Women are social creatures, primed for connection and close, intimate ties at every stage of life.
All humans are social creatures, of course. Being alone in the ways modern humans can now be alone would have been almost impossible for most of our history and prehistory, when survival depended far more directly on other people. But women have also spent much of that history surrounded by other women, children, family, and community, often in close physical proximity and deeply involved in caring for both young and old.
Our reproductive physiology also makes oxytocin especially relevant to distinctly female experiences like childbirth and breastfeeding, alongside sex, orgasm, touch, eye contact, bonding, and other forms of relational connection.
For this reason, I believe women in the modern developed world may be uniquely vulnerable to what happens when intimacy, community, physical affection, pleasure, and meaningful connection become scarce. That doesn’t mean loneliness isn’t an enormous problem for men, too. But my work is primarily with women, and what interests me is where female physiology meets a way of living that can leave us increasingly cut off from the experiences that once made connection a normal part of everyday life rather than something we have to schedule.
In this article, I’ll explain what oxytocin is and why it matters so much for women, how modern life can quietly starve us of connection, and three strategies I use with my clients (and in my own life) to address loneliness at its roots.
What Is Oxytocin, and Why Does It Matter So Much for Women?
Oxytocin is often called the “love hormone” or “cuddle hormone,” but those nicknames undersell how central it is to our physiology.
Chemically, oxytocin is a small peptide made of just nine amino acids. It’s produced in the hypothalamus and released in two ways: into the bloodstream through the posterior pituitary gland, where it acts as a hormone throughout the body, and directly within the brain, where it acts as a neurotransmitter influencing emotion, social behavior, and our perception of safety.
Its most familiar roles are uniquely female. Oxytocin drives the uterine contractions of labor, triggers milk let-down during breastfeeding, and surges during orgasm. But it’s also released in far more ordinary moments: a long hug, warm skin-to-skin contact, sustained eye contact with someone we trust, a good laugh with a friend, a shared meal, being listened to and understood. In other words, the everyday experiences of connection are also physiological events.
What makes oxytocin so relevant to regulation is its relationship to stress. Oxytocin helps calm the stress response. It can dampen the release of cortisol, reduce reactivity in the brain’s threat centers, and shift the nervous system toward rest, digestion, and repair. Researcher Kerstin Uvnäs-Moberg has described oxytocin as the foundation of a “calm and connection” system, a physiological counterweight to fight-or-flight. When we feel safe with other people, our bodies can stop bracing.
Women may be especially attuned to this system. Estrogen increases the number of oxytocin receptors in the body, which means our sensitivity to oxytocin shifts across the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, postpartum, and perimenopause. Psychologist Shelley Taylor proposed that under stress, women are often wired not only for fight-or-flight but for what she called “tend-and-befriend”: turning toward others, caring for the vulnerable, and seeking social support as a way of surviving. Oxytocin appears to be part of what drives that impulse.
Here’s the part I find most fascinating: some research suggests that oxytocin may rise when we’re in social distress, not only when we’re comforted. If so, it may function partly as a signal that nudges us to reach for connection when we need it. That raises a question: what happens when a woman feels that pull toward other people over and over, but there’s no one there to reach for?
I want to be careful here. Oxytocin research is still evolving, its effects depend heavily on context, and it’s difficult to measure meaningfully in a blood test. I’m not suggesting that every lonely woman has a clinically measurable “low oxytocin” that explains her symptoms, or that one hormone explains the full complexity of human connection. But what we understand so far points in a consistent direction: our bodies are built to regulate in relationship, and women’s physiology in particular seems deeply organized around bonding, touch, and care.
Which brings us to the problem of modern life.
How Modern Life Quietly Starves Us of Connection
Many women today are highly independent, educated, and career-oriented. We’re often geographically separated from family, living alone, marrying later or not at all, having children later or not at all, and spending an extraordinary amount of time working, consuming information, and interacting through screens.
