essay about loneliness and love

Paris, 1951. Photo by Elliot Erwitt/Magnum

Loved, yet lonely

You might have the unconditional love of family and friends and yet feel deep loneliness. can philosophy explain why.

by Kaitlyn Creasy   + BIO

Although one of the loneliest moments of my life happened more than 15 years ago, I still remember its uniquely painful sting. I had just arrived back home from a study abroad semester in Italy. During my stay in Florence, my Italian had advanced to the point where I was dreaming in the language. I had also developed intellectual interests in Italian futurism, Dada, and Russian absurdism – interests not entirely deriving from a crush on the professor who taught a course on those topics – as well as the love sonnets of Dante and Petrarch (conceivably also related to that crush). I left my semester abroad feeling as many students likely do: transformed not only intellectually but emotionally. My picture of the world was complicated, my very experience of that world richer, more nuanced.

After that semester, I returned home to a small working-class town in New Jersey. Home proper was my boyfriend’s parents’ home, which was in the process of foreclosure but not yet taken by the bank. Both parents had left to live elsewhere, and they graciously allowed me to stay there with my boyfriend, his sister and her boyfriend during college breaks. While on break from school, I spent most of my time with these de facto roommates and a handful of my dearest childhood friends.

When I returned from Italy, there was so much I wanted to share with them. I wanted to talk to my boyfriend about how aesthetically interesting but intellectually dull I found Italian futurism; I wanted to communicate to my closest friends how deeply those Italian love sonnets moved me, how Bob Dylan so wonderfully captured their power. (‘And every one of them words rang true/and glowed like burning coal/Pouring off of every page/like it was written in my soul …’) In addition to a strongly felt need to share specific parts of my intellectual and emotional lives that had become so central to my self-understanding, I also experienced a dramatically increased need to engage intellectually, as well as an acute need for my emotional life in all its depth and richness – for my whole being, this new being – to be appreciated. When I returned home, I felt not only unable to engage with others in ways that met my newly developed needs, but also unrecognised for who I had become since I left. And I felt deeply, painfully lonely.

This experience is not uncommon for study-abroad students. Even when one has a caring and supportive network of relationships, one will often experience ‘reverse culture shock’ – what the psychologist Kevin Gaw describes as a ‘process of readjusting, reacculturating, and reassimilating into one’s own home culture after living in a different culture for a significant period of time’ – and feelings of loneliness are characteristic for individuals in the throes of this process.

But there are many other familiar life experiences that provoke feelings of loneliness, even if the individuals undergoing those experiences have loving friends and family: the student who comes home to his family and friends after a transformative first year at college; the adolescent who returns home to her loving but repressed parents after a sexual awakening at summer camp; the first-generation woman of colour in graduate school who feels cared for but also perpetually ‘ in-between ’ worlds, misunderstood and not fully seen either by her department members or her family and friends back home; the travel nurse who returns home to her partner and friends after an especially meaningful (or perhaps especially psychologically taxing) work assignment; the man who goes through a difficult breakup with a long-term, live-in partner; the woman who is the first in her group of friends to become a parent; the list goes on.

Nor does it take a transformative life event to provoke feelings of loneliness. As time passes, it often happens that friends and family who used to understand us quite well eventually fail to understand us as they once did, failing to really see us as they used to before. This, too, will tend to lead to feelings of loneliness – though the loneliness may creep in more gradually, more surreptitiously. Loneliness, it seems, is an existential hazard, something to which human beings are always vulnerable – and not just when they are alone.

In his recent book Life Is Hard (2022), the philosopher Kieran Setiya characterises loneliness as the ‘pain of social disconnection’. There, he argues for the importance of attending to the nature of loneliness – both why it hurts and what ‘that pain tell[s] us about how to live’ – especially given the contemporary prevalence of loneliness. He rightly notes that loneliness is not just a matter of being isolated from others entirely, since one can be lonely even in a room full of people. Additionally, he notes that, since the negative psychological and physiological effects of loneliness ‘seem to depend on the subjective experience of being lonely’, effectively combatting loneliness requires us to identify the origin of this subjective experience.

S etiya’s proposal is that we are ‘social animals with social needs’ that crucially include needs to be loved and to have our basic worth recognised. When we fail to have these basic needs met, as we do when we are apart from our friends, we suffer loneliness. Without the presence of friends to assure us that we matter, we experience the painful ‘sensation of hollowness, of a hole in oneself that used to be filled and now is not’. This is loneliness in its most elemental form. (Setiya uses the term ‘friends’ broadly, to include close family and romantic partners, and I follow his usage here.)

Imagine a woman who lands a job requiring a long-distance move to an area where she knows no one. Even if there are plenty of new neighbours and colleagues to greet her upon her arrival, Setiya’s claim is that she will tend to experience feelings of loneliness, since she does not yet have close, loving relationships with these people. In other words, she will tend to experience feelings of loneliness because she does not yet have friends whose love of her reflects back to her the basic value as a person that she has, friends who let her see that she matters. Only when she makes genuine friendships will she feel her unconditional value is acknowledged; only then will her basic social needs to be loved and recognised be met. Once she feels she truly matters to someone, in Setiya’s view, her loneliness will abate.

Setiya is not alone in connecting feelings of loneliness to a lack of basic recognition. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), for example, Hannah Arendt also defines loneliness as a feeling that results when one’s human dignity or unconditional worth as a person fails to be recognised and affirmed, a feeling that results when this, one of the ‘basic requirements of the human condition’, fails to be met.

These accounts get a good deal about loneliness right. But they miss something as well. On these views, loving friendships allow us to avoid loneliness because the loving friend provides a form of recognition we require as social beings. Without loving friendships, or when we are apart from our friends, we are unable to secure this recognition. So we become lonely. But notice that the feature affirmed by the friend here – my unconditional value – is radically depersonalised. The property the friend recognises and affirms in me is the same property she recognises and affirms in her other friendships. Otherwise put, the recognition that allegedly mitigates loneliness in Setiya’s view is the friend’s recognition of an impersonal, abstract feature of oneself, a quality one shares with every other human being: her unconditional worth as a human being. (The recognition given by the loving friend is that I ‘[matter] … just like everyone else.’)

Just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can feel lonely in a room full of friends

Since my dignity or worth is disconnected from any particular feature of myself as an individual, however, my friend can recognise and affirm that worth without acknowledging or engaging my particular needs, specific values and so on. If Setiya is calling it right, then that friend can assuage my loneliness without engaging my individuality.

Or can they? Accounts that tie loneliness to a failure of basic recognition (and the alleviation of loneliness to love and acknowledgement of one’s dignity) may be right about the origin of certain forms of loneliness. But it seems to me that this is far from the whole picture, and that accounts like these fail to explain a wide variety of familiar circumstances in which loneliness arises.

