what to say to a friend who feels lonely
By Maggie Fergusson
Nothing nigh Rebecca's life looks pitiful. She'south strikingly bonny and professionally successful. I met her in her comfortable split-level flat in Fulham, just later she had started a new job, another rung up the ladder of career and income. Four years ago, when she was 31, a long-term relationship that she had thought would pb to marriage came to a sudden stop. She still looks wistfully over her shoulder, merely at the same fourth dimension desperately wants to settle down and have children before it'due south too late. "Lots of people can't understand why I'g lonely," she says. "I've got a good task, a lovely family and lots of close friends. Only almost of them now are married and taken upwardly with babies. I try to be happy for them, but there's no i I can ring if I've had a bad solar day; there's no ane for whom I'g the well-nigh important 1. Things similar filling out forms make me feel acutely alone. Who's my next of kin? My dad."
Rebecca has joined the 7m other people in Britain who are trying to find dear through the internet. She reckons she's been on at least 100 dates so far. Every time, she makes an endeavour – gets "frocked up" as Australians say – just it'south never still been successful, and she travels home from each assignation feeling "more lonely than if I'd never tried". Her distaste for the whole business organization is palpable. Still, faute de mieux, she bashes on.
"How does it feel?" I inquire, as she opens her page on the Guardian Soulmates website (which shows that, to date, 1,305 people accept viewed her and 356 people liked her).
"It feels pragmatic, and sad. I'yard albeit, 'I'grand lone, and I want to have a family unit', and there'due south a kind of shame in that."
She takes me through the profiles of men who have recently joined the site, about with cheeky-chappy nick-names: Curbychup, FoodieGeoff, LieutenantGrey. She shows me how she's congenital her own contour, presenting herself as a happy-go-lucky woman who's well read and widely travelled. "At that place's a loneliness in having to nowadays yourself in a certain way, definitely. The distance between the image I give and the reality is getting wider and wider. But if I were to write the truth – that I'chiliad lonely and worried I might not have a family – it would exist just the most off-putting thing."
"So people think of loneliness almost as an infectious disease?"
"Yup. Something like that. Most people find information technology very, very unattractive."
"Does anyone on the Guardian site always admit to loneliness in their contour?"
"NEVER!"
"Are you sure?"
Rebecca taps the word "lonely" into the search box that allows y'all to seek out potential partners with particular qualities – Hindi speakers, Erstwhile Etonians.
Instantly, it returns the bulletin "No soulmates found".
According to the Office for National Statistics, Britain is the "loneliness capital of Europe". For the novelist Deborah Moggach, loneliness is "the concluding taboo: nosotros talk well-nigh everything else, fifty-fifty death, merely nobody likes to admit that they're lonely". And while loneliness has no physical manifestations, it can be an affliction more harrowing than homelessness, hunger or disease. "The greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, merely having no one," Female parent Teresa wrote. Loneliness is the leprosy of the 21st century, eating away at its victims and repelling those who encounter it.
In Britain 7.7m people live solitary. "Thank God London property is so extortionate," a unmarried, 30-something woman said to me. "I tin can't afford to buy lone, so I'm forced to conduct on sharing." The number of baby-boomers – people aged 45 to 64 – living alone is increasing year on year. Seventeen million adults in United kingdom are unattached. More than 1m older people experience alone all or almost of the fourth dimension, and most of them do not feel able to admit their loneliness to family and friends. Loneliness is ane of the principal reasons people contact the Samaritans, though oft callers find it difficult to admit it. "People who call us sometimes experience that loneliness is not a good enough reason for calling," says Nick, a long-term Samaritans volunteer. "They feel ashamed or embarrassed, as though feeling lonely isn't something serious." Iii out of four GPs say that they run across between one and v solitary people a day; only 13% feel equipped to help them, even though loneliness has a detrimental issue on health equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Only 22% of us have never felt lonely.
I wanted to discover who these shoals of solitary people were and to get a sense of the texture of their suffering. And I wanted to understand the psychology of loneliness. What does information technology feel similar? Can it be cured? Is information technology the production of low incomes – or, indeed, of prosperity?
