My father-in-law retired three years ago, and on paper his life is full. He’s married. He has three kids and six grandchildren within a two-hour drive. His calendar has things on it.
But I’ve noticed something about his phone. When it rings, it’s almost always a request. Can you look at the water heater? Can you take the dog Thursday? Do you still have the title for the old truck? Do you know a guy who does gutters?
He picks up every time, and he sounds glad to. Then he hangs up, and the house goes quiet in a way that a full house shouldn’t.
Meanwhile, a widow down the street from him lives entirely alone and seems, by every measure I can see, less lonely than he is. Her phone rings for no reason. Somebody wants to tell her about a movie.
Bolde recently ran a piece from a 74-year-old father who has started opening every call to his son with “don’t worry, this’ll be quick”, and what struck me was how much of it was about the direction the calls run in. Psychology has a fair amount to say about that direction, and it explains my father-in-law better than his living situation does.
Living alone is a weak predictor of loneliness
The assumption most of us carry is that loneliness in retirement is about headcount. Empty house, empty life. The research doesn’t support that very well.
A UCSF team led by geriatrician Carla Perissinotto followed more than 1,600 adults over 60 for six years and found that 43 percent reported feeling lonely, while only 18 percent lived alone. Most of the lonely people in that study had someone else in the house.
The University of Michigan’s National Poll on Healthy Aging has tracked this for years, and in its most recent data, about one in three adults aged 50 to 80 said they felt lonely at least some of the time. People who live alone have usually reported higher rates than people who live with others.
But in 2024, the rate for people living alone was actually lower than for people living with someone else. That’s one year of a poll that draws a fresh sample each time, so I wouldn’t build a theory on it. But it fits the larger pattern. Living arrangements turn out to be a surprisingly poor guide to who’s lonely.
The form of the contact people have matters more. And for a lot of retirees, the form is lopsided.
A phone that only rings for favors is delivering one kind of support and withholding another
Researchers who study social support tend to split it into two broad kinds. There’s instrumental support, which is practical help: rides, repairs, money, babysitting, someone to sit with you at the DMV. And there’s emotional support, which is companionship, being confided in, being asked how you actually are.
A phone that rings for favors is running entirely on the first kind, in one direction. The retiree supplies it. Nobody supplies the second kind back.
Diana Wang, then a doctoral candidate at USC’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, looked at more than 1,200 adults in the Midlife in the United States study and asked how much their friends, family and spouses relied on them in a crisis or opened up to them about worries, and how much that ran the other way.
People who reported an imbalance in either direction showed more stress, depression and anxiety. But giving more than you got back looked worse than the reverse. That’s a cross-sectional survey and it measured perceptions rather than actual behavior, so it can’t tell us which way the arrow points. It can tell us that being the one everyone leans on and nobody checks on registers as a loss.
My father-in-law is the water-heater guy. Nobody has ever called to say the water heater’s fine, how are you.
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Giving more than you get isn’t the problem on its own
I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this argument is retirees are being used, and the research complicates that.
A 2024 study in The Journals of Gerontology followed 4,650 Europeans aged 60 and older across three survey waves and tracked practical help they gave to and received from people outside their family. More than half of them gave more than they got. And that imbalance wasn’t associated with worse quality of life, more depression, or lower life satisfaction. Receiving more than you gave was. The authors’ explanation is that helping others keeps an older person feeling capable and useful, while being helped without a way to repay it does the opposite.
So the ledger itself can run in the red without much harm. Older people, in particular, seem fairly comfortable being net givers. Wang’s USC study found the same thing: older adults were less bothered by imbalance than younger ones, possibly because they’ve built up decades of what researchers call a “support bank” and can afford to run a deficit for a while.
My father-in-law would be fine helping more than he’s helped. He’d probably prefer it. What wears on him is what the pattern of calls implies about why people dial his number in the first place.
What’s missing is evidence that someone would call anyway
Bert Uchino, a psychologist at the University of Utah, has spent much of his career on a distinction that sounds like hairsplitting until you think about it. There’s support you actually receive, and there’s support you believe is available to you if you needed it. He argues those are separable things that need to be measured separately, and the broader literature he’s part of has generally found that perceived support is the more reliable predictor of health.
Here’s the trap for someone whose phone only rings with requests. Every call is technically evidence of a relationship. What none of the calls can show him is whether the relationship would hold if he stopped being useful.
He can’t tell whether his son would call if the truck title were already sorted. He has no data on that, because it’s never been tested. And a mind trying to gauge where it stands with people tends to read missing data as bad news.
Isolation you can see by counting. This doesn’t show up in the count at all.
Being needed and being valued are not the same experience
Gordon Flett, a psychologist at York University, has spent years studying something he calls mattering, which is the sense that you’re significant to other people, that they’d notice if you weren’t there. He’s found it tracks closely with loneliness, especially in older adults.
“A big chunk of the loneliness epidemic is a ‘not mattering’ epidemic,” he told AARP, and he noted that lonely people almost always describe themselves as unimportant or insignificant to others.
What’s counterintuitive is that you can be needed constantly and still feel that you don’t matter. A person who calls for the gutter guy’s number needs you the way they need a phone book. That’s a real need, and meeting it feels good in the moment. Being wanted in the room is a separate thing, and the phone book never gets that.
Flett himself, approaching his own retirement, told AARP that losing his office and lab space made it easier to feel discarded. He’s the expert on this, and he still felt it. Most of us get our sense of mattering delivered through work for forty years, and then work stops delivering it, and the phone becomes the only remaining instrument.
If it only rings for favors, that’s what it measures.
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What actually changes this, for the retiree, and for the people who call them
Stopping the helping would be the wrong move. The research is fairly clear that helping is one of the things holding him up. What has to change is the requests being the only contact.
That means making some calls that have no purpose, and tolerating how strange that feels at first. It means saying I’ll fix the water heater, and also I’m free Sunday if you want to get lunch, and letting the second half sit there without apologizing for it.
On the other side, if you’re the adult child, the fix is easier and more embarrassing. Call once in a while with nothing to ask. Tell him about the movie. Ask him what he thinks about something that has nothing to do with your house. He’ll probably assume you need something. Let him figure out that you don’t.
None of this makes anyone less lonely overnight, and someone whose loneliness comes with sleeping badly, losing interest in things, or a real drop in mood should be talking to a doctor, not just waiting for a nicer phone call.
But my father-in-law doesn’t need more people. He has plenty. He needs one call a week that would have happened even if he’d never learned how to fix anything.