When I came home from my study-abroad semester, I returned to a network of robust, loving friendships. I was surrounded daily by a steadfast group of people who persistently acknowledged and affirmed my unconditional value as a person, putting up with my obnoxious pretension (so it must have seemed) and accepting me even though I was alien in crucial ways to the friend they knew before. Yet I still suffered loneliness. In fact, while I had more close friendships than ever before – and was as close with friends and family members as I had ever been – I was lonelier than ever. And this is also true of the familiar scenarios from above: the first-year college student, the new parent, the travel nurse, and so on. All these scenarios are ripe for painful feelings of loneliness even though the individuals undergoing such experiences have a loving network of friends, family and colleagues who support them and recognise their unconditional value.

So, there must be more to loneliness than Setiya’s account (and others like it) let on. Of course, if an individual’s worth goes unrecognised, she will feel awfully lonely. But just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can feel lonely in a room full of friends. What plagues accounts that tie loneliness to an absence of basic recognition is that they fail to do justice to loneliness as a feeling that pops up not only when one lacks sufficiently loving, affirmative relationships, but also when one perceives that the relationships she has (including and perhaps especially loving relationships) lack sufficient quality (for example, lacking depth or a desired feeling of connection). And an individual will perceive such relationships as lacking sufficient quality when her friends and family are not meeting the specific needs she has, or recognising and affirming her as the particular individual that she is.

We see this especially in the midst or aftermath of transitional and transformational life events, when greater-than-usual shifts occur. As the result of going through such experiences, we often develop new values, core needs and centrally motivating desires, losing other values, needs and desires in the process. In other words, after undergoing a particularly transformative experience, we become different people in key respects than we were before. If after such a personal transformation, our friends are unable to meet our newly developed core needs or recognise and affirm our new values and central desires – perhaps in large part because they cannot , because they do not (yet) recognise or understand who we have become – we will suffer loneliness.

This is what happened to me after Italy. By the time I got back, I had developed new core needs – as one example, the need for a certain level and kind of intellectual engagement – which were unmet when I returned home. What’s more, I did not think it particularly fair to expect my friends to meet these needs. After all, they did not possess the conceptual frameworks for discussing Russian absurdism or 13th-century Italian love sonnets; these just weren’t things they had spent time thinking about. And I didn’t blame them; expecting them to develop or care about developing such a conceptual framework seemed to me ridiculous. Even so, without a shared framework, I felt unable to meet my need for intellectual engagement and communicate to my friends the fullness of my inner life, which was overtaken by quite specific aesthetic values, values that shaped how I saw the world. As a result, I felt lonely.

I n addition to developing new needs, I understood myself as having changed in other fundamental respects. While I knew my friends loved me and affirmed my unconditional value, I did not feel upon my return home that they were able to see and affirm my individuality. I was radically changed; in fact, I felt in certain respects totally unrecognisable even to those who knew me best. After Italy, I inhabited a different, more nuanced perspective on the world; beauty, creativity and intellectual growth had become core values of mine; I had become a serious lover of poetry; I understood myself as a burgeoning philosopher. At the time, my closest friends were not able to see and affirm these parts of me, parts of me with which even relative strangers in my college courses were acquainted (though, of course, those acquaintances neither knew me nor were equipped to meet other of my needs which my friends had long met). When I returned home, I no longer felt truly seen by my friends .

One need not spend a semester abroad to experience this. For example, a nurse who initially chose her profession as a means to professional and financial stability might, after an especially meaningful experience with a patient, find herself newly and centrally motivated by a desire to make a difference in her patients’ lives. Along with the landscape of her desires, her core values may have changed: perhaps she develops a new core value of alleviating suffering whenever possible. And she may find certain features of her job – those that do not involve the alleviation of suffering, or involve the limited alleviation of suffering – not as fulfilling as they once were. In other words, she may have developed a new need for a certain form of meaningful difference-making – a need that, if not met, leaves her feeling flat and deeply dissatisfied.

Changes like these – changes to what truly moves you, to what makes you feel deeply fulfilled – are profound ones. To be changed in these respects is to be utterly changed. Even if you have loving friendships, if your friends are unable to recognise and affirm these new features of you, you may fail to feel seen, fail to feel valued as who you really are. At that point, loneliness will ensue. Interestingly – and especially troublesome for Setiya’s account – feelings of loneliness will tend to be especially salient and painful when the people unable to meet these needs are those who already love us and affirm our unconditional value.

Those with a strong need for their uniqueness to be recognised may be more disposed to loneliness

So, even with loving friends, if we perceive ourselves as unable to be seen and affirmed as the particular people we are, or if certain of our core needs go unmet, we will feel lonely. Setiya is surely right that loneliness will result in the absence of love and recognition. But it can also result from the inability – and sometimes, failure – of those with whom we have loving relationships to share or affirm our values, to endorse desires that we understand as central to our lives, and to satisfy our needs.

Another way to put it is that our social needs go far beyond the impersonal recognition of our unconditional worth as human beings. These needs can be as widespread as a need for reciprocal emotional attachment or as restricted as a need for a certain level of intellectual engagement or creative exchange. But even when the need in question is a restricted or uncommon one, if it is a deep need that requires another person to meet yet goes unmet, we will feel lonely. The fact that we suffer loneliness even when these quite specific needs are unmet shows that understanding and treating this feeling requires attending not just to whether my worth is affirmed, but to whether I am recognised and affirmed in my particularity and whether my particular, even idiosyncratic social needs are met by those around me.

What’s more, since different people have different needs, the conditions that produce loneliness will vary. Those with a strong need for their uniqueness to be recognised may be more disposed to loneliness. Others with weaker needs for recognition or reciprocal emotional attachment may experience a good deal of social isolation without feeling lonely at all. Some people might alleviate loneliness by cultivating a wide circle of not-especially-close friends, each of whom meets a different need or appreciates a different side of them. Yet others might persist in their loneliness without deep and intimate friendships in which they feel more fully seen and appreciated in their complexity, in the fullness of their being.

Yet, as ever-changing beings with friends and loved ones who are also ever-changing, we are always susceptible to loneliness and the pain of situations in which our needs are unmet. Most of us can recall a friend who once met certain of our core social needs, but who eventually – gradually, perhaps even imperceptibly – ultimately failed to do so. If such needs are not met by others in one’s life, this situation will lead one to feel profoundly, heartbreakingly lonely.

In cases like these, new relationships can offer true succour and light. For example, a lonely new parent might have childless friends who are clueless to the needs and values she develops through the hugely complicated transition to parenthood; as a result, she might cultivate relationships with other new parents or caretakers, people who share her newly developed values and better understand the joys, pains and ambivalences of having a child. To the extent that these new relationships enable her needs to be met and allow her to feel genuinely seen, they will help to alleviate her loneliness. Through seeking relationships with others who might share one’s interests or be better situated to meet one’s specific needs, then, one can attempt to face one’s loneliness head on.

But you don’t need to shed old relationships to cultivate the new. When old friends to whom we remain committed fail to meet our new needs, it’s helpful to ask how to salvage the situation, saving the relationship. In some instances, we might choose to adopt a passive strategy, acknowledging the ebb and flow of relationships and the natural lag time between the development of needs and others’ abilities to meet them. You could ‘wait it out’. But given that it is much more difficult to have your needs met if you don’t articulate them, an active strategy seems more promising. To position your friend to better meet your needs, you might attempt to communicate those needs and articulate ways in which you don’t feel seen.