Inorth a street off Portobello Route in London, a battered grey door leads into a hallway adrift with junk mail. Upwardly three flights of stairs, in a volume-infested eyrie, the psychologist Adam Phillips – once described as the "Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis" for his razor-sharp intellect and often unsettling piece of work – writes his bestselling books and treats his patients. Most of these, he says, suffer some degree of loneliness and the frantic search for romance may exacerbate the problem. "If ane'southward living in a civilization where a lot of people are alone," he says, "there'southward going to be a tremendous idealisation of relationships. People are going to want more from each other than they can give. It'south going to produce a compensatory dream of unbelievable ecstatic intimacy. And lots of things can be used to appease this – sex activity, for case. I think in our culture at that place'southward a lot of sexualisation of loneliness. I think that's what pornography is, in a sense: a despair well-nigh relationship, a despair about existent commutation. And loneliness is fundamentally virtually someone's belief in the ability of substitution: whether we can requite each other things that make a difference, whether nosotros tin can make each other experience better."
While Phillips does not believe that people are born lonely, or that there is a loneliness "gene", he is pretty sure that loneliness is very oftentimes continued with poor parenting and dysfunctional early relationships: "I think information technology is very likely", he says, "that people who are lone as adults were solitary as children."
I recollect his words when the Samaritans put me in bear upon by telephone with James, an It entrepreneur and holding dealer, now in his mid-40s. Looking back, James explains, he reckons he had begun to distance himself from his parents and their bitterly unhappy marriage when he was nearly vi. By the time they divorced, when he was nine, he was "completely separate" from them: "I was living in the same house as my mother and sister, but I probably wouldn't spend more than 15 minutes a day in their visitor. I routinely had meals alone, and then went back upward to my room and stayed there, alone." He was lonely at schoolhouse and university; but it wasn't until he was in his early 20s, and in his commencement job, that he realised how completely sick-equipped he was to deal with other man beings: "I didn't fit in, and I didn't understand why not. Slowly but surely self-uncertainty came into play, forth with acrimony and feet. It was loneliness in the sense of real impecuniousness, complete lack of human contact."
"And what does loneliness feel like?"
"Loneliness is worthlessness. Y'all experience you don't fit in, that people don't sympathize you. You feel terrible about yourself, you feel rejected. Everyone goes to the pub, but they don't invite you. Why? Considering at that place's something incorrect with you."
It was when he came to the signal of feeling "highly suicidal" that James reached out to the Samaritans, ringing them as often as eight times a day. They helped him to "feel human", and take been a lifeline to him for over 20 years, including seeing him through a "complete mental breakdown" thirteen years ago. He expresses his gratitude to them in substantial financial gifts. Because, for all his awkwardness and isolation, James is a self-made multi-millionaire. Along with Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe and President Trump – described past his biographer Tim O'Brien as "one of the loneliest people I know" – he is proof that you can't buy your way out of loneliness. "Notwithstanding much money you have, you lot remain constrained by your mental processes," he says.
It may exist that affluence is making things worse. We prize space, privacy and independence, and the richer we go the more of these nosotros tin can beget, nonetheless their corollary is being lonely. Our economy works better if people motion around to find work, even so mobility stretches and breaks the bonds of family unit and community. Phillips told me that "capitalism and a mobile labour market make connections between people very precarious and difficult. In so far as people feel that what they've got to practice is get on, they are, equally it were, encouraged to sacrifice relationship and intimacy."
Only if money can't shield yous from loneliness, poverty tin exacerbate information technology. I met Euan at a soup kitchen in Soho on a chilly evening before Christmas. He used to manage a betting store, simply after a mental breakdown ended upwards on the streets. "I'1000 an only child and I've e'er been a loner," he told me. "To be lone is just what my life is. I feel I don't deserve to be with people, or to have a human relationship."
"What does loneliness experience similar?"
"It'southward similar being offered a full meal, and not beingness able to swallow it."
Chris Mahoney is a senior co-ordinator at Home Start, a clemency that offers practical and emotional support to families with small children in crisis. "Lots of our mums are terribly lonely," she says, "especially if they are refugees or asylum-seekers. In fact I would say that probably most of their suffering comes from loneliness."
