Older Women Are Battling a Loneliness Epidemic

Glance at the Dropbox photos from Road Scholar’s women-only tour titled “North Florida’s Sacred Springs and Rivers” and among the images of silver-haired kayakers and manatees lounging in deep turquoise springs, you’ll see snapshots of plastic dinosaurs on a restaurant table wedged into sexually-suggestive positions. The perpetrators were a half-dozen septuagenarians from all over the country—strangers to one another and tipsy on margaritas after five hours of paddling along the region’s Silver River on a misty 35˚F day.

At 55, I sat among them, wrestling a plastic T. Rex and a Stegosaurus into a missionary pose beside my empty salt-rimmed glass. For the first time in decades, I giggled. I felt like a mischievous schoolgirl goofing around with my friends—a feeling I didn’t realize I’d so deeply missed.

I’d signed up for the guided kayaking trip in part to observe whether an adventure for solo women over age 50 could create camaraderie, even long-term friendships. I also enrolled because I’ve struggled with loneliness off and on my whole adult life.

Loneliness: A Worldwide Epidemic

In 2023, then–Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy described for The New York Times how social disconnection increases our risk for depression, anxiety and suicide. “As it has built for decades, the epidemic of loneliness and isolation has fueled other problems that are killing us and threaten to rip our country apart,” he wrote.

The CDC’s 2024 report on health effects of social isolation and loneliness notes that “loneliness may impact some groups more than others, such as low-income adults, young adults, older adults, adults living alone, immigrants, people who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual.” A 2025 report reviewing six years of data from the University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging  found that one in three adults between 50 and 80 years old admits to feelings of social isolation. Women, the report reveals, are more likely to report being lonely than men.

With approximately 30 percent of the U.S. population over 50, that’s a whole lot of little old ladies who could be sharing a pitcher of margaritas and hooting over the faux sexual exploits of plastic dinosaurs in a Mexican restaurant. Maeve Hartney, Chief Program Officer at Road Scholar, explained it to me this way: “Social interactions are vital to living a longer, healthier, more fulfilling life. The atmosphere of camaraderie and inclusiveness are vital to the experiences we provide.”

Loneliness and Seniors

Do a search for “loneliness and seniors” online and you’ll find stories about Americorps’ federally funded companions for isolated older adults; women in their 70s co-housing Golden Girls–style; virtual reality headsets that transport centenarians to a Hawaiian beach. There’s a Dutch supermarket with a lane called “Chatter Checkout” for older shoppers who’d like to pause a moment over the conveyor belt and gossip with the cashier.

On February 11, 2025, our U.S. Senate reintroduced legislation that would, if passed, require the Department of Health and Human Services to study the ways in which loneliness affects older adults, then offer solutions including their reintegration into the community. Sometimes, this reintegration looks like working as a greeter at Walmart or meeting for coffee after a gentle yoga class at the local YMCA. Other times, it looks like putting on your hiking pants and your waterproof boots and a parka and taking off for parts unknown to walk and kayak and learn about the world with other autodidacts.

The latter solution to loneliness appealed to me.

Technology and Politics: The Loneliness Culprits

In high school, I had so many close and peripheral friends—thanks to clubs and extracurricular activities—that I’d wake myself up every night talking to them in my dreams. But in college, I hooked up with an introverted boyfriend and made few new friends. I didn’t fare much better in graduate school. Then, I moved 700 miles away from my hometown and had to start over. For a decade, I found myself once again surrounded by comrades—long-distance runners, mostly. But when I became a mother to a child with intense emotional and educational needs, marathon-running, like friends, became a luxury in which I had little time to indulge.

At my loneliest, I’ve felt a nauseating emptiness in my chest during every waking hour. Rumination takes over my brain—if only I’d done, I should have joined, if only I were more like—and fills in the blank spots with a multitude of actions, organizations, and friends who seldom have a free hour in their social calendars.

I wondered, as I boarded a plane across the country in January, whether my chronic sense of social isolation could be mitigated by freezing my ass off on a multi-day paddling trip in Florida. Trepidation nagged at me. Thirty years past the awkwardness of university dining halls, I still worried that other, more popular women would gather in happy little cliques over the Sweetwater Inn’s buffet breakfast while I’d eat alone with my smartphone.

On the American Psychological Association’s podcast Speaking of Psychology, Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad—professor of neuroscience and psychology at Brigham Young University—talked about her research on social isolation and loneliness as a predictor of depression, anxiety, and early death and identified technology like my smartphone as a culprit. “The way in which we interact socially has changed dramatically with changes in technology,” she said. “And of course, this is a hotly debated topic in terms of whether or not technology is increasing loneliness or not or can be a solution or both.”

