Funeral directors and healthcare workers fact-checked a man into deleting his tweet claiming women are going to die alone. In fact, according to these experts in death-related fields, men are the ones who are likely to die alone because they fail to build or maintain community with others.
It started with a funeral director, then nursing home workers, hospice workers, emergency room workers, and other hospital staff confirmed that the bodies no one will claim tend to be male.
This guy said what about women?
On X, user @tusslindo tweeted a Christmas tweet seemingly provoked by nothing.
“Unfortunately a lot of good women are going to die alone with their rose & cat, because they chased the social media definition of a relationship all through their 30s,” he wrote.
OP deleted his tweet after large crowds of people booed him into submission, but too late to stop them from grabbing a screenshot. He appeared to acknowledge what happened in a tweet on Dec. 26 about how even old friends were participating in the dogpile and complained in replies that people took his statement the wrong way.
Men die alone more often than women
The reason he had to delete the tweet started with funeral director and public health officer @bestlil_badgurl. She quote-tweeted Tony to explain that romantic partnerships are not the only kind of relationships that exist, and women tend to be surrounded by friends and family at the ends of their lives more often than men.
“The people who die alone are men. Women have a community, men rarely do,” she wrote. “We have to search far and wide for someone to claim their bodies, in many cases, we bury them curtesy [sic] of the state and the only people who are at the funeral is me and a driver.”
As the tweet went viral, gaining over 11.9 million views in less than two days, others involved in the work of end-of-life care and death preparations chimed in to confirm her assessment. At nursing homes, for example, those who have worked in these facilities say that male residents are much less likely to be visited by family.
Lack of connection makes men die alone faster
While the act of dogpiling someone so wrong about a gender issue to the point that he deleted the tweet is funny, the underlying issue is a bummer. The data has long shown that men tend to die at a younger age on average than women, and at least part of that seems to be related to their lack of social connections late in life.
If the alleged male loneliness epidemic is real, it’s a killer.
According to a study published in 2022, male nursing home residents report poorer quality of life than their female counterparts. Among the top reasons for this disparity were two categories involving social life, or lack thereof.
“After controlling for individual and facility characteristics, men reported lower overall QoL than women, including significantly lower ratings in several QoL domains,” the study authors wrote. “In interviews, men noted being less satisfied with activities than women, having fewer friends, and being less able to rely on family for support.”
Quality of life is also closely related to how long a person will live. In a 2020 meta-analysis of 43 studies on the subject, researchers found that 91.5 percent of them “reported that better QoL was associated with lower mortality risk.”
Not only are men the ones dying alone, but they’re dying younger because they fail to maintain relationships with family and friends. Stop tweeting and go see your loved ones, my dudes.
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