At Chris's function in East Sheen I met Alice and her toddler son, Tom. Alice's husband works 12-hour shifts as a concierge in a smart block of flats, but his income is low, and Alice has been unable to claim Jobseeker'southward Assart because of mental-health issues. So for several months after Tom was built-in they were stuck in a tiny studio flat in a higher place a restaurant, exposed to carbon-monoxide poisoning. "I couldn't invite people over," says Alice. "I thought they'd be thinking, 'Jeez! How can you permit your kid alive in these weather condition?' At three months Tom hadn't met another infant, and I was desperately lonely."
"What does that feel like?"
"It feels like a dark cloud. You don't want anyone to see yous and so you get lonelier: it'southward a savage circle."
Alice is OK, you might think: at to the lowest degree she has a husband and child. But loneliness in marriage can exist bitter. Caroline, now 47 and a successful writer, was married for 12 years to a man who, though never vicious, felt increasingly absent-minded. "He was very gregarious," she says, "ever the life and soul of the party, simply actually very insecure. When we were alone, he would disappear into himself. He didn't really either talk or mind. At that place was nil I could put my finger on, but in a way that was the trouble: at that place was nothing." She remembers sitting on the backyard with him i summer'due south day, with their children playing nearby. "I was feeling a little melancholy, and said, 'it'southward the 10th ceremony of my begetter'due south death.' There was a pause, which I thought perhaps was a sympathetic 1; but so he said something well-nigh flying to New York the following week, and I realised that, as usual, he simply wasn't listening."
Caroline's husband started drinking seriously, and things got worse: "He was never, really, fully, with me. His caput was either in the office or total of booze. If I hadn't loved him, maybe it wouldn't have mattered, but I did, so information technology was very painful." Caroline had had a stiff-upper-lip upbringing, and she wanted the marriage to work, and so she spoke to no ane. "I idea that the more visible the cracks, the likelier information technology was that the whole thing would crumble. Then we went around, for several years, looking like the perfect family, with lovely children and good jobs, only all the time I was feeling so lonely." She put her friendships on ice, because she felt unable to tell the people closest to her how much pain she was in. Then, finally, the marriage bankrupt up, and she was able to talk – "and this awful gulf between me and everybody I cared for closed upwardly, and I wasn't so lonely any more."
"What does loneliness feel like?"
"Like being surrounded by a dark void that y'all have no mode of crossing."
The corroding furnishings of loneliness become more credible as we grow older. Literature is brimful with lonely spinsters. Have the eponymous central character in Brian Moore'south "The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne", who lives in dingy lodgings in Belfast, watched over past paintings of her belatedly aunt and the Sacred Middle. In her early 40s, Judith Hearne is plain, pinched and desperately sorry – "a temptation to no man". She drinks to drown the bitterness of her being.
"When I wrote Judith Hearne," Moore told ane interviewer, "I was very solitary, writing in a rented caravan, I had nearly no friends, I'd given upwards my beliefs, was earning well-nigh no money and I didn't run across much of a future. So I could identify with a dipsomaniac, isolated spinster." But that was in 1955. Surely now, 60 years on, we don't subclass middle-aged unmarried women and loneliness in the same way?
I met Fiona, a sharply intelligent psychotherapist, terminal fall, and when I told her what I was working on, she swiftly volunteered that she was "desperately alone" and would exist happy to talk about information technology. "How onetime are you?" I asked. "I'm 57," she replied, "or, every bit the dating sites would have information technology, 'I'm 57 but I feel 27'." So ane quiet afternoon we met for lunch and a walk by the Thames. I sensed that what she had to tell me was going to be painful, so for a good while we talked of anything just loneliness. But eventually, sitting on a bench, I switched on my recorder, and we scrap the bullet.
