for now, we don’t. We have no idea whether the loneliness of a high-school student feeling excluded is the same as the loneliness felt by a 30-year-old lacking a sense of purpose, or a 50-year-old in a bad marriage, or an 85-year-old recent widower.  

Pulling apart these varied hardships might matter a great deal for finding tailored solutions. If people aren’t seeing their friends often enough, maybe we need more social infrastructure so they can easily meet pals in public spaces. If Americans are hungering for a collective sense of meaning, Weissbourd told me, the best approach might be to get people involved in volunteer opportunities. For those who socialize plenty but still feel alone—well, some of them might benefit from more solitude, to take a breather and reflect on who and what gives them real fulfillment.

More than one of these challenges can be taken seriously at once, but the time and resources required to tackle all of them are limited: Only so many policy initiatives can be dreamed up, fought for, and funded. Loneliness might even be the wrong priority altogether. Fischer pointed out that the country has other, very real public-health issues that need attention: preparing for the next pandemic, addressing gun violence, reversing the shortening of the average American lifespan. None of that is to say that our social lives are perfect; as patterns of socializing shift, something is almost always lost. But when it comes to identifying what’s ailing the nation, “loneliness” may no longer be a sufficient answer.

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At least the fever came on a Friday. Or at least that’s what I, an absolute fool, thought when my nine-month-old, Evan, spiked a 102-degree temperature after I picked him up from day care recently. That meant he’d have three days to recover and would be back at day care on Monday.

When the fever rose to 104 on Saturday, my husband and I grew concerned, and when it persisted on Sunday, we took him to urgent care. They diagnosed Evan with an ear infection and prescribed antibiotics, which should take “a day or two” to work, the doctor said.

Okay, fine; we would miss a day of work. Our jobs, thank God, are flexible about such things.

Except on Tuesday, Evan still had a fever. His ear infection had not gone away, and in fact had worsened to the point that he refused to eat or drink and screamed whenever he was laid down. On Wednesday, the doctor switched him to a new antibiotic. That Friday, a mere 48 hours away, I had to go record my audiobook, in a recording session that my publisher had already booked and paid for.

[Annie Lowrey: Why I can’t put down the vacuum]

Before we had Evan, my husband, Rich, and I had discussed such exigencies using Fair Play, a popular system—in the form of a book and card game—for divvying up chores. It aims to help women in heterosexual relationships, who tend to take on more household cognitive and physical labor, offload tasks onto their partner. Rich was assigned researching backup child care, for whenever our son was inevitably sick and could not attend day care.

The thing is, Rich never did research backup child care. Before people have kids, they don’t realize that parenting is like running a complex military operation in addition to holding down your regular job. He figured we wouldn’t need backup care, and because I was tired and pregnant and swamped with millions of other tasks, I didn’t do the research for him. So here we found ourselves.

Which is why, when Rich asked me, four days into Evan’s fever, as we were syringing Tylenol into his wailing mouth at 2 a.m., “What are we gonna do?” I very reasonably responded, “I don’t know, dickhead! What the fuck are we gonna do?”

I had done what the pop-feminist chore-management gurus suggested. I had tried to reduce my mental load by foisting ownership of and accountability for tasks onto my husband. The only slight hiccup in this plan is that if your husband doesn’t do the tasks, the system falls apart.

The problem, as both Fair Play’s author, Eve Rodsky, and I, and probably lots of other women, see it, is the men. Our husbands or male partners, enlightened though they may be, don’t notice what needs to be done, or they forget to do it, or they don’t know how to do it. This requires the woman to act as project manager, reminding her husband to clean the baby’s humidifier or to grab the yogurt snacks, and so on and so forth, as long as you both shall live.

In theory, Fair Play offers a good solution. The best-selling 2019 book, and its companion card deck, lay out all the chores a family could conceivably have—everything from buying birthday gifts to doing the dishes to taking out the trash—on 100 cards, which the couple is meant to divide. Though the resulting division might not quite be 50–50, it should feel equitable. Rodsky writes that the man in the relationship should take at least 21 cards. She told me that a popular way to keep track of who has which card is through the software program Trello.

Each person is to take complete “ownership” of their card, including its “conception, planning, and execution.” The same person remembers that it’s time to clean the countertops, finds the cleaning liquid, and actually uses it.