There are freedoms in this that previous generations of women didn’t have, and I don’t romanticize a past in which a woman’s survival could depend on men, marriage, or family structures she had little power to choose or leave. But greater independence has also made something else possible: we can build lives in which we function quite well on paper while receiving surprisingly little intimacy, touch, co-regulation, sexual connection, communal care, or deep relational support.
And because modern life offers so many substitutes for stimulation, we may not even recognize what’s missing.
We can work more. We can scroll. We can research our symptoms, perfect our diets, order another supplement, listen to another podcast, take another course, smoke cannabis, use stimulants, binge entertainment, stay constantly busy, or chase the next goal. We can even stay surrounded by people through partying, casual relationships, social media, and shallow social ties while still being profoundly lonely.
My theory is that many women are increasingly using easy sources of dopamine and stimulation to compensate, at least in part, for lives that contain too little of the connection, pleasure, safety, intimacy, and bonding we actually need to be well.
When this goes on long enough, loneliness becomes hard to identify, because it becomes the water we swim in.
Connection Is a Core Need
Through my training in working with complex PTSD (C-PTSD), I’ve come to see connection as the core need on which every other need rests. The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) describes five core needs we’re born with: connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and healthy, loving sexual development and expression. Connection comes first, and the other four build on it.
When these needs go unmet during development, we can carry adaptations into adulthood that once protected us but become maladaptive over time, making it harder to meet those same needs as adults.
I’m not suggesting that everyone with unmet needs is walking around with trauma, and developmental trauma research still has a long way to go. What I am saying is that human connection is a baseline need for a healthy life. If we didn’t experience it early on, that can be one reason we struggle to find it as adults. And even if our needs were met in childhood, we can still develop maladaptive patterns and health issues when our need for connection goes unmet year after year.
Loneliness is a threat to our health and quality of life.
What Loneliness Can Look Like
You may not walk around thinking, I’m lonely. You may simply feel overwhelmed by everything you’re carrying, because you’re carrying it alone. Your health problems may take up an enormous amount of mental space, and you may become more “type A” or obsessive as a result. You may feel flat, low in vitality, disconnected from pleasure, overly serious, chronically stressed, or strangely unable to imagine your life getting much bigger than it is when you’re the only one building it.
And if you’ve lived this way for years, particularly after trauma, chronic illness, heartbreak, family estrangement, relocation, or relationships that taught you not to rely on people, you may have built an identity around being the woman who handles everything herself.
I know this experience because I’ve lived it. There have been periods of my life when I felt physically and emotionally terrible from some combination of inflammation, health issues, unresolved trauma, and social isolation, each feeding the others. Then I’d spend time with someone I loved and notice how dramatically my internal experience shifted afterward. My perspective on my life and my health expanded. The symptoms I’d been consumed by hadn’t necessarily disappeared, but they became noticeably smaller.
So did the identity I’d unconsciously built around those symptoms: how I felt, and what I believed it meant about me. I had been seen, touched, listened to, validated, distracted, made to laugh, inspired intellectually, and given the chance to co-create reality with another human being instead of carrying my own reality full-time.
This is what co-regulation does, and it happens whether or not we’re consciously trying, simply through connection. It isn’t a luxury some of us get while others go without. We all need it.
These experiences have shaped how I think about women’s health.
Nutrition matters, of course. So do metabolic health, hormones, inflammation, nutrient deficiencies, digestion, sleep, and blood sugar. But human connection matters too, and I think we make a serious mistake when we treat a woman’s body as if it exists independently of the relational environment it has to live, and survive, in.
And surviving is exactly what life can start to feel like when we don’t have people close to us who share our values and help us build it.
So if you’ve been working relentlessly on your health while becoming more and more isolated, if you don’t have the friendships, family relationships, partnership, sexual connection, or community you want, or if you’ve gone without them so long you’ve stopped letting yourself want them, I want to offer another way of looking at the problem.
Below are the strategies I use with clients, and in my own life, to address loneliness and its downstream emotional and physiological effects, especially when it’s gone on too long.