Of course, such a strategy will be successful only if the unmet needs provoking one’s loneliness are needs one can identify and articulate. But we will so often – perhaps always – have needs, desires and values of which we are unaware or that we cannot articulate, even to ourselves. We are, to some extent, always opaque to ourselves. Given this opacity, some degree of loneliness may be an inevitable part of the human condition. What’s more, if we can’t even grasp or articulate the needs provoking our loneliness, then adopting a more passive strategy may be the only option one has. In cases like this, the only way to recognise your unmet needs or desires is to notice that your loneliness has started to lift once those needs and desires begin to be met by another.

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The Human Connection Of Love And Loneliness Essay Examples

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Money , Love , Parents , Life , Family , America , United States , Women

Words: 1800

Published: 01/15/2020

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In Short-Story Characters

Loneliness is a human condition that people almost universally wrestle with, at least during some point in their lives, which is why it is such a compelling subject for writers to depict with their characters. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “lonely” is defined as “being without company, cut off from others, not frequented by human beings, sad from being alone, and producing a feeling of bleakness or desolation” (n.d.). A person may feel lonely when all his friends are going away to college but he is still in his hometown working at the same job he has had through high school, when burdened with a secret that only he knows, or when other people make fun of him for some personal quality that he can do nothing about. The girl named Jig from Ernest Hemingway’s story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” Paul from D.H. Lawrence’s story, “The Rocking Horse Winner,” and Dee from Alice Walker’s story, “Everyday Use,” all feel loneliness for different reasons. The loneliness that these characters feel is because of either a lack of or a perceived lack of love in their lives. In Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Jig and an American man, whom she is in a relationship with, are waiting for a train to arrive in the town of Ebro, Spain. Her loneliness and the reason for it is never mentioned specifically in the text. Instead, much is revealed through the dialogue of the characters. As Jig and the American drink beers while waiting for the train’s arrival, she observes the hills in the distance and says, “They look like white elephants,” to which he responds, “I’ve never seen one,” and she replies, “No, you wouldn’t have” (167). These sentences they exchange reveal a lot about the character of their relationship. In a literal sense, Jig is commenting fancifully on the landscape, and rather than join in her imaginings, the American says, “I’ve never seen one,” which dismisses her observation as if it lacked connection to reality and is therefore not rational (167). When Jig replies, “No, you wouldn’t have,” she implies, insultingly, that the American has a limited mind and experience, as well as acknowledges that he is unwilling to make a real connection with her. Additionally, the term “white elephant” is an English language idiom meaning “an expensive burden” (“White elephant,” n.d.). It is unlikely that Jig herself is conscious of the idiomatic meaning of “white elephant,” and her observation comes from the rising of the literally white hills from the bleak landscape surrounding Ebro. However, Hemingway is certainly aware of the term and its use is no coincidence as it foreshadows another revelation in the story, when the American says, “It’s really a simple operation, Jig” (168). Although subtle, it is obvious that one of the problems in the couple’s relationship is that Jig is pregnant, and the American wants her to have an abortion. The couple’s relationship lacks love. It seems as if the American lacks love for Jig, and as a result she feels lonely. The pregnancy, he says, is “the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy” (168). Jig seems to be more aware that there is a greater problem with their relationship, the lack of love, when she says, “But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?” (168). Through this query, she questions the idea that the connection caused by love can exist between them. Jig is at least unconsciously aware that if her relationship with the American had love, she would never need to ask the question, “But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?” (168). It is easy to imagine the difference it would have made from the beginning of the story if, instead of responding dismissively, “I’ve never seen one,” the American had instead clapped his hands and said, “Well, I’ll be! You’re right. They look like a whole pack of white elephants, a whole crowd over there!” (169). The two of them would have laughed, enjoyed the moment, the waiting for the train, their beers, and the observation that only the two of them noticed. Jig would not feel so lonely if she was surer that the father of her unborn child loved her. In D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner,” Paul is a young boy living in a household in which his parents value money over their children. They live in a fancy house, yet there was enough money to satisfy the parents. Even though the mother “married for love, and the love turned to dust,” she is unable to find any place in her heart for her three children, and “she herself knew that at the center of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love, no, not for anybody” (750). The values of the mother, to believe that luck is the source of money, and her lack of love, greatly influence Paul, who is a naturally curious child. It is impossible for a child who knows his mother does not love him not to try to find a reason why and a way to make himself lovable. He begins to equate being lucky and getting money with the thing that will bring him the love he needs in his life, so his mother will love him, and so that he will not feel this lack and so lonely. By the end of the story, Paul has acquired a great deal of money through his luck at betting on horses, but he dies from his exertions. The lack of love in Paul’s life originates with his mother. She is incapable of focusing on anything else but the acquiring of money, neglecting her children emotionally. The lack of love also comes from the father, who is apparently never present, and his Uncle Oscar, who is more interested in Paul as a curiosity and experiment rather than as the person he is. If just one person had taken the curious Paul under his or her wing and showed him love, his value to them as a human being, his own passion and love would not be misdirected in a single-minded frenzied quest to seek out the money that became a substitute for the nutrition his soul lacked. Paul is unable to steer away from his focus on luck and making money because he has no better example to show him that there is more to life than that. In Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” Dee is the brilliant older daughter that the narrator, the mother, compares to her duller younger daughter, Maggie. The mother describes Dee as almost a perfect person, with “nicer hair and a fuller figure” than Maggie, “determined to stare down any disaster in her efforts,” and as a person so put-together that “At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was” (719). Dee seems to be a person who knows who she is, what she wants, and has a bright future ahead of her because of it. However, Dee lacks love. She hates the house she grew up in, is critical of her mother and Maggie’s words and habits, and had few friends (719). Her focus is completely on herself and her appearance. It is some surprise to the mother when Dee comes to visit with her man, Hakim-a-barber, and is apparently friendly. “Oh, Mama! . . . O never knew how lovely these benches are,” she observes, surprising her mother, who thought that Dee would probably hate the house and be critical of everything about it during her visit (720). This is, however, not a reversal in attitude for Dee. When she finds out that some quilts she admires are going to go to Maggie when Maggie gets married, and that Maggie would use the quilts in the way quilts were designed to be used, she objects to it. Mama says, “What would you do with them?” and Dee responds, “Hang them” (721). When Mama rejects the idea of giving the quilts to Dee, Dee leaves. It is apparent that Dee has not changed, no matter how different she looks on the outside. Dee may not realize it because she is so selfish, but she is a very lonely character, without real admirers or anything of lasting value. Dee fails to love anything in life other than her own self. If she had felt love for her family, for her heritage, or anything else, she would not be such a lonely character because everything in her life would have a real value, one that she could share with others. She is able to see the physical beauty of the quilt, but her lack of love fails to acknowledge or appreciate who made the quilt or why it was created. If she had love in her life for anything or anyone but herself, she could see the value of things beyond a pretty façade, and would not spend her life on an endless quest to find fulfillment by surrounding herself with pretty things whose origin she cannot understand. The characters in these stories, who suffer from loneliness, show the many ways that the value of love is important to having a fulfilling life. Love is a value that helps keep a community of people healthy, emotionally and even physically. In fellow students, love and a sense of community are often forgotten in exchange for a focus on rivalry and putting each other down. A student who receives the best grade in a paper receives jeers from other students. If love and the other things that accompany it, such as respect, appreciation, and cooperation, replaced this rivalry, students would not put each other down for a job well done, but would ask the successful one how he or she did it in order to improve their own work. With love, all could attain more success, as well as a healthier, happier sense of community. With love, everyone would be less lonely.

Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” Introduction to Literature. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. 166-169. Print. Lawrence, D.H. “The Rocking Horse Winner.” Introduction to Literature. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. 750-757 Print. “Lonely.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Merriam-Webster, Inc., n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2012. Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use.” [Class Materials], n.d. 717-723. Print. “White elephant.” UsingEnglish.com. UsingEnglish.com, Ltd., n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2012.

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Sylvia Plath and the Loneliness of Love

By maria popova.

Yet always, always, there is an undertone of loneliness in even the most symphonic love — not the gladsome “neighboring solitudes” Rilke placed at the center of healthy companionship, but the hollowing loneliness of unbelonging, of never feeling fully and completely seen, which another great poet placed at the center of her poetry and her private anguish before she perished by that loneliness.

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932–February 11, 1963) was still a teenager when she began facing the deepest existential questions, untangling them with uncommon lucidity on the pages of her diary, which now survive as The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath ( public library ) — the dazzling and at times discomposing posthumous echo of personhood that gave us the young Plath on finding nonreligious divinity in nature , the ecsatsy of curiosity , and her thoughts on life, death, hope and happiness .

In an entry from the winter of her freshman year at Smith College, upon returning to her dorm room after a four-day blur with her family for Thanksgiving, she writes:

Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self — like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion. […] This loneliness will blur and diminish, no doubt, when tomorrow I plunge again into classes, into the necessity of studying for exams. But now, that false purpose is lifted and I am spinning in a temporary vacuum… The routine is momentarily suspended and I am lost. There is no living being on earth at this moment except myself. I could walk down the halls, and empty rooms would yawn mockingly at me from every side.

Peering beyond the immediate situation, beyond this particular moment in life, she casts a darkly prognostic eye toward the rosary of moments stringing her uncertain future — a future that would soon include a passionate but damaging love , a future cut short by her lonely pain — and adds:

God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in it’s appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.

It was Plath’s tragedy that after chance had dealt her neurochemistry and nurture far from optimal, and that the delicious illusion of choice had led her to a complicated love that deepened her art and deepened the pain from which it sprang. But her concrete tragedy — which is a common tragedy: so often our unhealed wounds lead us to people whose claws fit those wounds and deepen them — is contoured by the luminous negative space of the opposite possibility: Some loves can unseal, irradiate, and heal those small dark old places in us where joy has been compacted into a hard dense loneliness. This possibility is folded into a glorious, maddening Möbius strip of trust: The very relationships in which we can begin to grow those twin roots of the soul require a level of trust to begin the terrifying process of being known — a process Adrienne Rich placed at the heart of every relationship in which two people have together earned the right to use the word “love,” a truly honorable relationship shaped by “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”

— Published June 18, 2021 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/06/18/sylvia-plath-journals-loneliness-love/ —

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New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving

• © 2021
• Simon Cushing 0

University of Michigan–Flint, Flint, USA

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• New philosophical essays on love by a diverse group of international scholars
• Includes contributions to the ongoing debate on whether love is arational or if there are reasons for love
• Also whether love can explain the difference between nationalism and patriotism

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Table of contents (14 chapters)

Front matter, introduction.

Simon Cushing

Making Room for Love in Kantian Ethics

• Ernesto V. Garcia

Iris Murdoch and the Epistemic Significance of Love

• Cathy Mason

‘Love’ as a Practice: Looking at Real People

• Lotte Spreeuwenberg

Love, Choice, and Taking Responsibility

• Christopher Cowley

Not All’s Fair in Love and War: Toward Just Love Theory

• Andrew Sneddon

Doubting Love

• Larry A. Herzberg

Love and Free Agency

• Ishtiyaque Haji

Sentimental Reasons

• Edgar Phillips

Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Enticing Reasons for Love

• N. L. Engel-Hawbecker

Love, Motivation, and Reasons: The Case of the Drowning Wife

• Monica Roland

Can Our Beloved Pets Love Us Back?

• Ryan Stringer

Romantic Love Between Humans and AIs: A Feminist Ethical Critique

• Andrea Klonschinski, Michael Kühler

Patriotism and Nationalism as Two Distinct Ways of Loving One’s Country

• Maria Ioannou, Martijn Boot, Ryan Wittingslow, Adriana Mattos

Back Matter

• Rationality
• Artificial Intelligence
• Iris Murdoch
• Non-Human Animals

About this book

Editors and affiliations, about the editor, bibliographic information.

Book Title : New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving

Editors : Simon Cushing

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Religion and Philosophy , Philosophy and Religion (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-030-72323-1 Published: 21 September 2021

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-030-72326-2 Published: 22 September 2022

eBook ISBN : 978-3-030-72324-8 Published: 20 September 2021

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XII, 322

Topics : Philosophy of Mind , Ethics , Social Philosophy , Emotion

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Essay About Being Alone: 5 Examples and 8 Prompts

To explore your understanding of this subject, read the following examples of an essay about being alone and prompts to use in your next essay.  

Being alone and lonely are often used interchangeably, but they don’t have the same meaning.

Everyone has a different notion of what being alone means. Some think it’s physically secluding yourself from people, while others regard it as the feeling of serenity or hopelessness even in the middle of a crowd.

Being alone offers various benefits, such as finding peace and solitude to reflect and be creative. However, too much isolation can negatively impact physical and mental health . 

By understanding the contrast between the meaning of being alone and being lonely, you’ll be able to express your thoughts clearly and deliver a great essay. 

1. Why I Love Being Alone by Role Reboot and Chanel Dubofsky

2. why do i like being alone so much [19 possible reasons] by sarah kristenson, 3. things to do by yourself by kendra cherry, 4. the art of being alone, but not lonely by kei hysi, 5.  my biggest fear was being alone by jennifer twardowski, 8 writing prompts on essay about being alone, 1. why you prefer to be alone, 2. things learned from being alone, 3. pros and cons of being alone, 4. being alone vs. being lonely, 5. the difference between being alone vs. being with someone else, 6. the fear of being alone, 7. how to enjoy your own company without being lonely.

“For me, being alone is something I choose, loneliness is the result of being alone, or feeling alone when I haven’t chosen it, but they aren’t the same, and they don’t necessarily lead to one another.”