Of course, people’s definition of “clean” varies, and many women have higher standards when it comes to tidiness and caretaking. Single, childless women tend to do more housework than single, childless men. Rodsky addresses this through something called the “minimum standard of care,” or a basic level of competence for each task that both spouses agree upon in advance. This means no cramming all the Tupperware into a Jenga tower if the MSC, as it is known, calls for it to be stacked neatly. (Left mostly unresolved is what to do if you can’t agree on a minimum standard of care, or if one partner doesn’t live up to it.) You maintain this system through regular check-ins with your spouse, at which you assess how things are going and re-deal the cards if necessary.

Sure, this may sound like romance by McKinsey—a friend of mine called these chore check-ins “deeply unsexy”—but hundreds of thousands of people have bought the book or card deck. Couples seem to really need a way to talk about household labor, and Rodsky offers one.

Rodsky, a married mother of three based in Los Angeles, worked as a lawyer and philanthropic adviser before she developed Fair Play. She got the idea, she writes, when one day after she had hustled out the door with a bag of snacks, a FedEx package, a pair of kids’ shoes to be returned, and a client contract—literally with her hands full—her husband texted her, “I’m surprised you didn’t get blueberries.” She was doing so much, but apparently she should have been doing the blueberries too.

It made her realize that despite a successful career, “I was still the she-fault parent charged with doing it all, buying the blueberries and masterminding our family’s day-to-day life while my husband … was still not much more than a ‘helper.’”

For the book, she interviewed hundreds of couples and immersed herself in research about the division of household labor. She came away with a set of facts and observations that may make you want to set your bra on fire and run off to a lesbian commune. Men hate to be nagged but, Rodsky writes, when pressed in interviews, they admit that they wait for their wife to tell them what to do around the house. Countless studies show that women do much more unpaid labor—housework and child care—than men do, even when both work outside the home. Rodsky cites a study showing that after couples who claim to be egalitarian have a baby, men cut back on the amount of housework they do by five hours a week. In part because of this disparity, working women, on average, see their incomes cut in half after having children.

You may be thinking “not all men,” but it’s an awful lot of men. Several studies show that women score higher on two facets of the conscientiousness personality trait: orderliness and dutifulness. In layman’s terms, this means women like things neater than men do, on average, and they pay more attention to the rules and structure of home life.

Explanations for this phenomenon vary. It could be that women are socialized from girlhood to be cleaner and more organized, and are judged in adulthood for having a messy home more than men are. Socialization might have contributed to my own orderliness: My parents are immigrants who, from what I can tell, have never taken a gender-studies course. When I told my mom about the Fair Play system, she said, “That’s dog nonsense. Men don’t know what to do with kids. Especially your man.”

It could be that because women bear disproportionate costs of childbearing in the form of pregnancy, birth, and in many cases breastfeeding, many feel more invested. They may pay greater attention to their children, and their various needs and proclivities, than the kids’ father does. And men tend to earn more than women, so when one person’s work has to take a hit for the kids’ sake, it’s usually the woman’s. Rodsky quotes one father as saying, “I’m so proud of how well my wife balances work with her family life.” Her family life.

I heard about Fair Play during the pandemic, and I thought it could help settle the chore wars that had been simmering between Rich and me for years already. Within a few weeks, we’d read the book, bought the cards, and scheduled a weekly check-in on our Google Calendars. It worked for a while. But after I got pregnant, I suddenly felt the need to, for example, research the difference between strollers and “travel systems,” while Rich did not. We thus found it virtually impossible to play fairly for more than a few weeks at a time. After Evan was born, it didn’t seem possible at all.

To name just a few of 10,000 examples: Rich was in charge of cleaning the floors, but he forgot to do it unless I asked. We hired a cleaning lady. He forgot to pay the cleaning lady. The cleaning lady texted me to ask about getting paid. I would task him with taking Evan to a doctor appointment (which I had made), and he would forget the diaper bag. Mentally, I willed Evan to have a huge blowout in the waiting room, just to teach him a lesson.

Perhaps these are personal foibles, specific to me and my husband. But the broader system—and indeed, any system of this kind—seems like it would crumble for any couple operating under the pressures of modern life, especially if you don’t live near family.

Let’s say you’re holding the “dinner” card, but you really need help with the execution part—peeling the potatoes—because you got stuck on a work call. According to Rodsky, what you’re supposed to do in this case is ask for help from “someone in your village other than your partner.” The problem, of course, is that I, and so many other moms, don’t have a village. My parents live a flight away. Rich’s parents are dead. We have no other family nearby, and we have to drive an hour to see most of our friends. Often, I’m “assigning” Rich tasks, even if they’re technically my “job,” because I’m literally holding a crying baby and no one else is available to help.