1. Take an Honest Inventory of Your Relational Life
The first step isn’t forcing yourself onto a dating app, signing up for five social events, or deciding you need to become more extroverted, only to surround yourself with people who leave you feeling even more alone. It’s getting honest about the life you’re actually living and what it feels like to live it.
Who do you talk to when something hard happens or you have an emergency? Who can you call without worrying you’re bothering them? How often are you touched affectionately? How often do you laugh with another person, share a meal, have sex, hug someone you love, sit beside somebody, talk through what you’re going through, or feel the relief of someone understanding what’s been living inside your head?
How much fun and pleasure are actually present in your days and weeks?
And perhaps most importantly: are you satisfied with your answers, or have you simply learned not to expect much in this department?
For women with trauma histories, this inventory can be confronting, because extreme independence can look remarkably functional from the outside. If you developed a fierce sense of autonomy because relying on people once felt unsafe, disappointing, or unpredictable, being the captain of your own ship can become a deeply entrenched part of your identity.
You may have excellent intellectual reasons why you don’t need much from people, why people aren’t available, why dating isn’t worth it, why friendships are exhausting, or why nobody around you shares your values.
You may also have gotten into the habit of postponing your social life until your health improves, your business grows, you move, you lose weight, you have more energy, or you finally feel like yourself again. In this story, you have to become “good enough” before you’re allowed the very support that might help you get there. Some of those reasons may be completely legitimate.
But intellectual explanations can also protect us from admitting something much more vulnerable: I need people, I don’t have the relationships I want, and I don’t know how to change that.
There can be real grief in that admission.
Women are often verbal processors, and relationships give us more than advice: they let us distribute the psychological weight of our struggles and triumphs. Something that feels enormous after three days of circulating through your own nervous system can feel far more manageable after you talk it through with someone who knows and cares about you. Another person can offer perspective, humor, reassurance, practical help, affection, or simply the experience of being witnessed. Without enough of these interactions, we become the sole container for our problems, ambitions, health struggles, fears, responsibilities, and trauma, and everything starts to feel heavier than it would in a well-supported life.
This is one reason health issues can take up so much space in an isolated woman’s identity. She’s experiencing the symptoms, researching them, managing them, thinking about them, and structuring her day around them, often entirely alone.
The more frightening or disruptive the symptoms, the easier it becomes to pour even more attention into fixing the body, because the body feels like a problem she can control, while her social life or love life does not. I’ve seen this pattern again and again in health-focused women, and I’ve lived versions of it myself: focusing ever more intensely on health while intimacy, pleasure, friendship, and community sit in the background as a void.
This doesn’t mean the health problems aren’t real. They often very much are. It means we need to ask whether fixing our health has quietly become the project that lets us avoid looking at everything else. The only way to know is to take stock of our lives, admit which needs aren’t being met, and feel what comes up when we do.
2. Create a Social Life You Want to Be Healthy For
Once you have an honest picture of your relational reality, the next step isn’t becoming perfectly healed, completely confident, or endlessly self-loving before you’re allowed to build solid relationships.
I don’t believe we have to love ourselves first before anyone else can love us. Intimacy is messy. We’re relational beings, and we learn about ourselves by knowing others and being known by them. We heal in relationships. Through friendship, partnership, sexuality, family, conflict, collaboration, and caregiving, we discover parts of ourselves that introspection alone could never reveal.
At the same time, there’s an important difference between believing we must be perfect before we deserve connection and developing enough of a relationship with ourselves to choose connection wisely.
I’ve worked with very isolated women who can’t name what another person would find interesting, enjoyable, or lovable about them. That’s heartbreaking, but it makes sense after chronic illness, trauma, mental health struggles, and years spent in low-agency states, dissociating and feeling helpless over our circumstances and our bodies. When life contracts around managing symptoms, surviving, working, scrolling, intellectualizing our feelings, or fixing ourselves, we can stop participating in the parts of life that give us evidence of our own vitality.
This is where I return to something I’ve written about before: creating a life worth healing for. In this context, that means creating relationships worth healing for.
