The Rooms We Stopped Building

Cedar Valley News
May 15, 2026
The Rooms We Stopped Building
By Dan Larson

A man in our ward stopped coming to church two years ago.

I will not name him. He is sixty-eight, retired, widowed, and lives alone in the house he bought with his wife in 1982. His wife died in early 2024. He came to her funeral. He came to a few Sunday meetings after. Then he stopped.

I have visited him three times since. He answers the door. We sit in the kitchen and talk about his garden. He is not angry. He is not in crisis. He has not lost his faith. He has lost something harder to name.

He has lost the rooms.

The chapel was one of his rooms. The Saturday breakfast at the Lions Club was another. The bowling league out on Highway 14 closed in 2019. The neighbors he used to talk to over the fence have moved or died. The barber he saw every six weeks retired. His wife was the room he came home to. She is gone.

What he has left is his house, his garden, his phone, and me, once every five months, sitting at his kitchen table for forty minutes.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic in 2023. The report cites Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s meta-analyses showing social isolation carries mortality risk equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The Survey Center on American Life reports the number of American men with no close friends has roughly quadrupled since 1990. One in six adults told the Kaiser Family Foundation last year they feel lonely always or often.

The major outlets report the facts. They have mostly not reported why.

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in a 1989 book called The Great Good Place, gave us a term we should have been using all along. The third place. Not home. Not work. The third room a person walks into in a normal week, where they are known by name, where they are nobody’s customer, and nobody’s family member, and nobody’s project. The cafe. The bar. The library. The barbershop. The Knights of Columbus. The Legion. The hardware store on a Saturday. The church potluck where the food was an excuse to stay.

The third place is the room where the casual friendship happens. It is the room where an older man takes a younger man aside and says one sentence the younger man will remember for thirty years. It is the room where a woman in the middle of a hard week sits next to a friend and does not have to explain herself. It is the room where the country talks to itself.

The third places have been closing for forty years. The bowling alleys closed first. The fraternal lodges aged out. The mainline churches shrank. The diners thinned. The hardware stores were absorbed by box stores. The pandemic took another round and closed them for good.

Nobody decided to close the third places. They closed because we stopped showing up.

I have spent thirty years watching what happens when a man like the one in my ward loses his rooms one at a time. He does not become a different person. He becomes a smaller version of the same person. His world contracts to the radius of his front door. He stops calling. He stops being called. The loneliness data is what happens when this story happens to enough men at once.

The country treats the loneliness epidemic as a mystery. It is not a mystery. We let the rooms close. The rooms are where friendships live.

The chapel is one third place among many. I am going to tell you what I see from inside it. We held a potluck on Wednesday. Two men I had not seen in a year came. They did not stay long. They came because somebody walked over and asked them. Maybe next month they will come again.

This is the work. This is the only work. Walk over. Ask.

There is a man on your street who has lost his rooms. You know who he is. Walk over. Ask him. Then tell us on the Facebook page.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. The third-place stories are welcome too — the room you remember, the room you miss, the room you walked back into. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, Publication Consultants, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness, Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s research, the Survey Center on American Life findings, the Kaiser Family Foundation data, and Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place are real.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Start Your Publishing Journey with Expert Guidance.
Unlock Exclusive Tips, Trends, and Opportunities to Bringing Your Book to Market.

About Us

Kindly contact us if you've written a book, if you're writing a book, if you're thinking about writing a book, we can help!

Departments

My Account

Social Media

Payment

Publication Consultants Publication Consultants

Copyright 2023 powered by Publication Consultants All Rights Reserved.