Edward Hopper’s paintings captured something essential about American life in the mid-twentieth century: figures isolated within the frame, surrounded by the architecture of modern life yet fundamentally alone. Hopper’s “Nighthawks” shows four people in a diner, none of them connecting. “Morning Sun” depicts a woman sitting on a bed, light streaming through the window, utterly solitary despite being in the heart of a city.
These images now feel prophetic. We live in Hopper paintings. A loneliness epidemic is transforming many American homes into galleries of isolation. We are surrounded by people yet cannot reach them.
In homes across America, with almost ritualistic predictability, you will find couples sitting side by side on the couch, bathed in the blue glow of separate screens, together yet utterly alone. They share a mortgage, a Netflix account, maybe children sleeping upstairs, but the warmth that once connected them has cooled to the temperature of roommates splitting rent.
Nearly half of all U.S. adults report feeling lonely, and married life, which was meant to banish isolation, has itself become a solitary confinement cell for many couples. It is becoming a broader American tragedy, a loneliness epidemic that has metastasized through every layer of society, transforming marriages into economic arrangements too expensive to dissolve, families into collections of strangers passing in hallways, and communities into Hopper paintings featuring rooms filled with people who cannot see each other.
Isolation
Thirty percent of adults say they have experienced feelings of loneliness at least once a week over the past year, while ten percent say they are lonely every day. Among younger Americans aged 18-34, the crisis deepens further, with thirty percent saying they were lonely every day or several times a week. Perhaps most alarmingly, in-person social interaction among teens has dropped significantly in the span of two decades, replaced by digital communication that offers the semblance of connection while amplifying feelings of inadequacy and exclusion.
This epidemic cuts across demographic lines but strikes certain groups with particular severity. Research from Harvard’s Making Caring Common project found that people between 30-44 years of age were the loneliest group, with twenty-nine percent reporting they were frequently or always lonely. Economic factors compound the crisis: Americans earning less than $30,000 a year were the loneliest, with twenty-nine percent in this category reporting feeling lonely, compared to just eighteen percent of those making over $100,000 annually.
Single adults are nearly twice as likely as married adults to say they have been lonely on a weekly basis over the past year (39% vs. 22%). The expectation that a single person may be lonely was normalized for generations, but the idea that loneliness is flourishing in an institution that is supposed to address the loneliness problem seems abnormal.
The Roommate Marriage
There is a new term that describes this loneliness phenomenon in marriages: “roommate marriage” or “roommate syndrome.” These are relationships where couples coexist under the same roof but are emotionally and physically disconnected, living more like roommates than spouses. The dynamic rarely happens overnight. Instead, it sneaks in slowly: you stop going out, stop touching, stop talking beyond schedules and errands.
Research confirms what many couples feel but hesitate to name. When a roommate stage lingers for too long, it turns into resentment between partners who no longer view their relationship as innately special or a top priority. Couples eventually become business partners and the communication, if any, between them focuses on to-do lists, schedules, kids, and finances. Most of these couples then stay trapped in hollow and unhappy marriages not by choice but by economic necessity. The average cost of divorce in America now ranges between $7,000 to over $20,000 depending on complexity and location, with some states seeing costs as high as $14,435.
The economic architecture of American life has made divorce prohibitively expensive for many. Nearly one in three users on a married dating site report avoiding divorce because they can’t afford it. Divorcing can be expensive for both parties, and not just because of legal bills. Most families spend what they make, and now they have to support two households. Women face particular hardship, with post-divorce income dropping by an average of 25-30% in most developed countries. The result is a Kafkaesque situation where couples remain legally married while living as emotional strangers, bound together by mortgages they cannot afford to split, children they must co-parent, health insurance they cannot replace, and retirement accounts that would be decimated by division.
As a result, a growing number of couples, who want to divorce, are opting to end the marriage but still remain within the same household, saving higher expenses related to moving out, alimony, child care and potentially longer work transportation commutes. The roommate marriage, once a psychological condition, has become a prescribed economic arrangement.
Political polarization
Into this new landscape of emotional and economic precarity, add political polarization. About two-thirds of liberal and conservative singles would be more likely to “swipe left” and reject a potential match who did not share their politics.
