I doubt that's the problem. It takes effort to go out and try to make friends. Even trying does not guarantee success. I'm barely thirty and I can't remember the last time I made a friend on my own. There are people in my orbit (family) who help me meet new people and stay connected. I'd be doing a really bad job without them.
My lonely friend who moved away regularly says he is lonely, but also hasn't really made any new friends where he lives. They decided to move to another state where there are more people who speak his wife's native language, but neither of them know anyone there, despite living there for a couple of years now. Knowing you are lonely and telling others you are lonely doesn't help if you don't have a support network or community.
“Admit” as in “enable social structures around,” not “confess to random strangers.”
As a concrete (and tiny) example: we enforce loneliness at the physical and policy levels by subsiding the construction of car-dependent suburbs: human socialization becomes defined by points of interaction (driving to the bowling alley, except you have no friends to bowl with), rather than transitory areas of interaction.
This is very different your original statement. Social structures that create loneliness are not the same as "stigmatizing" loneliness. And this doesn't explain how the supposed stigma around loneliness causes loneliness in men.
> Social structures that create loneliness are not the same as "stigmatizing" loneliness.
I didn't say that they were the same: I said that expressions of loneliness are stigmatized in men, and that we've developed social structures that create and enforce loneliness. They're separate points.
The stigma around loneliness doesn't as much cause loneliness as it ensures that the causes of loneliness can't be meaningfully ameliorated. To use a popular phrase: "the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem."
My lonely friend who moved away regularly says he is lonely, but also hasn't really made any new friends where he lives. They decided to move to another state where there are more people who speak his wife's native language, but neither of them know anyone there, despite living there for a couple of years now. Knowing you are lonely and telling others you are lonely doesn't help if you don't have a support network or community.