Rather than waiting for every symptom to resolve before you start living, identify the parts of your life you do have agency over and move them, little by little, toward what you value. What principles do you want your life built on? What kind of woman do you want to be? Which people do you respect, and why? What do you want your friendships to feel like? What matters to you in a partner or husband? What kind of family life do you want? What makes you feel creative, sensual, sexy, useful, playful, curious, lovable, or alive?
And what do you want to contribute to other people’s lives, not just receive from them?
This matters because relationships built mainly to escape loneliness are very different from relationships chosen with a clear sense of who we are. Some people can’t tolerate being alone, so they constantly surround themselves with others, rush into relationships, stay in partnerships that aren’t good for them, or keep shallow friendships, because almost any connection feels better than solitude. But being surrounded by people isn’t the same as being relationally healthy or having your intimacy needs met.
At the other end is the woman who has learned to enjoy her own company, trust herself, and find solitude restorative, and who is mature enough to recognize that independence doesn’t erase her need for other people.
She can hold both: I enjoy being alone, and I need people. I can take care of myself, and I want to be cared for. I don’t want relationships just to fill space, and I deeply value partnership. I won’t abandon my standards because I’m lonely, and I won’t use my standards to avoid ever risking rejection or disrupting my carefully controlled life.
That middle ground, between being unable to tolerate solitude and isolating yourself, is where discernment develops.
Building a life around your values also makes it more likely you’ll meet people who share them, because we meet people through the lives we actually participate in. Health-minded people tend to find each other in health-oriented spaces, just as intellectual people meet through shared interests, family-oriented people bond over family life, and people devoted to a cause meet while working for it. Different relationships can meet different needs, but we have to believe we’re worth knowing in order to build them.
This is why relational health can’t always be solved by “trying to make friends.” Sometimes the more useful questions are: What kind of life would naturally bring me into contact with the people I want to know? And do I believe I’m someone worth knowing?
Then you start building that life before those people arrive. That’s what I’ve done over the years, and although I still go through periods of loneliness (sometimes circumstantial, sometimes environmental, sometimes of my own making), it’s brought me some of the greatest connections a person could ask for.
3. Make Connection, Intimacy, Community, and Pleasure Real Priorities
Awareness without action eventually becomes another form of intellectualization, another way to avoid.
Once you understand what’s missing and have started building a stronger relationship with yourself and the life you want, relationships have to become something you actively do and prioritize, the way you prioritize exercise or hygiene. That sounds obvious, but many of us give relationships whatever scraps of time are left after everything “more urgent” is done. This only intensifies once we have children, a full career, or health issues to manage. We end up scheduling our favorite people months in advance, then going months more before we see them again, and that’s if we have those friendships at all.
We work. We exercise. We meal prep. We answer emails. We research our health. We complete our routines. We consume information. We work on ourselves. And then we wonder why connection hasn’t shown up, or why we feel so stressed and unable to relax.
If relationships are foundational to health, they deserve the same intentionality we give to nutrition, work, exercise, and self-improvement.
Depending on what you need, that might mean using dating apps with real intention, rather than collecting matches or swiping past anyone who isn’t perfect. It might mean going to events even when staying home feels easier, joining organizations built around causes or interests you care about, finding communities that share your values, inviting someone for coffee instead of waiting to be invited, or calling family members regularly.
If your environment is an obstacle, it might mean traveling to spend time with people you love, or building relationships online with the intention of turning some of them into real-world friendships, trips, meetups, collaborations, or community.
Prioritizing connection also means weaving smaller moments of connection and pleasure into daily life, instead of imagining that relational health only begins once you have a best-friend group, a husband, or a family. A conversation matters. Daily touch matters. Laughing with a friend, making eye contact, and sharing a meal across the table all matter. Sexuality and sensuality matter, even if they start with discovering on your own what you like and want. Doing something creative with another person, asking for help, and letting someone do something for you matter too. Each time you prioritize these experiences, you’re building skills and neural pathways.
For a nervous system that has adapted to isolation, even small experiences can begin to provide evidence that another way of living is possible.
