Your typical love story depicts romantic love, a bond between two people that through trials and tribulations grows over time. It seems like the characters you want to get together always do, and they ride off into the sunset together. All the Lonely People is not that kind of love story. Dennis, the protagonist, at every turn is telling us how pathetic and dependent everyone else around him is, except Gerald, yet he isn't a "lion" like he says, he's what he would deem a "real hunter," or maybe not even a member of that group.
We first meet Dennis in a cafe, late at night, talking with Alfred. Alfred immediately seems like the down-trodden one of the pair-spilling his guts to this man he doesn't really know in a coffee shop. We see Dennis attract the attention of a woman, causing him to leave the cafe after her. Dennis lights her cigarette, but then walks immediately away from her. What I initially took as aloofness on Dennis' part, by the end of the story I think was a lack of confidence. He left her before she could possibly leave him, therefore maintaining his belief that he can be selective about who he goes out with. Betty, the girl who Dennis expects the night Alfred comes over, doesn't come, instead postponing their rendezvous, but he is so desperate for her he said he, "was prepared to lie relentlessly just to have her there that one night" (148). That's not quite the type of behavior you would expect of a lion who is being hunted. Dennis becomes so desperate that week, that he needs his friend Gerald to set him up with Gloria, a "community chest" as they described her. Yet Dennis can't even close this deal, one that Gerald has practically set in his lap.
Dennis isn't a lion. He is not hunted by others, and he's too ashamed to be a real hunter so instead he subtly uses his friends to hunt for him. He judges everyone around him, which to me makes him worse than anybody who he's deemed below him. Even in the last section when he finally begins to examine himself, he still has to judge Alfred for not being home at 2:00 a.m. though he then goes to the old coffee shop at 3:00 a.m. and sits alone. Dennis is the saddest character of them all, not because he doesn't have girls hunting him, but because he has to put down everyone else to construct his self-superiority.
One somewhat optimistic way to read the story's closing line is to see it as Dennis first starting to come to terms with the fact that he might be more like Alfred than he'd like to admit--in a number of ways. "The way I am" can of course refer to his sexuality, and the idea that he might know he's actively repressing his homosexuality, but it also could mean something even more general: the way he views others, and himself; why he acts as he does; and why he feels like he needs to see Alfred right now more than Gerald, or the woman he's been hooked up with, or anyone at the cafe. In other words, the unsavory qualities you identify here might be just about to change. It's easy to see this judgmental tendency as born out of self-consciousness and insecurity.
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