I think what you said here is great and really gets right to the meat of it all:

"I don’t think we can call the male loneliness epidemic “debunked”. Although I’ve always thought the word “epidemic” was going a bit too far. Let’s call it the “male loneliness problem”. Because I do think it is a problem.

Personally, I suspect it’s young men in their 20’s who are really suffering. But 30+ men and women start partnering up, as you said."

Yes, and, obviously, I'm not going so far as to say that loneliness doesn't exist—it does. The "lonely twenties" doesn't sound much different from life when I was in my twenties—insecure, both personally and economically—often single, getting out, living life, and generally making a mess while learning the lessons I needed for my thirties.

My biggest problem is with the hyper-fixation on this particular group of young men, a group that notoriously eschews long-term commitments like kids and marriage. There's a loneliness problem broadly, one that I'll even say might warrant the term "epidemic," but the problem isn't decisively male, nor is it just people in their twenties, nor can we see that from data like this which is often used as the crux of the argument. Funny, no one is talking about the "loneliness epidemic" of women over 65 who are widowed because women statistically live longer than men.

Now, I think the loneliness problem does affect different groups differently and young men have a unique presentation of loneliness. But I even question some of those measures like I do this one (that being single is a guaranteed marker of loneliness, even when the people asked say they want to be single). The idea of "deaths of despair" is a great example. Some use surveys that find people's drug use rates to conclude that someone is lonely. But, like, a lot of drug users and alcoholics are very social people. If not, bars would be empty. So that's another flawed measure, no?

I think the best measure is simply to ask people if they're lonely and stop trying to make assumptions based on data that doesn't even touch the topic of loneliness.

Thanks for reading and this thoughtful comment, as always. I appreciate both.