It's not easy, Fiona conceded, to talk about being lone: "Mental-health problems and depression are quite stylish now, merely loneliness is non fashionable. At that place'southward something shameful nearly it – 'it'southward my fault, there'south something wrong with me, I'yard a horrible person.'" I mentioned that at a contempo dinner in Oxford, a brisk American woman had suggested to me that the solution lay in keeping friendships in skilful shape: "lonely people need to frexercise." Merely Fiona explained that, as loneliness gets a grip, this becomes more and more than difficult. "Information technology took me a very long time to actually remember of myself as someone who's lonely," she reflected, "and I feel I've simply actually done that in the terminal iv years or and then. If you have a skillful social life, and you lot have people in your life you've known a long time, and you make friends easily – which I do – it's very easy to experience united nations-alone because yous're quite busy and you're not curt of interactions with people. But I have institute, for whatever reason, that I don't socialise whatsoever more than in that way." Information technology'southward partly that friends seem so immersed in their own lives – some are now retiring, moving out of London, becoming grandparents – "so the circumvolve has really narrowed. I just spend an awful lot more fourth dimension on my own." And information technology's partly that she has come up to have that hectic socialising will never satisfy her deepest longings. "What you actually need are people that know you lot very well, and care virtually you and are available to y'all," she says, "and that y'all can merely contact almost anything at any time and I don't have that, and that's very lonely. I can't just selection up the phone and say, 'Exercise you want to come over? Do you want to get to the cinema? What are y'all doing at the weekend?' That merely doesn't exist now. I didn't really notice information technology happening, simply it has. And so I'm caught in a barbarous circle. If you lot feel you're unlovable, y'all feel you can't be around people, and this enforces feelings of isolation, and so it goes on."
Going by childbearing age had brought no relief: "Oh God, information technology wasn't a relief to me. It's an ongoing grief. I thought it would go away after my 30s – I thought, 'if it doesn't make biological sense, information technology won't make psychological sense'. But in fact it just got worse."
All she wants now, she says, is to share her life, "in very ordinary ways", with one other person: "I think the whole significant of life is sharing and relationships and companionship. Information technology'southward about equally if doing things on your own isn't actually doing them. If there's no one to reflect you lot or relate to you, it's virtually as if you lot stop existing."
"What does your loneliness feel like?" I inquire Fiona.
"It feels similar a bereavement – like an enormous loss of something. And it besides feels suffocating – tight and strangling and suffocating, fifty-fifty though it'south an absence."
"And what practice you practice when these feelings get overwhelming?"
"Cypher. I used to make myself keep bicycle rides and stuff. Now I only try to put up with information technology. I remember, 'this is it, and then. This is what loneliness is'."
Equally old age hovers on the horizon, the loneliness strengthens. "I don't really accept anything practiced to remember," Fiona says, "I call back about non having done any marvellous things, and that's a sickening thought. I notice tiny things brainstorm to get wrong with me physically – and I call back, 'there's nobody who cares or knows what I'm doing now. If something bad happened to me, who would know?'"
It is a valid business organisation. In the autumn final year, the body of 68-year-quondam Marie Conlon was found in her flat at Larkspur Rise in Belfast. She had been dead for nearly iii years. In a statement, her family unit said they were "shocked and heartbroken" at the decease of their "beloved sister". Telephone call me cruel, merely how beloved could she have been if they hadn't seen or spoken to her since the beginning of 2015? I popped into my local funeral directors to learn how ofttimes they were presented with bodies which had lain lonely in flats until they began to decompose. The lady in charge that day was wary of my questions, and made me hope non to give her proper noun. Merely yes, she said, this happens quite regularly – bodies prevarication undiscovered until neighbours complain of a smell.
If this is shocking, information technology'southward perhaps unsurprising. More than half of men and women over 75 in Great britain live lonely. Three-quarters of older people say they are lonely, and more than a 3rd of these feel their loneliness is "out of their control". Most admit that they take never spoken to friends or family about how they experience.
On a fine autumn twenty-four hours, I travel to Rutland to meet 85-year-former Barry, and to have luncheon with him in the Finch's Arms at Hambleton. He often used to come up hither with his married woman, Christine, and though she's now been dead three years, he yet talks of "we" and "our" rather than "I" and "my". Christine was 15 years younger than Barry, and so they e'er quietly causeless he would go showtime. Then she developed a brain neoplasm. "Her sudden death", Barry says now, "left me in a state of concrete shock so deep it defies description. My future became a wasteland total of empty days."
