Why apps make loneliness worse, not better

This piece makes a claim that I want to state clearly at the outset, because it runs against what the apps themselves suggest they offer, and against what many men hope when they open them.

Apps do not reliably reduce loneliness.

Apps do not reliably reduce loneliness. For men who are already lonely in the specific way that drives compulsive sexual behaviour, they tend to make it worse. Not immediately, and not without providing something real along the way. But over time, and at the level that matters most, the pattern is consistent: the more a man relies on apps as his primary route to connection, the lonelier he tends to become.

Understanding why requires looking honestly at what loneliness actually is, what apps actually provide, and the gap between the two.

What loneliness actually is

The loneliness that sits underneath compulsive sexual behaviour is not simply the loneliness of being alone. Many of the men I work with are not alone in any conventional sense. They have partners, friends, colleagues, families. What they are is unknown. There is a version of themselves, often the most significant version, that has never been seen by the people around them.

This is the loneliness of the unwitnessed self. The desire, the struggle, the fear, the need for connection that cannot be expressed within the structures of ordinary life. And this particular kind of loneliness has a specific quality that distinguishes it from the loneliness that is resolved simply by being around other people: it can only be addressed by being genuinely known. Not just present. Known.

What apps actually offer

Apps offer something real. It is important to say that clearly, because dismissing what they provide misses why men return to them.

They offer access. At any hour, in any mood, in any state of distress or desire, the app is there. The experience of being seen as desirable, even briefly, even by a stranger, even in a format that is entirely mediated and curated, is not nothing. For men who feel unseen or unwanted in their daily lives, that experience carries genuine weight.

They offer low-stakes contact. The emotional exposure required to send a message on an app is minimal. There is no requirement to be legible, to be vulnerable, to risk being truly known. The contact is real and the reward, the message back, the match, the acknowledgement, can produce a genuine neurological response.

And they offer the appearance of possibility. The scroll through profiles is always, implicitly, a scroll through potential futures. Something might happen. Someone might be there. The anticipation is itself a form of relief from the loneliness that preceded it.

Why it does not hold

None of what apps offer addresses the loneliness of the unwitnessed self. And the specific way in which they fail to address it tends to deepen it.

The contact available through apps is, by design, curated and controlled. You present a version of yourself. The other person presents a version of themselves. The interaction, even when it leads to a physical encounter, is conducted between two performances rather than two people. The genuine knowing that would address the underlying loneliness is not available in that format. Not because the people involved are not real, but because the format is not built for it.

The scale of the app experience compounds this. When connection is available in such abundance, when there are always more profiles to scroll through, the experience of any individual connection becomes more disposable. The man who feels unseen in his life goes to the app to feel wanted, finds something that briefly functions as wanting, and then finds that it evaporates. The next scroll begins before the previous encounter has been processed. And underneath the accumulation of contacts and encounters, the loneliness that was there at the start remains completely untouched.

An app that reliably resolved loneliness would be an app that users would eventually not need.

The design of the apps, as explored elsewhere in this blog series, is not neutral. Variable rewards, push notifications timed to pull users back, paid tiers that offer the promise of more visibility and more connection: all of this is designed to maximise time on the platform. The loneliness that drives a man to the app in the first place is, from the platform's perspective, a resource. It is what keeps him coming back. An app that reliably resolved loneliness would be an app that users would eventually not need. That is not a commercially viable outcome.

The specific problem for gay and bisexual men

For gay and bisexual men, this dynamic has additional complexity because apps have not just been a route to sex. They have been social infrastructure.

In places where gay community was thin or dangerous, apps were how men found each other. They remain, for many gay and bisexual men, one of the primary ways of locating others who share their experience. Dismissing them entirely misses something real about what they have provided and continue to provide.

The distinction I am drawing is not between using apps and not using them. It is between apps as one element of a broader social and sexual life and apps as the primary or only route to connection. When the latter becomes true, when the app has replaced rather than supplemented other forms of community and contact, the loneliness it was supposed to address tends to intensify rather than reduce. The ease of app-mediated contact can erode the capacity and the motivation for the kinds of connection that are slower, more demanding and more genuinely addressing.

What actually addresses loneliness

The work we do is not aimed at getting men off apps. It is aimed at building the internal capacity and the external structures that address the loneliness that makes apps so compelling.

That means building the capacity for genuine disclosure: the ability to be known, not just seen. It means developing relationships with other men that contain some honest content. It means finding contexts, including the group programme itself, where being fully present with other people is possible without the mediation of a screen or a substance or a performance.

None of this is quick. The loneliness of the unwitnessed self took years to develop. The habits of contact that substitute for genuine connection are deeply established. What we consistently see in the men who do this work over time is that as the alternatives develop, the pull of the apps changes. Not because the apps have changed, but because what they were substituting for is no longer entirely absent.

For more on how loneliness drives compulsive sexual behaviour broadly, see The loneliness behind compulsive sexual behaviour. For the group therapy mechanism that addresses this directly, see When you realise you're not the only one: why group therapy works.

Information about applying to the programme is on the apply page.

Dr Michael Yates is an HCPC-registered Clinical Psychologist and Psychosexual Specialist. He is an EFS-ESSM Certified Psychosexologist and COSRT-registered Sex and Relationship Therapist.