Loneliness isn’t necessarily about being alone. You can spend an entire day surrounded by people – children asking for snacks, colleagues on Teams, parents at the school gates, a delivery driver who wants to know your date of birth – and still get to the end of it feeling profoundly lonely.

For single parents, that feeling can be particularly complicated. You’re rarely physically alone, for one thing, which can make loneliness feel almost contradictory. You may also have spent years being told how strong and capable you are, or become so accustomed to managing everything yourself that admitting you’re lonely feels uncomfortably close to admitting you’re not coping.

So when we recently asked the Frolo community, ‘Is it normal to feel lonely as a single parent?’, the answer was emphatic.

‘God yes!’ said one parent. Another replied simply: ‘Yes, absolutely.’

The more interesting question, perhaps, is why.

The loneliness of being the only adult in the room

One Frolo parent described the loneliness of single parenting as ‘doing everything alone without the backup of a co-parent who in theory would take 50/50 of the responsibility and tasks off my hands.’

That distinction matters. Single-parent loneliness isn’t always about wanting somebody to go to the cinema with on a Saturday night. Sometimes it’s the loneliness of being the person who has to remember that the PE kit needs washing, the dentist appointment needs booking and the milk has run out. It’s being the only adult awake with a vomiting child at 3am and the only person who has to decide whether they’re well enough for school at 7am.

There’s a particular intimacy in shared responsibility that can be difficult to replace. It’s not necessarily romantic intimacy either. It’s having somebody else who knows that the toddler has suddenly decided the blue cup is unacceptable, or who understands exactly why the email from school has tipped you over the edge because they’ve been living the previous six weeks alongside you.

Without that other adult witness, even very ordinary family life can sometimes feel strangely isolating.

When the children go to bed

Several parents talked about loneliness changing shape as their children got older. The intense early years can leave you desperate for five minutes to yourself; then, almost without warning, the children need you less and the silence you once craved can feel very different. One parent described ‘the lonely nights once bubba’s in bed’, while another told us that evenings were hardest: ‘I can be absolutely desperate for bedtime by six o’clock, then by eight I’m sitting on the sofa wishing there was somebody to tell about my day.’

It’s a peculiarity many single parents will recognise. You can simultaneously want everyone to leave you alone and desperately want some company. Weekends can bring their own challenges, particularly if friends are spending time as couples or families. Even the apparently innocuous question, ‘What are you up to this weekend?’ can underline the fact that you’re the only person responsible for making the weekend happen.

One parent told us she found Sunday afternoons particularly difficult. ‘Everyone else seems to disappear into their family unit,’ she said. ‘I can have had a lovely weekend with the kids and still get this feeling at about four o’clock that everyone belongs somewhere except me.’

Loneliness can change over time

There was another important theme in the responses: loneliness after separation isn’t necessarily permanent. One parent, who had been single for a long time, said she believed loneliness had been more apparent during her relationship with her children’s father than it was now. It’s an important reminder that being in a relationship is no guarantee against loneliness, just as being single doesn’t automatically cause it.

For some people, the period immediately after separation can actually bring relief. There may be less tension at home, more control over your own time and the opportunity to rediscover friendships or interests that had been squeezed out. For others, loneliness arrives later, once the practical business of separating has settled down and the new shape of family life becomes clearer.

‘I was fine for the first year because I was so busy surviving,’ one parent told us. ‘It was afterwards, when everything was supposedly settled, that I realised I needed to build a life for myself as well as for the children.’

There’s no timetable for any of this. You can also be happily single and lonely sometimes. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Finding your people matters

Perhaps the most encouraging part of the conversation was hearing what had helped. One parent described finding ‘as much support and companionship as I can’, while another admitted she hadn’t quite worked out what helped yet. Both responses feel equally valid, because there isn’t one neat solution to loneliness.

For some people it’s existing friendships. For others, especially after separation, old friendship groups may have shifted or become harder to navigate. Making new friends as an adult can be awkward at the best of times; doing it while juggling childcare, work and limited free evenings raises the difficulty level considerably.

This is where connections with other single parents can feel different. You don’t have to explain why you can’t spontaneously meet at 7pm, why alternate weekends have a completely different emotional texture, or why having nobody to share the mental load with can be exhausting even when your children are wonderful. That sense of recognition can be surprisingly powerful. You may not need someone to fix anything. Sometimes you simply need another person to say, ‘Yes. Me too.’

You can love your independence and still want connection

One of our favourite comments captured the contradiction perfectly. A parent explained that she was coming out of a particularly lonely period and beginning to feel stronger again. She was enjoying the freedom of being able to do everything on her own terms without negotiating or justifying her choices to anyone.

That freedom is real, and it deserves to be celebrated. Single parenting can bring autonomy, confidence and the discovery that you are capable of far more than you realised. It can also occasionally be incredibly lonely.

Those truths can sit alongside each other.

Perhaps that’s the most useful thing the Frolo community can offer: not a promise that you’ll never feel lonely, but proof that feeling lonely doesn’t mean you’re uniquely failing at single-parent life. Somewhere, another parent is sitting on their sofa after bedtime, wondering what everyone else is doing and whether they’re the only person feeling this way.

They’re not. And neither are you.

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