In this essay, the authors make it clear that being alone is not the same as being lonely. They also mention that it’s a choice to be alone or be lonely with someone. Being alone is something that the authors are comfortable with and crave to find peace and clarity in their minds. For more, see these articles about being lonely .

“It’s important to know why you want to be alone. It can help you make the best of that time and appreciate this self-quality. Or, if you’re alone for negative reasons, it can help you address things in your life that may need to be changed.”

Kristenson’s essay probes the positive and negative reasons a person likes being alone. Positive reasons include creativity, decisiveness, and contentment as they remove themselves from drama.

The negative reasons for being alone are also critical to identify because they lead to unhealthy choices and results such as depression. The negative reasons listed are not being able to separate your emotions from others, thinking the people around you dislike you and being unable to show your authentic self to others because you’re afraid people might not like you.

“Whether you are an introvert who thrives on solitude or a gregarious extrovert who loves socializing, a little high-quality time to yourself can be good for your overall well-being.”

In this essay, Cherry points out the importance of being alone, whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert. She also mentions the benefits of allocating time for yourself and advises on how to enjoy your own company. Letting yourself be alone for a while will help you improve your memory, creativity, and attention to detail, making them more productive.

“You learn to love yourself first. You need to explore life, explore yourselves, grow through challenges, learn from mistakes, get out of your comfort zone, know your true potential, and feel comfortable in your own skin. The moment you love yourself, you become immune to loneliness.”

Hysi explores being alone without feeling lonely. He argues that people must learn to love and put themselves first to stop feeling lonely. This can be challenging, especially for those who put themselves last to serve others. He concludes that loving ourselves leads to a better life. 

“We have to be comfortable in our own skin and be willing to be who we truly are, unapologetically. We have to love ourselves unconditionally and, through that love, be willing to seek out what our hearts truly desire — both in our relationships and in our life choices.”

The author discusses why she’s afraid of being alone and how she overcame it. Because she was scared of getting left alone, she always did things to please anyone, even if she wasn’t happy about it.  What was important to her then was that she was not alone. But she realized she would still feel lonely even if she wasn’t alone. 

Learning to be true to herself helped her overcome what she was afraid of. One key to happiness and fulfillment is loving yourself and always being genuine.

Did you finally have ideas about how to convey your thoughts about being alone after reading the samples above? If you’re now looking for ideas on what to talk about in your essay, here are 8 prompts to consider.

Read the best essay writing tips to incorporate them into your writing.

Today, many people assume that individuals who want to be alone are lonely. However, this is not the case for everyone. 

You can talk about a universal situation or feeling your readers will easily understand. Such as wanting to be alone when you’re mad or when you’re burnout from school or work. You can also talk about why you want to be alone after acing a test or graduating – to cherish the moment.

People tend to overthink when they are alone. In this essay, discuss what you learned from spending time alone. Perhaps you have discovered something about yourself, found a new hobby, or connected with your emotions.

Your essay can be an eye-opener for individuals contemplating if they want to take some time off to be alone. Explain how you felt when alone and if there were any benefits from spending this time by yourself.

While being alone has several benefits, such as personal exploration or reflection, time to reboot, etc., too much isolation can also have disadvantages. Conduct research into the pros and cons of alone time, and pick a side to create a compelling argumentative essay . Then, write these in your essay. Knowing the pros and cons of being alone will let others know when being alone is no longer beneficial and they’ll need someone to talk to.

We all have different views and thoughts about being alone and lonely. Write your notion and beliefs about them. You can also give examples using your real-life experiences. Reading different opinions and ideas about the same things broadens your and your readers’ perspectives.

Some people like being with their loved ones or friends rather than spending time alone. In this prompt, you will share what you felt or experienced when you were alone compared to when you were with someone else. For you, what do you prefer more? You can inform your readers about your choice and why you like it over the other.

While being alone can be beneficial and something some people crave, being alone for a long time can be scary for others. Write about the things you are most afraid of, such as, “What if I die alone, would there be people who will mourn for me?”  This will create an emotive and engaging essay for your next writing project.

Learning to be alone and genuinely enjoying it contributes to personal growth. However, being comfortable in your skin can still be challenging. This essay offers the reader tips to help others get started in finding happiness and tranquillity in their own company. Discuss activities that you can do while being alone. Perhaps create a list of hobbies and interests you can enjoy while being alone. 

Interested in learning more? Read our guide on descriptive essay s for more inspiration!

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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A Conceptual Review of Loneliness in Adults: Qualitative Evidence Synthesis

Louise mansfield.

1 Centre for Health and Wellbeing across the Lifecourse, College of Health, Medicine & Life Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge UB8 3PH, UK; [email protected] (C.V.); moc.liamg@yargrck (K.G.); moc.liamg@37gnidlogxela (A.G.)

Christina Victor

Catherine meads.

2 Faculty of Health, Education, Medicine and Social Care, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge CB1 1PT, UK; [email protected]

Norma Daykin

3 New Social Research, Faculty of IT and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, 33100 Tampere, Finland; [email protected]

Alan Tomlinson

4 Centre for Arts and Wellbeing, School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Brighton BN2 4AT, UK; [email protected] (A.T.); [email protected] (J.L.)

Alex Golding

Associated data.

All summaries of data are available in the Supplementary Material .

The paper reports an evidence synthesis of how loneliness is conceptualised in qualitative studies in adults. Using PRISMA guidelines, our review evaluated exposure to or experiences of loneliness by adults (aged 16+) in any setting as outcomes, processes, or both. Our initial review included any qualitative or mixed-methods study, published or unpublished, in English, from 1945 to 2018, if it employed an identified theory or concept for understanding loneliness. The review was updated to include publications up to November 2020. We used a PEEST (Participants, Exposure, Evaluation, Study Design, Theory) inclusion criteria. Data extraction and quality assessment (CASP) were completed and cross-checked by a second reviewer. The Evidence of Reviews of Qualitative Research (CERQual) was used to evaluate confidence in the findings. We undertook a thematic synthesis using inductive methods for peer-reviewed papers. The evidence identified three types of distinct but overlapping conceptualisations of loneliness: social, emotional, and existential. We have high confidence in the evidence conceptualising social loneliness and moderate confidence in the evidence on emotional and existential loneliness. Our findings provide a more nuanced understanding of these diverse conceptualisations to inform more effective decision-making and intervention development to address the negative wellbeing impacts of loneliness.