We alive in a society that admires independence but derides isolation. Notwithstanding for many onetime people the two go mitt in hand. Back in the summer of 1960, following the expiry of his wife, Joy, C.Southward. Lewis wrote of the desperation of becoming a free agent. "I'd like to meet," he wrote to Peter Bide, the priest who had married them, "for I am – Oh God that I were not – very free now. 1 doesn't realise in early life that the price of liberty is loneliness. To be happy is to be tied." This was exactly Barry'southward feel. He finds it hard to say where grief ends and loneliness begins, but together he experienced them as "a penetrating hurt that doesn't misemploy – a mental thing that becomes physical and robs you of all motivation. I got very well-nigh to losing the volition to live: despair is always knocking on the door for the lonely."
Other elderly people I spoke to described a like experience in different ways. For 91-twelvemonth-former Robbie, living in Kent and a widower since 2012, "loneliness is non having somebody to do aught with." He hasn't been out of his front end door, except to hospital, for two years now, and he keeps his goggle box permanently on for company (ii-fifths of older people in Uk say that tv is their main companion). "A lot of the fourth dimension, I'm non actually watching it. But and then something interesting comes on, and I say, 'Cor, wait at that!', and I turn round, and there'due south nobody there…" Vanessa, nearly lxxx, used to piece of work in style. "I still hunt for apparel in charity shops," she says, "only you tin't hunt for friends."
"What does loneliness feel similar?"
"Information technology freezes you lot. You can hardly get out of bed. I wake up and think, 'what the hell shall I do?' I make picayune lists, effort to tell myself that today is a new day."
Adam Phillips believes that lonely people exercise a measure of choice: "at that place's loneliness, and so there are the uses of loneliness. Loneliness can be a refuge, admitting a miserable one. It can be an avoidance of a lot of things that could feel exciting, but troubling. At that place tin be safety in loneliness." But if people can face their loneliness head on, there's the possibility of recovery: "somebody but feels lonely because they've had the feel of not feeling lonely. In other words, this is reactive to something – somebody feels lonely because they know they're missing something they have one time experienced. They know there'south something good in the world that might appease their loneliness. That seems to me in and of itself a promising element. And so one time someone's feeling lonely, I think, in a mode, it's a sign of hope."
Sara Maitland, writer of the bestselling "A Volume of Silence", and also of a handbook entitled "How to Be Alone", has lived on her own for xx years. Her home is in a remote Scottish valley, the nearest shop 10 miles away. When she moved here she had never lived alone, and was "eagerly pending being thoroughly miserable, and having i more thing to blame my ex-married man for". Instead, she found herself becoming fascinated by silence, "by what happens to the human spirit, to identity and personality, when the talking stops, when you press the off push button, when you venture out into that enormous emptiness." One thing that happened for Sara was that low – "that I had causeless, throughout my developed life, was part of my personality" – ceased to problem her. She now thinks of urban life, and being surrounded past people, with horror.
Sara's isolation – with black-faced sheep for neighbours and no mobile-phone signal – is extreme. Merely I kept wondering, after speaking to her, whether at that place were less radical ways in which people who are solitary can larn to convert the desolation of loneliness into the richness of solitude. I met Laurence Freeman, a Benedictine monk and an internationally renowned teacher of meditation, in a quiet square in Islington, and was speedily struck both by his profound agreement of human nature and the distinction he fabricated between solitude and loneliness. For him, loneliness is a "failed solitude". In his experience loneliness contains a "terrible feeling of failure, and there's shame in that. Lonely people feel they should be connected, and if they feel disconnected, alienated, then that must mean they've made a mistake – or that they've been pushed into this by fate, or by something they've done. This can often involve a combination of paranoia and a very high level of judgmentalism about others. So they're trapped both means: they feel judged and they're besides judgmental." Solitude, he believes, is "the discovery and acceptance of your uniqueness. Information technology's not merely having noesis about yourself, it's actual experience of being, which is what we taste in meditation." This demand not be rooted in faith – his meditation techniques are taught and practised in schools and prisons up and down the state. "Solitude in this sense is the footing of relationship – entering into the solitude of oneself, i's uniqueness, prepares you lot for deeper, more authentic relationships."
"So can you acquire non to be alone?"
"I think you can – by embracing confinement. Only I think that coming out of loneliness is difficult work."
ILLUSTRATIONS SHOUT
Source: https://www.economist.com/1843/2018/01/22/how-does-it-really-feel-to-be-lonely
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