Aging, Lonely Men, and the Three-legged stool.

At one point in my past, I was a graduate student in gerontology at Portland State University. I was studying the social aspects of aging. I don’t remember a lot from that experience, just as I remember little from any of my other academic adventures, but a few things stuck with me. One of those was that loneliness is as dangerous to one’s health as smoking.

Loneliness in old people is most acute among men. Men get married and thereafter depend upon their wives for a social life. Wives not only handle the couple’s social life, but build and maintain all-female social groups. When a woman’s husband dies, she often has a bevy or female friends she can turn to for support and companionship. When an old man loses his wife, there is often no one there.

I fit this stereotype. During my teen and college years I had male friends, and then one day after I had entered the working world, I realized they were all gone. I had my colleagues at work, my family, and my spiritual community, but no male friends who did not come from one of those groups. In my drinking days, my spiritual community met at the bar. It was a community with a death wish, a dysfunctional community, but a community better than none at all. After I got sober, my spiritual community was my twelve-step group.