For existing marriages, political differences have become increasingly corrosive. Research shows that fewer than half (47 percent) of politically mixed married couples report they are “completely satisfied with their family life,” compared with 61 percent of couples in which both spouses are Republicans and 55 percent where both are Democrats. The decline in cross-partisan marriages is precipitous: in 2016, thirty percent of couples were politically mixed; today, only twenty one percent of marriages are politically mixed, and nearly four percent are between Democrats and Republicans.
There was a time in America when married couples had differing opinions on politics, mild and polite disagreements, but they were not cause for canceling a relationship. Today, marriage affiliation is becoming a proxy for fundamental life goals regarding gender, work, family, and values, the very bedrock on which successful marriages are built. When a couple’s political identities diverge, they often find themselves “making war over political issues” rather than making love.
Result: greater political polarization is spelling trouble for already anemic rates of dating, mating, and marrying.
Social media
If economic pressure provides the cage and political polarization the kindling, social media is the accelerant that is transforming simmering discontent into open crisis. According to the Pew Research Center, forty percent of partnered adults say they are bothered by the amount of time their partner spends on their smartphone. The average user now scrolls through social media for two and a half hours per day, time once spent in conversation, in touch, in presence.
Social media breeds destructive comparison. Couples sometimes compare their mundane lives with what is depicted online as other’s exciting lives. This leads to compulsive behavior that produces withdrawal symptoms similar to drug addiction. Perhaps most destructively, social media posts now generate the appearance of connection as a substitute for actual intimacy.
Beyond marriages, the prolonged use of social media is impacting social interactions for Americans of all ages, negatively affecting family relationships and friendships while also making face-to-face communication more difficult. The scene of family dinners where everyone sits together while scrolling separate feeds has become so common it barely registers as abnormal.
Technology is also reshaping family dynamics in subtle but profound ways. I know family members who communicate with each other online, through texts, or on social media rather than talk to each other face to face. I know husbands and wives, including yours truly, spending time next to each other, but with minds engrossed in their own social entertainment as they scroll through their individual feeds. The physical proximity remains, but the emotional presence evaporates.
The health consequences of loneliness rival those of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Loneliness increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia, depression, and premature death. The social consequences are even more devastating. When Harvard researchers investigated the underlying causes, they found that lonely respondents were far more likely to report anxiety, depression, a lack of meaning and purpose and the sense that their place in the world is not important; eighty one percent of lonely adults reported anxiety or depression, and about seventy five percent of lonely adults reported having little or no meaning or purpose.
The epidemic creates a vicious cycle. Loneliness breeds anxiety and depression, which further isolate individuals, which deepens loneliness. For marriages already strained by economic pressure and political division, loneliness becomes the final straw that breaks connection entirely, or the final reason to stay in a broken marriage, because being alone together seems preferable to being alone alone.
Last word
The loneliness epidemic and the crisis of American marriage nay not be separate phenomena but symptoms of the same disease: the erosion of genuine human connection in favor of economic arrangements, political tribes, and digital simulacra of intimacy. The solution cannot be purely individual, though individual choices matter. It must also be structural and cultural.
The antidote to loneliness may be surprisingly accessible. The solution people endorsed most, including lonely adults, is available to almost all of us: “taking time each day to reach out to a friend or family member.” For couples in roommate marriages, the path back requires intentional effort: prioritizing time together, engaging in non-political activities, practicing active listening, and creating device-free spaces for genuine conversation.
But personal solutions remain insufficient without broader change. America needs policies that make divorce less financially catastrophic for those who need it, reducing the economic captivity that traps couples in hollow marriages. We need digital literacy education that helps families establish boundaries around technology use. We need spaces, physical and cultural, that facilitate face-to-face connection rather than digital isolation. We need to recognize that social connection is not a luxury but a fundamental determinant of health and wellbeing.
Most of all, we need to acknowledge the crisis for what it is. Loneliness is not a personal failing but a potential public health phenomenon. The roommate marriage, in some cases, may not be just a relationship problem but a symptom of economic inequality. Political polarization may be about more than ideology; it may reveal fundamental incompatibility of visions for life in general. Social media is not simply a tool but an architecture that shapes how we relate, or fail to relate, to one another.
The Hopper paintings that capture our current moment need not be our permanent condition. But escaping them requires more than individual therapy or relationship advice. It requires reimagining how we structure economic life, how we engage across political differences, how we use technology, and ultimately, how we value human connection itself. The epidemic of loneliness is one of the defining crisises of our age. Whether and how we address it will determine not just the health of American marriages but the health of American society itself.
Now, excuse me, my wife is trying to get my attention.