1. Introduction

Most of us will encounter loneliness at some point in our lives. Indeed, some philosophers argue that loneliness is a universal human experience [ 1 , 2 ]. This experience may be momentary or protracted, occur frequently or rarely, and vary in intensity. Loneliness is characterised as a homogeneous, static, and/or linear experience that is quantitatively accessible (i.e., we can measure it), and it is understood as a problem about which ‘something’ can and should be done to prevent or cure it [ 3 ]. In public health, for example, loneliness has been problematised and medicalised because of the associations with a range of negative mental and physical health outcomes [ 4 ], including increased mortality, morbidity, poorer health behaviours and excess service use [ 5 ], cardiovascular disease [ 6 , 7 ], reduced physical activity [ 8 , 9 ], poorer cognitive function [ 10 , 11 ] and depression [ 12 , 13 ]. Distinct but related concepts, most notably loneliness and social isolation, but also living alone, aloneness, and solitude are often conflated despite not being linguistically, empirically, or conceptually interchangeable. Despite the almost universality of the experience of loneliness, and an extensive research literature, it remains an enigmatic concept for individuals, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners since it is the outcome of an individual’s subjective experience.

Understanding loneliness is made more challenging because it is characterised by differing antecedents across varying populations and across individual life courses [ 14 ]. There is a lack of clarity about theories of loneliness and their application in empirical studies, and how they should be evaluated, measured, and applied in policy and practice [ 4 , 15 , 16 , 17 ]. When interpreting and using evidence about loneliness, these conceptual challenges are important to identify and address because they will have a profound influence on the generation, interpretation, and potential impact of evidence on policy, practice, and research in the field. In addition, there is a growing body of qualitative research that has not been fully explored for its contribution to bringing conceptual clarity to loneliness research. We undertook a synthesis of qualitative studies to start to address this evidence gap in 2018 with the aim of identifying, synthesising, and reporting on how the included studies have conceptualised loneliness as a way of enriching thinking and informing decision-making and practice in the field. We were not developing a new concept of loneliness. Following guidelines that reviews should be updated two years after publication, we updated the previous review to include relevant papers published up to 2020. This paper combines both reviews and summarises all the relevant literature on conceptualisations of social, emotional, and existential loneliness in diverse populations, their positive and negative attributes, and the ways people have found to alleviate loneliness as reported in academic journal articles and grey literature.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. methods.

The protocol was registered with the PROSPERO database (registration number: CRD42019124565). We followed PRISMA guidelines for conducting and reporting in this updated evidence review [ 18 ]. We employed a two-stage method, based on that proposed by key authors in the field [ 19 ]. Stage 1 identified evidence on conceptualisations, models, frameworks, and theories of loneliness and related concepts or domains. We made provision for a Stage 2 process to include additional evidence reviews for specific concepts and theories identified in Stage 1. This was not deemed necessary given the extensive evidence found at Stage 1. Our review was produced with stakeholder engagement on a project advisory board constituting personnel from key UK government departments, colleagues at the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, local and regional public health experts, and community groups. Stakeholder engagement consisted of an inception meeting to agree the protocol for the review and ongoing update meetings to discuss preliminary findings, implications of the evidence, and translation and dissemination activities.

2.2. Inclusion Criteria

We used a bespoke framework, PEEST (Participants, Exposure, Evaluation, Study Design, Theory), to identify relevant literature. The inclusion criteria were agreed through peer review with our stakeholder group to reflect the focus of their work on loneliness on adults aged 16 or over and from high- or middle-income countries, using the United Nations (UN) criteria, and including both clinical and community populations. The included studies evaluated participants’ exposure to or experiences of loneliness, however conceptualised, in any setting, reported as outcomes, processes, or both. Any qualitative or mixed-methods study with qualitative component in English, published between 1945 and November 2018 (for the previous review) and December 2018 and December 2020 (for the new review) was eligible if employing an identified theory, model, concept, or framework for understanding loneliness beyond a simple definition. Studies were considered off-PEEST if they included only a simple definition of loneliness with no conceptual analysis or were background literature reviews.

2.3. Data Sources and Search Strategy

The search strategy was informed by engaging in the peer review process with our stakeholder group, bringing expertise in policymaking, practice, and academic work on loneliness, the librarians at Brunel University London and the University of Brighton, and through advice from a systematic review expert, in accordance with PRISMA guidelines [ 18 ] for reviews in public health. Full details of our search strategy are in Supplementary S1 . Eight electronic databases (Scopus, Medline (via Ovid), Eric, PsycINFO (via EBSCO), CINAHL Plus, and the Science, Social Science, Arts, and Humanities Citation Indices (via Web of Science) were searched using a combination of MeSH terms and text words. All database searches were framed by this strategy, but individual searches were appropriately revised to suit the precise requirements for each database. We hand-searched reference lists of reviews and systematic reviews published between 1945 and 2020, following PRISMA guidelines [ 18 ]. Grey literature was sought via an online call for evidence, employment of expert input, review of key-sector websites, and a Google search (a keyword search and review of titles of the first 100 hits) for the previous and new reviews.

2.4. Study Selection

Search results (titles and abstracts) were independently checked by two review authors. Where eligibility was unclear, the full article was checked. Disagreements were resolved through consensus, or a third team member considered the citation and a majority decision was made.

2.5. Data Extraction

We extracted data as reported by authors on: (a) the conceptualisation(s) of loneliness, (b) population defined by age, identity, or context, (c) positive and negative attributes of loneliness identified, and (d) mechanisms for alleviating loneliness. Data were extracted onto standardised forms independently by one reviewer and cross-checked by a second. Discrepancies were resolved by consensus. Our protocol allowed us to contact authors if the required information could not be extracted and if this was essential for interpretation of their results, but we did not need to follow this procedure.

2.6. Quality Assessment

The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) quality checklist for qualitative studies was used for published studies [ 20 ]. Two authors independently applied the criteria to each included study, and disagreements were resolved through discussion. For grey literature, the Public Health England (PHE) Arts for Health and Wellbeing Evaluation Framework [ 21 ] was used to judge the quality in terms of the appropriateness of the evaluation design, the rigour of the data collection and analysis and the precision of the reporting. This checklist was employed by agreement with stakeholders in the project on account of the methods and context for collecting evidence in the grey literature being less well established than the published literature.

Confidence in the Evidence of Reviews of Qualitative Research (CERQual) was used to judge confidence in the review findings, specifically the methodological limitations, relevance, coherence, and adequacy of the data [ 22 ]. Confidence was decreased if there were serious or very serious limitations in the design or conduct of the study, the evidence was not relevant to the study objectives, the findings/conclusions were not supported by the evidence, or the data were of inferior quality and inadequate in supporting the findings. Confidence was increased if the study was well designed with few limitations, the evidence was applicable to the context specified in the objectives, the findings/conclusions were supported by evidence and provided convincing explanation for any patterns found, or the data supporting findings were rich and of high quality.

2.7. Data Synthesis

The synthesis was conducted thematically using the principles of inductive and reflexive methods (see for example [ 23 ]) through the development of a broadly inductive and iterative framework or typology that identified three types of loneliness: (i) social loneliness, (ii) emotional loneliness, and (iii) existential loneliness. This framework was drafted by L.M. and N.D. and refined by the research team. Each paper was categorised as representing one or more of the types of loneliness, bringing a more nuanced understanding to the analysis, anchored in a recognition of the complex social, emotional, and contextual factors which characterise loneliness.

