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...there is some combination of two problems:
A) the distance is too great (it took us 11.5 billion years to evolve in the Milky Way...to reach a point where our galaxy was even capable of supporting stable climate planets around stable mid-sized stars. The first 8 billion years of the Milky Way were hot, violent and radioactive. Too much mass smashing into too much other mass. Life takes a lot of time to evolve. Any galaxy younger than ours probably contains no intelligence yet. Any galaxy older than ours we can't see in present day...we see it billions or years in its own past. Meaning...when it didn't have intelligent life.
That is the problem we have when trying to find life outside the Milky Way.
B) It's inherently dangerous to try to make contact with another intelligent life form.
For within our own galaxy, if there are lots of sentient lifeforms here for us to find, I believe it follows that they would be suspicious of meeting others even if they desired to do it...and I believe they would choose carefully how best to make contact and when.
Look how fast our technology is exploding...in a few hundred years, we may not be emitting any clear signs of our existence because our tech may have reached a state where it is in harmony with the surrounding environment while harvesting benefits from that environment. The radio era has ended, more or less, in relevance. The cable television era is about to end. Soon, our communications will all be by fiber optics...and then by direct neural linkages and then by some other unimaginable form. Soon, the radio bubble will pop and our signals won't go out there unless we want them to.
There is, of course, one other theory...we might be the first.
Not the only...but the first...with life evolving elsewhere in the Milky Way, but not having reached that critical threshold.