Why women are embracing solitude more than ever 🫂

Matt Hussey

Feb 28, 2025 • 11 min read

👆👆Audio version here!👆👆

Welcome to the third and final part of my solitude series: a deep dive into how our modern world has pushed us to spend more time on our own.

While this series has looked at men and dating, I’m now turning my steely gaze to women. So far I’ve painted a gloomy picture of what solitude is doing to us, but in this last chapter, there is surprisingly, a rosier note. That’s because women appear to be the biggest beneficiaries of this shift to more me time.

So in this week’s Brink, I’m exploring how women are increasingly embracing solitude, but not in the same way men are.

I, woman 🙋‍♀️

As we’ve discussed previously, the rise in solitude is universal. All ages and demographics are spending more time without others, and women are no different, according to the Institute of Family Studies. In its research, just 20% of 25-year-old women and 23% of 25-year-old men have ever married today. These are close to the lowest levels ever observed.

While we can easily bat those numbers away by saying that people are settling down later on in life, those figures actually worsen as we age. Marriage is at historic lows for 35-year-old and 45-year-old women, too. This trend also suggests that a growing share of adults will not get married before their healthiest years are long past them.

This trend has been seen in teenagers, too. A survey found that only 56 percent of Gen Z women—and 54 percent of Gen Z men—said they were involved in a romantic relationship at any point during their teenage years.

Sounds quite normal you might think? Until you compare that same age against previous generations. Among Baby Boomers, 78% said they’d had a significant partner as a teenager, while for Gen Xers it was 75%.

But what this does to men and women differs. As I discussed in my newsletter on men, for the fellas, this shift has led to an increased focus on themselves, often at the expense of everyone else.

These ‘secular monks’ as philosopher Andrew Taggart coined them are focused on three things:

Mastering their body.
Mastering their bank account.
Mastering their minds.

These men increasingly look to the likes of Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and others who tell a story to these men: that they are forgotten, downtrodden, and ignored by society.

But for women it’s different. For two key reasons.

Lonely Island 🌴

The first is loneliness. Women feel the effects of isolation more keenly than men. In research published by the Campaign to End Loneliness, women are more likely to be chronically lonely than men. Not only that, 16-to-29-year-old women are twice as likely to be chronically lonely than those who are over 70.

They’re finding loneliness at work too. A recent survey of more than 600 men and women across the US found that 53% of women in the workplace experience loneliness—and it only gets worse the higher they climb the corporate ladder.

It’s worth pointing out the difference between loneliness and solitude. Loneliness is felt when we want more connection but struggle to find it. It’s our expectation of friendship. Solitude is the opposite: we don’t seek connection because we feel fine on our own. While there is indeed a loneliness epidemic across a lot of the world, those numbers have remained stable for nearly 20 years.

Solitude has become the norm. The Office for National Statistics shows that women not living in a couple, who have never married, is rising in every age range under 70.

Between 2002 and 2018, the figure for those aged 40 to 70 rose by half a million. The percentage of never-married singletons in their 40s doubled. This isn’t just in the UK, but globally. In South Korea, Japan, Chile and elsewhere, women are pursuing romantic relationships, and the expectations that come with them, less and less.

But why? That’s a big question, and there is no single answer, and I wouldn’t want to point to a thing to explain the decisions of hundreds of millions of women worldwide. But in the my research, the following themes emerge time and time again:

Technology - we now have a friend, an entertainer, an intimate partner and an attention seeker in our pockets, all the time. Technology provides readily and immediately. It wants to sate our needs, and we want to be sated. We can have a version of connection, without the messy hard work of building relationships on tap, wherever, whenever.
Violence towards women - a big one. This has been the inciting incident for the 4B movement in South Korea, the Sisters Uncut movement in the UK, and several others. The UN’s report on violence against women is a must read if yuo’re interested.
Societal expectations - the felt tension and politicisation of gender equality versus historical norms on gender roles. Gender equality has been backsliding in recent years.
Poor support - Relationships, and by association, having families is less appealing, thanks to a collapse in child support across the Western world, paired with women being overwhelmingly left to raise families single handedly.

These issues are felt by many. But perhaps the most interesting part of this story, is what women do in such tough times.

Leaning in 🫷

Throughout history, women seeking solitude have been treated with suspicion. ‘When a woman thinks alone’, it was said by witch-obsessed priests in the fifteenth century, ‘she thinks evil’.