3.1. Search Results

The previous review returned 5117 citations after the removal of duplicates and 15 records from additional searches (total 5192) of which 223 full texts were assessed for eligibility. From the previous review, 127 published studies and 16 grey literature reports (total 143) were included. The new review returned 3449 citations after the removal of duplicates, of which 25 full texts were assessed for eligibility. There were 10 published studies and 2 grey literature reports that were included from the new review (a total of 12). In total, 137 published studies and 18 grey literature reports are included in this systematic review, providing 155 sources of evidence conceptualising loneliness: 116 qualitative studies in journal articles and 7 book chapters (including interviews, observation, document analysis, diaries, and focus group methods); 14 mixed-methods studies (only the qualitative findings met inclusion criteria); and 18 grey literature reports. The search-screening process is illustrated in the PRISMA flowchart (see Figure 1 ). A table of excluded studies with reasons for exclusion can be found in Supplementary S2 .

PRISMA flowchart.

3.2. Study Characteristics

A summary of the characteristics of included studies can be found in a list in Supplementary S3 (with full details of study objectives, description, participants, design and analysis employed, how it conceptualises loneliness, the predominant themes, and study conclusions). In terms of populations, 68 studies reported that participants were solely aged 50+ years (43%). However, the included studies also demonstrated considerable heterogeneity including groups specified by youth and middle age, cultural, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation, people living with physical and mental illness, those living in care homes, people in clinical settings, homeless people, healthcare professionals, volunteers, parents, and prisoners. Studies were reported for 26 different countries with the largest representation from the UK ( n = 37) and the USA ( n = 33), and the earliest published study, by Jerrome, was dated 1983. Loneliness was conceptualised in the included studies principally by three types: social loneliness ( n = 108), emotional loneliness ( n = 27), and existential loneliness ( n = 20). Studies emphasised one of these three types of loneliness, and some considered the interconnections between two or more different types, which we discuss later in the section on multidimensional concepts of loneliness.

3.3. Study Quality

Following the CASP quality checklist, articles were scored out of 8, where 8 is the highest. In general, the quality was good for the published journal articles, with a relatively high number of studies (73/155) receiving scores of 7 and 8, but less so for the book chapters, most likely due to the different publishing requirements. Study quality varied across the types of loneliness studies with ratings of 7 or 8 for 48% of the social loneliness (52/108), 65% of existential loneliness (13/20), and 37% of emotional loneliness (10/27) studies. Methodological weaknesses included a lack of exact details of the researcher’s role, potential bias, and influence on the sample recruitment, setting, and responses of participants. Published studies identified ethical issues but did not always include an official record. The grey literature was of mixed quality with high-quality reports, including details of methods, theoretical analysis and recognition of limitations, and low-quality (credibility) reports providing little detail of the methods, commonly taking participant accounts at face value without theoretical analysis. A summary of quality checklist results and scores is presented in Supplementary S4 for published studies. Supplementary S5 presents quality ratings for the grey literature. The CERQual qualitative evidence profile is shown in Supplementary S6 (providing a succinct summary of the methodological limitations of all the included studies). This shows that there was much more evidence for social loneliness than emotional and existential loneliness, and we have high confidence in the social loneliness results and moderate confidence in the emotional and existential loneliness results.

3.4. Social Loneliness

Studies of social loneliness dominate the evidence accounting for 70% (108/155) of sources in the review and included populations of different ages, family carers, and a range of different employment groups [ 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 , 48 , 49 , 50 , 51 , 52 , 53 , 54 , 55 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 , 86 , 87 , 88 , 89 , 90 , 91 , 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 , 96 , 97 , 98 , 99 , 100 , 101 , 102 , 103 , 104 , 105 , 106 , 107 , 108 , 109 , 110 , 111 , 112 , 113 , 114 , 115 , 116 , 117 , 118 , 119 , 120 , 121 , 122 , 123 , 124 , 125 , 126 , 127 , 128 , 129 , 130 , 131 ]. The typical conceptualisation of social loneliness was as an ‘objective’ condition framed by numbers of social connections and explained as a subjective evaluation of feeling isolated, deprived of companionship, lacking a sense of belonging, and lacking access to a satisfying social network; that is, it describes a sense of disconnection from others. How this concept was manifest and the underpinning contributary mechanisms varied across populations and contexts.

In studies focused on older 50+ years and younger populations, social loneliness was articulated as a feeling of disconnection across various domains of life including devaluation, helplessness, powerlessness, and feelings of stigma and shame. The vulnerability created by social loneliness was highlighted by accounts of financial fraud in elderly people [ 38 ]. For older adults, loss, detachment, and boredom were commonly identified as contributors to loneliness in both community and care home settings. Young people noted loneliness to be connected to the need to escape from someone or something and aligned loneliness with submission or resignation to negative feelings, often alongside feelings of shame and stigma [ 67 ]. The stigma of loneliness was reported by a wide range of groups, including people with HIV and with cancer [ 24 ], homeless people [ 25 , 32 , 74 , 111 ], female prisoners [ 43 ], men who have sex with other men [ 53 ], transgender people [ 108 ], and older people living in care settings [ 29 ]. To clarify, within the context of loneliness, stigma is understood to mean some kind of marginalisation, feelings of disgrace, or exclusion. If the papers did not directly use the term ‘stigma’ but used one of these concepts, we took it to mean stigmatisation.

There were groups or contexts where the feeling of disconnection associated with social loneliness took specific forms. Cultural difference was reported as a potential source of social loneliness in older population groups [ 69 , 82 ]. For international students, the absence of intimate personal connections combined with a lack of cultural fit created ‘cultural loneliness’, a version of social loneliness generated by the absence of their cultural and linguistic settings [ 112 ]. This notion of cultural loneliness could persist even when people had good access to social networks. Studies of social loneliness in the employment context identified a lack of support and employment-related ‘distancing’ or isolation from others from a diverse range of employees including long-haul truck drivers [ 26 ], homeworkers [ 46 ], school principals [ 57 , 60 , 113 ], medical educators [ 96 ], professional golfers [ 40 ], and senior corporate managers [ 104 ], as well as family caregivers [ 45 , 98 ]. Homeworkers and family caregivers seem to be especially vulnerable. Both groups experienced a sense of being cut off from their networks, professional and personal, because of the restrictions their respective roles had on their personal life [ 46 , 98 ]. For family caregivers, not feeling understood and being denied recognition for their role was experienced alongside more generic feelings of powerlessness and helplessness to take control of live events.

Experiences of illness and healthcare led to or compounded social loneliness in ways not reported for other population groups. In care homes, feeling lonely was exacerbated by issues preventing carers from providing adequate care (e.g., limited resources, time pressures, and professional rules) [ 83 ]. For stroke patients, a lack of support and contact, a sense of being unable to contribute, and not having an intimate relationship contributed to loneliness [ 109 ]. The design of healthcare environments can generate social loneliness as illustrated by a stroke ward, which while allowing privacy and supporting efficient clinical care, increased loneliness and created barriers to social connection [ 25 ]. This example provides one of the few explanations of loneliness not simply attributable to individual characteristics. In mental health contexts, social loneliness was affected by external environments, activities, and therapies/treatment, as well as people [ 121 ]. Social loneliness arose as a result of physical, cognitive, behavioural, and emotional responses following traumatic brain injury since these changes could affect existing relationships, leading to the loss of old friends and creating difficulties in making new ones [ 85 ].

