"Not Wanting to be Alone" is Okay

From flirting to friendship, craving social connection is being pathologized

One of the first tweets that ever got me in trouble (and by “in trouble” I mean “getting yelled at by the maladjusted weirdos of Twitter”) was a tweet where I said that the acceptable options for young men who want to find partners have shrunk to basically “be at a party with your big, vivid network of close friends who all happen to know single women” (a situation in which almost no young man in 2024 finds himself regularly.) People will tell young single men to “get off the apps” (apps aren’t stacked in their favor anyway,) but in the same breath, tell them it’s creepy to cold-approach women in public. And trying to escalate a friendship into romance? Well, that’s neckbeard behavior—clearly, you didn’t value the friendship at all if you want to take it in that direction. And what about joining a social club to meet women? Well, that’s dishonest. You should be joining a pickleball league for the pure love of the sport. If you flirt with a woman there, you’re making it an “unsafe space.”

I feel like this tweet was my first foray into developing an audience of young single men, who were frustrated with their romantic prospects but didn’t hate women. This group often feels afraid to speak out, because they don’t want to be confused with misogynists, but they have reasonable concerns about loneliness (they also tend to have social anxiety and issues with social skills- neither of which should condemn someone to a life alone.)

But I got some pushback, because, of course. I feel like the pushback was emblematic of the time (early 2020s, the peak “oh to be as confident as a mediocre white man” era)—I don’t think I’d get this kind of reaction today. If anything, today, inverted-Woke right wing men would yell at me for not “checking my female privilege” or “sitting my ass down and listening to male bodies and voices.” But anyway, at the time, women said that I was making excuses for sexual predators, even though I repeatedly said that I was talking about flirting in a respectful way—not being overtly sexual, and backing off if the person is not interested. I mentioned that this was how humans have functioned since the dawn of time. Real-life social connection (often romantic) is a very fundamentally human thing. Wanting some kind of connection is innate to being human, as I mentioned on the Hope Axis podcast a few weeks ago. But when I asserted this during the aforementioned Twitter argument, I was told that maybe the death of such social connection—especially romantic—was for the best, and that there’s no need for the human race to continue anyway. Cool!

Part of the problem is that the Internet is run by people who don’t have much social connection. Some of those people (like me and a lot of my followers) are in this situation because of the nature of our work, or because we have trouble connecting with people even though we really want to. Ironically, lots of moms are terminally online despite having fairly healthy family connections, because they spend most of their time at home with their children. But others are terminally online because they’re just misanthropic duds. These people do not rule real-life society, because they don’t participate in real-life society, but they rule the Internet, where they spend all their time. And if you spend a lot of time online, you’ll quickly discover you are in a topsy-turvy land where, paradoxically, introverted shut-ins are the ones at the top of the social pecking order.

But the Internet is not some Sims role-playing world with no basis on reality. With the exception of anyone touting a “pussy in bio,” the Internet is full of real people who have real lives, even if those lives are spent mostly arguing online. You can’t argue that Elon Musk specifically engineered the outcome of the 2024 election by boosting conservative content on Twitter, and then say that any observation of the Internet is pointless because you need to “touch grass” and “the Internet isn’t real life.” Yes it is.

And as a result of this “not actually real” world, a war has been waged against social connection in the “actually real” world. And it’s…very bad.