Women were believed to not do well when they were alone. Indeed, many of Freud’s female patients were brought before him because they had fallen into melancholy and spent long periods in solitude.

But today, women are embracing this idea. Women go out to eat alone more often than men. Women travel alone more often than men - 71% of solo travelers are women. Women outside of relationships are more sexually satisfied than men. Women are even happier on their own than men. Yep, women report higher life satisfaction when they are on their own, than men do.

According to that same research, it’s largely down to the sense of agency women feel in being able to choose how to live that makes them feel better about themselves.

“Traditionally, there has been a lot of societal pressure on women to secure a mate and settle down so as not to be seen as ‘leftover women,’” said the authors of the report. “This pressure may have been a major cause of unhappiness among single women… with time, society has grown more lax with its prescriptions, allowing single women to be free and have the time of their lives, which they appear to be doing.”

In my own anecdotal research too, I’ve found long threads on forums where women openly discuss the enjoyment that comes with not feeling the pressure to couple up at any cost.

When women do feel that pinch of loneliness, they are more able to reach out than men to repair it.

When I went looking for the female equivalent of the Joe Rogans, the Andrew Tates and the Jordan Petersons, I couldn’t find any. Sure there are some influencers that espouse the same values through a female lens, but they are neither as popular or as enduring as their male counterparts. That’s an important distinction. The idea of being downtrodden and forgotten is a new idea for men and has resonated. But for women, that’s been felt for centuries and so offers little appeal or novelty.

Bringing it back to how solitude affects men and women, for the former, solitude has come with an increase in anger and a sense the world cares not for them. For the latter, meanwhile, solitude has, dare I say it, made them happier.

So where does that leave us?

Looking longer term 🔮

In my article looking at men and solitude, I shared this infographic.

In politics, researchers used to find that while there were different opinions between generations, you tended to think the same as the generation you were in. Not so anymore.

Men and women are diverging politically. While for men, they have swung to the right, women have swung to the left. Looking across the world, right wing views are on the rise, suggesting that politics is following the increased anger and resentment a lot of young men feel towards the world.

In Germany, for example, young men saw left-leaning political issues to be more concerned with feminism, equality, and human rights, issues they felt had nothing to do with them. The same happened during the Trump election, too.

But while our current political discourse feels overwhelmingly “pro-bro”, something interesting is quietly going on.

In a fascinating book, The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy, Melissa Deckman found that women are expected to outpace their male peers across virtually every measure of political involvement, such as donating money, volunteering for campaigns, registering people to vote – and, of course, voting in the next ten years.

While men have become politically disengaged, the opposite is happening to women. Across the world, women are taking a more active role in their communities, because they, quite rightly feel, the world isn’t a very nice place. Our politics may look pants now, but this data suggests that may be short lived.

People spending more time alone has and does change how a society works. But like all things, there are negatives, but also positives. On the one hand, time alone can leave you vulnerable to oversimplified ideas about how the world works. But on the other hand, that same alone time can give you the space you need to feel more like you.

This series has looked at this idea from a gendered perspective, but these ideas can and do affect both sides of the sex divide.

How solitude affects you is yours to know and yours to modify if you so wish.

Solitude is, I believe, a choice not a chain to be shackled by. If you find it meets your expectations, go forth and prosper by solo friend. But if you find it doesn’t, you should feel you can modify and change the role alone time plays.

It’s one of the things that makes us brilliantly human: the ability to shape and change the world around us.

Good luck.

Things we learned this week 🤓

Here is a list of excellent mental health services that are vetted and regulated that I share with the therapists I teach:

👨‍👨‍👦‍👦 Peer Support Groups - good relationships are one of the quickest ways to improve wellbeing. Rethink Mental Illness has a database of peer support groups across the UK.
📝 Samaritans Directory - the Samaritans, so often overlooked for the work they do, has a directory of organisations that specialise in different forms of distress. From abuse to sexual identity, this is a great place to start if you’re looking for specific forms of help.
💓 Hubofhope - A brilliant resource. Simply put in your postcode and it lists all the mental health services in your local area.

I love you all. 💋

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I, woman 🙋‍♀️

Lonely Island 🌴

Leaning in 🫷

Looking longer term 🔮

Things we learned this week 🤓

Just a list of proper mental health services I always recommend 💡

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