This step also asks you to hold two truths at once: I’m lonely and want deeper relationships, and I’m not willing to fill my life with empty connections just to avoid feeling lonely.
Loneliness isn’t inherently unhealthy. It’s a signal of an unmet need. That distinction matters especially for women who cope with loneliness through partying, casual relationships, substances, or constant company with people who don’t really know them. A crowded social life can still be a profoundly lonely one. If the people around us keep reinforcing the behaviors, beliefs, consumption patterns, and trauma responses we’re trying to move away from, being “social” isn’t moving us toward relational health.
Sometimes getting healthier actually creates loneliness before it creates connection.
You might stop drinking as much, realize much of your social life revolved around alcohol, and lose your tolerance for drinking culture. This is very common, and it often brings real loneliness. You might change how you eat, spend your weekends differently, get more serious about fertility or family, leave a dysfunctional relationship, or step back from friendships built around behaviors you’ve outgrown, and suddenly find you have far fewer people to fill your schedule. Your values may also drift away from those of people you’ve known for years, and that can be lonely too.
There can be a real void between the relationships we’ve outgrown and the ones we haven’t built yet. It’s uncomfortable, but filling it indiscriminately doesn’t solve the problem, because that pause matters. It’s a time to get clear about what we want next. The real work is learning to tolerate the uncertainty of building something better without retreating into isolation or returning to relationships that no longer fit simply because they’re familiar. This becomes more important the more unhealthy those old relationships were.
“But there aren’t people like me where I live.”
This is one of the most common objections I hear from lonely women, and I relate to it a lot.
Sometimes our environment genuinely is part of the problem. Maybe you live somewhere with few people your age, or the local culture doesn’t match the values you’ve grown into. Maybe you’re single and the dating pool is tiny, your family lives across the country, or you’ve changed while the community around you hasn’t. I’ve experienced versions of all of this, and I’ve moved multiple times trying to change my circumstances and reclaim agency over my life.
Moving isn’t always the answer, though. Sometimes changing locations becomes a way to avoid patterns that will follow us wherever we go. Sometimes there were more opportunities where we lived than we realized, but fear, exhaustion, illness, or avoidance kept us from seeing or taking them. Sometimes we have to leave a place to discover that its trade-offs were worth it after all. And sometimes moving is itself a trauma pattern: flight as the familiar way we reclaim agency when we feel helpless.
But sometimes environment really does matter, and changing it is what brings us closer to the relationships we need.
If you’ve made genuine efforts and your location keeps getting in the way, moving to another city, state, or even country doesn’t have to be off the table just because it’s inconvenient or stressful. You may not be able to move tomorrow; you might need a year or several to prepare financially and practically. You may ultimately decide that staying near family, keeping a particular career, or remaining somewhere you love matters more than a bigger dating pool. The point is to understand your options and know that you’re the one choosing.
Agency doesn’t mean getting everything we want without sacrifice. It means examining the trade-offs consciously instead of treating our current circumstances as permanent just because changing them would be hard. It means recognizing where our power lies and choosing from that clear-eyed place.
The internet can also bridge gaps in a way that wasn’t possible twenty years ago. If your interests, beliefs, or values are unusual where you live, online communities can connect you with people who understand those parts of you. I don’t believe online relationships should permanently replace embodied, real-world community, but they can be bridges to it. Online friendships can lead to visits, trips, collaborations, relocations, and real-life community. Even long-distance dating can make sense when local options genuinely don’t fit, as long as there’s a realistic path toward eventually building a life in the same place.
My own business and personal life have overlapped this way many times. Business partnerships and podcast conversations have become the foundation for friendships with like-minded women around the world. And as a deeply intellectual, heterodox thinker, I’ve found some of my best connections at seminars and events where people gathered to discuss the ideas I’d been geeking out over alone.
At some point, we have to decide how important relationships really are to us, take an active role in creating them, and treat ourselves as badass enough to deserve them.
