We keep offering individual fixes for loneliness while ignoring the disappearance of the spaces where adults once built real relationships.
Every time someone says we’re in a loneliness epidemic, the advice sounds suspiciously individual: join a gym, download a friend app, go to therapy, try harder. But what if loneliness isn’t a personal failure at all? The U.S. Surgeon General has declared it a public health crisis. Research has shown that chronic loneliness is associated with depression, cardiovascular disease, and even increased mortality risk. Headlines warn that Americans have fewer friends than ever before and give us advice on how to make more friends, as though the issue is simply our unwillingness or our lack of know-how. We debate whether smartphones ruined us, whether remote work isolated us, whether dating apps replaced real intimacy. But what if we are asking the wrong question? Instead of asking why individuals feel lonely, maybe we should be asking where the infrastructure for belonging went.
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Third places matter because they create the routine, low-stakes contact that keeps people from drifting into isolation. We tend to frame loneliness as an internal feeling, something happening inside individual people. But what if loneliness is less about emotion and more about environment? What if it’s the predictable outcome of dismantling the spaces that once made repeated, in-person connection routine? When we began studying BDSM communities, I expected to be writing about sex. Instead, I found myself documenting something much more structural: networks that many mainstream spaces no longer seem able to generate. The majority of participants were embedded in some form of community, whether online or in person. A substantial proportion had close friends within that community. Many reported receiving emotional support, practical help with moving or repairs, even financial assistance or job referrals from people they met through those networks. The more involved someone was in repeated, face-to-face gatherings, the denser their network became and the more tangible support they reported receiving.
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What struck me was not that a kink community could generate friendship. It was that it had preserved something many mainstream spaces have lost: structured, recurring, interest-based, in-person interaction among adults. It would be easy to assume that the more someone invests in a stigmatized subculture, the narrower their world becomes. That isn’t what we found. The people most active in in-person BDSM spaces were somewhat more likely to also participate in other hobby and interest-based groups. So, community didn’t appear to replace other ties. If anything, it coexisted with, and perhaps reinforced, broader social engagement.
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We have quietly dismantled many of the spaces where adults repeatedly encounter one another around shared interests. We often work alone, only to go home and stream and scroll alone. Even when we gather, it is often one-off and transactional rather than sustained and embedded, and then we wonder why we feel lonely. The takeaway is not “go join a kink club.” (Kink communities benefits their members because those members are interested in kink.) Adults need repeated, face-to-face interaction around shared interests. They need to see the same people often enough that familiarity turns into trust. Romantic relationships are important, but they cannot replace a broader network of ties. Expecting one person to meet every emotional and social need was never realistic. We keep asking how to make people less lonely, as though loneliness were a skill deficit. A better question is structural: where are the recurring spaces where adults encounter the same people long enough for connection to become inevitable? Until we grapple with that, we will keep misdiagnosing the problem.