Her words remind me of the new AI companion robots being marketed to seniors: They converse, play games, offer instruction for arts-and-crafts projects, show travel videos. One advertisement shows a silver-haired woman of indeterminate ethnicity holding a mug and beaming at a tablet propped up on a console displaying a picture-based game. For me, it’s a chilling image. I have zero interest in spending time with AI. But I recognize that for others less mobile, less gregarious, more tolerant of their own company and isolation, these robots are a blessing. Also, you can program them to share your political views.

It’s not an insignificant attribute. As Dr. Holt-Lunstad notes, “A significant portion of people have actually ended relationships with family and friends over politics and have unfollowed people on social media over politics.” This is happening worldwide, she adds.

Coalitions, Stipends, and Park Benches

Since 2016, Australia has had a Coalition to End Loneliness. In 2018, alarmed by the results of a parliamentary study on social isolation, the U.K. appointed a Minister for Loneliness. Japan did the same in 2021. Denmark’s government has a loneliness strategy. South Korea, for a time, gave socially isolated people between the ages of nine and 24 a $500 monthly stipend to use for school, work, and play outside of their homes. And several countries have adopted Zimbabwe’s Friendship Bench program in which grandmothers trained in attentive listening and talk therapy sit on park benches and offer lonely individuals a listening ear and some warm-hearted conversation.

I could have used a grandmother a few years ago, when my daughter began to drive and no longer needed a ride to her dance studio or my presence as a volunteer at her school. Most of my child-free marathoner friends had moved on. Most of my mom friends were still intensely parenting younger children. Isolated in my work-from-home journalism job, I pined for human connection.

Still, my loneliness felt ridiculous, even humiliating. I had a loving husband and a handful of introverted chums who occasionally surfaced for coffee or a text exchange. But a text is not a phone call, and a phone call is not a meeting over drinks in person at a clean well-lighted place where you can see and hear your bestie and perhaps reach out a hand to hold at a poignant moment in the conversation.

Worse, no one in my immediate circle seemed to listen to me or care about the stories I had to tell. Call it the journalist’s affliction; we’re so busy asking mindful questions of our sources that our family members and friends can’t get a word in edgewise.

My social isolation became so emotionally painful that I signed up to volunteer for National Ski Patrol and formed a weekly pub trivia group. Still, that yawning emptiness in my chest threatened to implode and take me down with it. I felt like Paul Simon, singing with Art Garfunkel in the folk song “America”: “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.”

At last, I figured out why. I missed my mother.

Before her death six years ago at 74, we’d been traveling partners. Curious about everything from history to nature to architecture and art, we’d galavanted across California and Oregon and Spain for three decades. Her passing left me longing for someone as rabidly inquisitive and down for adventure as she’d been.

Could I find someone to fill her sports sandals—someone who didn’t mind if they got wet and muddy and maybe even fouled by alligator poop?

Filling a Void Through Travel

Road Scholar is one of a handful of travel organizations specializing in trips for people over 50; it’s distinguished by its hyper-focus on education, whether that looks like learning how to cook Sicilian specialties or paint in the Poconos or study the fragile ecosystem of Florida’s natural springs. Retired counseling psychologist Mary Fukuyama calls the camaraderie that develops among guided tour participants a byproduct of collective identity—a shared sense of belonging to a community. “For a few days, you’re a member of a group,” she told me. “You’re part of a community that values travel and experiences out in the world.”

Mary and her wife Jackie Davis help to lead the Florida paddling trip a couple of times each year. She explained that kayaking on a river allows for independence while maintaining connection with the mission of the trip, and that limiting the trip to women creates a particular type of relaxed camaraderie.

 “The gender roles dictating how women act around men and vice versa are absent,” she said. “There’s no mansplaining, and there aren’t any women deferring to men, or women trying to take care of men.”

Instead, the women on my kayaking trip took care of one another. Jan, a former middle-school teacher, loaned me her gloves, saving my fingers from near frostbite on the chilly river. I loaned a woman named Susan my sound system when hers broke and she couldn’t hear our guide talking about Snowy egrets in a kayak up ahead of us.

“Women support and uplift each other, especially when we step out of our comfort zones,” Susan told me. She and her husband had lately moved to Florida to care for her father, and she’d had to leave dear friends behind in New Hampshire. She celebrated her 70th birthday on the Florida kayaking trip and found that what she called “the sisterhood” helped her to navigate the loneliness she felt as a caregiver.

Caregiving, she told me, left little time to meet other people and establish friendships. “But on a multi-day trip, you’re riding in shuttles together and listening to live lectures and watching films and sharing meals,” she said. “In our case, we also paddled … a lot.”

And we talked a lot. Florida’s natural springs attract herons and ibis and alligators and manatees, thanks to a constant water temperature of 72˚F. We pointed out our discoveries and peppered our guide with questions about them. The only time we pulled out our smartphones was to photograph flora and fauna or show off pictures of our kids or grandkids or dogs. The sisterhood didn’t need any AI robots.

On one chilly, sunny afternoon during a lunch break, Susan and I eyed each other.

“Are you gonna swim?” I asked her.

“I am,” she said. “Are you gonna swim?”