Rodsky herself seems deeply empathetic to people who don’t have the money or time to maintain a perfectly run household. She grew up with a single mother, so financially pinched that they used trash bags as luggage. She told me that when she would go into the kitchen at night to get her disabled brother some water, she would close her eyes for a second to allow the cockroaches time to scatter off the piles of dirty dishes.

On our call, Rodsky suggested that one solution might be thinking of your village as a neighbor or even a friendly security guard at a local store—two individuals her own mother relied on for occasional help when she was a girl. But I don’t know my neighbors or my local shopkeepers well enough to do this.

Rich and I have also struggled with the minimum standard of care. At one point, Rich tried to convince me that floors don’t actually need mopping. They can just be dirty! Rodsky suggests that, in situations like these, you should “collaborate on what is reasonable within your own home,” ultimately reverting to a “reasonable person” standard from jurisprudence. But the problem is that in our home, and in many others, there is no judge or jury. We are prosecutor and defense attorney, and there’s no verdict in sight.

A recent study of the Fair Play system conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California found that the system did work—at least among the couples who actually applied it. When participants in the study completed the Fair Play program and divided the household labor more equitably, their mental health improved, their burnout decreased, and their relationship quality improved. But here’s the rub: Only about a quarter of the participants actually completed the Fair Play program. Darby Saxbe, a USC psychologist and an author of the study, told me that participants might have dropped out because they didn’t pay for or even actively seek out the program; they were offered it. Or perhaps being overwhelmed with parenting and domestic labor didn’t leave a lot of time for divvying up parenting and domestic labor. Still, Saxbe thinks the program is worth considering, especially before couples have kids. “We know domestic labor is a huge reason that a lot of women initiate divorce and separation, but we don’t have a lot of great solutions,” she told me.

Allison Daminger, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin who studies the division of household labor, told me Fair Play is the program she tends to refer people to when they tell her they’re struggling with chore management. But people who seek it out, she said, often struggle with “overload, maybe some conflict in the relationship.” These are the very things that become hurdles to doing Fair Play.

I asked Rodsky what to do if your partner just doesn’t do his cards—the issue that my husband and I keep running into. Rodsky told me this can mean that the partner who does do their cards has poor boundaries. “They haven’t really done that internal work yet to really understand what a boundary means,” she says. “What are they willing to accept?” Rodsky says that for her, setting a boundary meant telling her husband, “I’m not willing to live like that anymore.”

But I am willing to live this way. I’m not getting divorced, because there is too much work to do. Right now a helper is worse than a co-pilot, but it’s better than nothing. And, well, when we’re not screaming at each other about Clorox wipes, we do like each other.

Daminger also suggested doing some “deep work” to understand why a (hypothetical) husband (but actually mine) wasn’t doing his fair share. It could be that “you and your partner have very different underlying goals and intentions,” Daminger said. “And I think if that’s the case, then systems for dividing up tasks better are probably not going to be effective.”

[Joe Pinsker: The gender researcher’s guide to an equal marriage]

When reached for comment, Rich called this article “very good” and “delightful,” but admitted that he has “a vastly different thinking pattern around what is clean and what isn’t clean.” Then he pointed out that he, unbidden, cleans “both sides of the garbage-disposal cover.” Then we got into a fight about how often he initiates Swiffering without being asked.

The more I talked with Rodsky and Daminger, the worse I felt. I felt bad for having an imperfect husband and an imperfect life. Why didn’t I know my neighbor well enough for her to be my village? Why did I marry a sloppy guy who doesn’t Swiffer? Why did I have a baby if I don’t have good boundaries, or even a Trello account? I came away with the conclusion that Rich and I are just not very compatible in this way, and that to approach compatibility would take a whopping amount of couple’s therapy that we don’t have time for right now.

Instead, our strategy is not one that Rodsky would like. I bark out orders, and Rich kinda-sorta fulfills them, most of the time. He doesn’t understand Evan’s needs the way I do, and it would be too hard for me to explain them to him. I’m pickier and cleaner than he is, and it will probably always be this way. Rodsky referred to this kind of thinking as being “complicit in your own oppression.” I call it getting our kid to middle school in one piece.

There is another element to it, though. During that frightening, feverish week, I spent hours swabbing Evan’s forehead with a cold washcloth and, because it hurt his ears to nurse, giving him sips of breast milk from a cup—his first-ever drink from something other than a bottle. I had to admit that part of me liked cuddling him and easing his distress—even if it was technically Rich’s turn to be on duty. It was mental, emotional, and physical labor that didn’t pay and that I, on some level, enjoyed. It wasn’t fair. But life rarely is.