When we’re older and looking back, I suspect that who we loved, who loved us, who we built with, who we cared for, who cared for us, and who witnessed our lives unfold will fill far more of our story than the inconveniences we once thought were too big to overcome.
Relational Health Is Health
As women, we’re meant to live in connection: in friendship, family, intimacy, community, care, sexuality, collaboration, and love. These relationships shape our sense of safety and identity, let us regulate alongside other nervous systems, help us process the stress of being alive, and provide so many of the experiences tied to bonding, pleasure, and oxytocin.
Yet many health-conscious women gradually find themselves living with less and less of them. Sometimes chronic illness creates the isolation; sometimes trauma does. Sometimes career ambition, relocation, heartbreak, divorce, changing values, or sheer exhaustion slowly crowd out intimacy. Sometimes we never developed the relational skills or secure attachment that would have made closeness easier. And sometimes modern life simply makes it remarkably easy to survive alone while filling the emptiness with screens, work, stimulants, substances, casual connection, and the endless project of self-improvement.
The solution isn’t abandoning independence or deciding every woman needs the same social life. I’d be exhausted living some of my more extroverted friends’ lives! And it isn’t ignoring real health problems or pretending friendship will fix our hormones or circadian rhythms. The solution is widening our understanding of what makes a woman healthy.
I’ve seen women come to me with complicated, hard-to-address health patterns, including autoimmunity, MCAS, mental health struggles, and other symptoms deeply intertwined with stress physiology. We look at labs, food, minerals, digestion, hormones, and lifestyle, and then I discover that she has virtually no support network, spends most of her time alone, or doesn’t feel emotionally safe in her closest relationships. That doesn’t make her symptoms imaginary or remove the need to care for her physiology. But it changes the context in which I understand them.
A woman’s nutrition matters. But sometimes what matters even more is the life her well-nourished body is being asked to live, and who she’s living it with.
If You’re Realizing This Is Part of Your Story
I’m not a relationship coach; my primary expertise is health and nutrition. But I’m also trained and certified in embodiment, nervous system regulation, attachment coaching, and trauma-informed care, and these inevitably lead us into the relational patterns that shape a woman’s experience of her body and her life.
For women, safe relationships and regular access to pleasure, connection, support, and intimacy can be as important to healing as the nutrition and lifestyle practices we usually focus on first. Yet relational health can feel far more daunting, because it isn’t fully within our control. It involves other people, vulnerability, boundaries, rejection, grief, and trust, and it’s easy to leave untouched when you work with someone who looks only at physiology.
My practice is intentionally integrative because I want to care for the whole woman. That can happen even within an HTMA consultation, although an hour only lets us skim the surface of chronic loneliness, relational stress, or trauma patterns. In my private coaching containers, we have far more room to understand how these pieces interact and to work with them alongside nutrition, metabolic health, and nervous system support.
This is especially important if you’re preparing for conception now or know motherhood is something you want in the future. Choosing a partner, creating a safe relationship, developing relational skills, and building the support motherhood requires aren’t separate from preparing your body. They’re part of it. That’s why Nourishing the Mother includes an entire component devoted to relationship building and emotional support alongside the physiological work.
Loneliness and isolation have been significant parts of my own story, too. Many of us who’ve lived with complex trauma or followed unconventional paths reach the age when we want a family and realize we haven’t found the right partner yet, partly because our earlier years went to surviving, understanding ourselves, and healing old wounds. I see this in so many of the women I work with.
If this article spoke to you, and loneliness, isolation, difficulty building safe relationships, or disconnection from pleasure and intimacy have become part of your health story, you can schedule a free chat with me to explore how we might work together. And if motherhood is on your horizon, whether soon or further down the line, Nourishing the Mother was created with this larger picture in mind.
Your relational health begins with your relationship to yourself, but it doesn’t have to end there. You’re allowed to build a life in which health isn’t the central project everything else revolves around, but the foundation that gives you more capacity to love, connect, create, experience pleasure, build family and community, and fully live the life you were trying to get healthy enough to live in the first place.