“It’s your birthday,” I told her. “We have to swim.”

As the rest of the women watched, we shed layers down to our swimsuits and scuttled across the sand, striding into the spring. Bygrave floated, serene. I squealed like a stuck pig. The water was tepid, not warm, and we swam for only five minutes. But the adventure reminded me of all the nights my high school friends and I built bonfires on Manhattan Beach and jumped into the cold ocean hooting with laughter. 

By the time we were back in our clothing, teeth chattering, I felt like Susan and I had known each other for years.

A Quick, Deep Bond

Road Scholar adventures aren’t cheap. The least expensive trip takes you to a mountain retreat in North Carolina where you spend five days studying the lives and works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Alfred Hitchcock. It’s just under $1,000…without airfare. But the organization wants to make adventure learning available for everyone. During the pandemic, they launched At Home programs—live remote, multi-day events featuring many of the same expert instructors from their in-person trips.

And thanks to donors, they’re able to award 300 trip scholarships each year to retired educators (their definition of “educator” is expansive, including, among others, coaches and counselors, custodians and librarians) and caregivers of ill or disabled family members whether that member lives at home or in residential care.

It’s possible, of course, to find camaraderie in vastly cheaper ways; in my city alone, there are hiking and cycling clubs, parks and recreation classes on everything from cooking to fencing, book clubs and Alzheimer’s support groups and the local dog park which fills up with Labradoodles and their retired owners mid-morning every day of the week. But what if, like me, older folks long to explore the world with like-minded friends?

Maeve Hartney told me that Road Scholar’s focus on learning and discovery through travel brings people together thanks to their shared passions, enhancing their sense of well-being. “We find that participants bond very quickly and often quite deeply,” she explained. Hoping for further insight, I visited the Women of Road Scholar Facebook group. When I asked whether any of the 43.1K members felt less lonely since signing up for the organization’s educational tours, I received over 100 replies.

Good question, someone wrote. I’m thinking I’m lonely now at home, might as well be lonely in a new-to-me beautiful place! 

Kelly Hatcher Turnbull posted about how she took her first Road Scholar trip at age 51. Rode horses with a lovely group of women, she wrote. Many of us planned our second horseback riding trip for June. Being with like-minded friends on an adventure is salve for the soul.

And Mareena Sweat described how she broke up with her partner in April and decided she needed to find her people.

I found them in Costa Rica on a RS trip and now have ten new friends I feel I can count on for anything, she writes. I’m going back to CR for the other birding trip there with seven of the ten and can’t wait to see them again. I’ve seen a couple of them since we came back and am so happy that I have bird people now and a new group of support.

Patty Baush offered this perspective. “Sounds like stereotyping older folks,” she wrote to me.

On the Speaking of Psychology podcast, Holt-Lunstad reminded listeners that “just because someone lives alone or is unmarried or doesn’t have children, doesn’t necessarily mean that they are isolated or lonely. So, you could, of course, have a wide social network and not feel lonely at all.”

Or you could be like me and feel lonely in the midst of your family and hometown, sign up for a solo adventure, and experience a revelation.

Filled Up With Friendship

On the last day of my group’s kayaking adventure, my new friend Pat, 79, taught us about geocaching, persuading three women to upend a rusting horse trough so that she could extract a tiny receptacle and sign her name on the miniscule register. We showered and met up on the Sweetwater Inn’s covered front porch for glasses of wine and shrimp and grits. Susan read a Wendell Berry poem. Mary and Jackie played the flute and stand-up bass with a young jazz guitarist. When the trio launched into “The Way You Look Tonight,” some of us broke into song, misty-eyed.

I realized then that likely every single one of my fellow travelers had experienced the profound loss and grief I felt around my mother’s passing. This revelation struck me as oddly comforting.

Later, I’d find some of these women on social media and continue our friendships. I’d text and Zoom with others, and I’d save my pennies for another Road Scholar excursion. But for the moment, on the Florida inn’s fairy-lit front porch, we were dancing.

Mary and Jackie and the jazz guitarist began a lively version of “All of Me.” My toes, under the table, began to tap. “This song would be perfect for swing dancing,” I told Pat. “but I’ve forgotten the steps.”

“Oh, I know them!” She pulled me out of my chair and toward an empty space on the porch. She guided me around the makeshift dance floor while the perpetrators of the plastic dinosaur fornication—my swimming partner, the retired teacher who loaned me her gloves, and others—looked on and applauded.

For an instant, the abyss in my heart opened up once more. I remembered the times my mother and I had danced together in her kitchen, how she demonstrated the tap and jazz steps she’d learned growing up in her stepfather’s dance studio, and how I’d try gamely to learn them.

Like Mom, Pat was graceful and confident. I stumbled over my boots. Part of me longed to weep. But the music and the wine and the camaraderie of my all new friends filled me up.

Instead, I twirled under Pat’s outstretched arm. Then, I threw back my head and laughed.