Solutions to social loneliness were numerous and diverse in this evidence base. For older adults, services to alleviate social loneliness were largely focussed on increasing social contacts. These included friendship clubs [ 44 ], music provision [ 127 ], museum-based social prescribing [ 129 , 131 ], local history cafes [ 119 ], broadly defined community-based approaches [ 30 , 58 , 89 , 100 , 125 ], and health-messaging services [ 49 , 124 ]. Community-based approaches to alleviating social loneliness were explored where community leaders worked with older women [ 100 ]. These suggested that increasing independence, improving communication and developing mentoring, buddying, and intergenerational befriending programmes could provide relevant support to women of older age [ 100 ]. Intergenerational approaches using reverse mentoring in which younger adults trained older people in the use of information technology (IT) were reported as successful in alleviating self-reported social loneliness in older people in one study [ 33 ]. Provision of social activities to alleviate social loneliness in nursing homes could include a range of activities (e.g., self-awareness programmes, humour sessions, social engagements, and faith-based activities), but these were only associated with self-reported reductions in social loneliness if the activities were relevant to older people [ 72 , 80 ].

Young people used a variety of coping strategies for managing social loneliness and preserving and extending social connections. These included distraction, seeking help from professionals and institutions, support seeking, self-reliance, and problem-solving behaviours [ 67 , 112 , 118 ]. Although social loneliness in young people was difficult to identify, youth workers could help to prevent a downward spiral by addressing loneliness risk at key moments, which would differ amongst individuals, but may be related to relationship concerns, mental health issues, and a range of perceived stressors in life [ 128 ].

Studies reported a range of strategies for addressing workplace social loneliness in different contexts, including provision of opportunities to socialise and maintaining connections with people who provide social support [ 26 ]. The use of mobile technologies, such as smartphones, widened possibilities for homeworkers to socialise while retaining access to emails and remaining contactable by clients, although the use of technological devices did not necessarily address professional isolation in homeworkers [ 46 ]. Strategic responses to alleviating social loneliness at the organisational level were noted in the context of academic institutions as part of a wider examination of the role of social support in improving mental wellbeing [ 6 ]. In wider work contexts, the extent to which senior managers felt lonely was also dependent on coping strategies they used, including mental and physical disconnection, adopting a healthy lifestyle, gaining support from one’s network, and affecting and influencing others.

3.5. Emotional Loneliness

A total of 27 of the 155 included studies conceptualised emotional loneliness with a ‘loss model’ or ‘primary relationship deficit’ approach, which was used in all but two of the studies as the explanatory framework [ 132 , 133 , 134 , 135 , 136 , 137 , 138 , 139 , 140 , 141 , 142 , 143 , 144 , 145 , 146 , 147 , 148 , 149 , 150 , 151 , 152 , 153 , 154 , 155 , 156 , 157 , 158 ]. A common theme in conceptualisations of emotional loneliness was the connection with social isolation and a loss or lack of good quality social relationships in all the included studies in this theme. However, in contrast to social loneliness, the sense of loss, disconnection, withdrawal, detachment, or alienation from people and places and feelings of abandonment and exclusion was resultant from a lack of a sense of belonging or recognition and, for older adults, perceptions of agism and stereotyping. Negative emotions identified in conceptualisations of emotional loneliness included sadness, fear, anxiety, and worry. Although it overlaps with social loneliness, the emotional aspect within this conceptualisation of loneliness requires addressing in a distinct way because these negative feelings occur even when one is in close contact with people. Positive emotions connected to emotional loneliness were also conceptualised in terms of optimistic perceptions of aloneness and solitude associated with learning to cope with loneliness and adjusting to imposed loneliness. Emotional loneliness was reported as both acute, temporary, and subject to negotiation and change, but also permanent, long-lasting, and associated with detrimental mental and physical health.

Emotional loneliness was described by older people as a type of inner pain or suffering, a feeling to be kept hidden and silent because of fears of being stigmatised as lonely and old, becoming a burden on family and friends, and feeling responsible for controlling emotional aspects of loneliness [ 140 , 141 , 150 , 151 ]. Negative feelings associated with loss [ 133 , 134 , 135 , 137 , 140 , 141 , 150 , 154 , 156 ], disconnection, withdrawal, detachment, or alienation from people and places [ 135 , 150 , 152 , 156 ], a feeling of abandonment [ 137 , 143 ], exclusion [ 141 ], and a sense of losing or being in conflict with ones’ established identity [ 135 , 140 , 144 , 145 ] were descriptions of emotional loneliness in old age. Two studies focussed on young people, highlighting a dearth of studies in this area [ 139 , 149 ]. Both studies related to young people growing up in particular family contexts: living with a parent diagnosed with cancer and having parents who were Holocaust survivors, highlighting specific exclusionary contexts. For the parental cancer patient context, key exclusionary processes included failure of professionals to explain the situation to them, being left out of decisions and conversations connected to diagnoses, and treatment of their parents. Alongside this, feelings of uncertainty about the future, fear of losing a parent, and a sense that they were not equipped to cope generated a sense of distance or disconnection from others. For children of parents who were Holocaust survivors, emotional loneliness was a cognitive reaction to parental trauma [ 149 ] and a consequence of negative self-comparison to families without such trauma. Alleviating this kind of emotional loneliness was associated with support and comfort offered by family members and being given accurate information by healthcare professionals, which combined to provide a sense of relief from emotional loneliness for the young people.

Positive feelings associated with emotional loneliness were observed only for older adults and were associated with the perceived benefits of solitude or aloneness [ 137 , 143 , 147 ]. Solitude was connected to feelings of freedom and a sense of comfort in old age in one study and defined as an ‘at homeness’. Being able to cope with emotional loneliness in old age was associated with a sense of joy and pride in oneself [ 147 ] and emotional self-management [ 143 ]. The included studies examined processes of negotiating and adapting to loneliness in old age. Alleviating emotional loneliness was connected to establishing new routines to account for the loss of loved ones or social networks [ 135 , 152 ], including developing opportunities for meaningful social contact [ 156 ], engaging in therapy for those living with long-term mental health conditions [ 141 ], and taking part in meaningful activities, such as reading, gardening, and social meals [ 143 , 151 ].

Of the 27 studies on emotional loneliness, seven studies explored emotional loneliness as a consequence of relational issues [ 132 , 136 , 138 , 142 , 148 , 153 , 155 , 157 ], further supporting the idea that social and emotional loneliness are interconnected. Four of these identified that complex family dynamics including responsibility for childcare, older children leaving home, and bereavement (for mothers) [ 132 ]; poor childhood attachment (to fathers), and weak sibling relationships [ 153 ]; being placed in a care home [ 148 ]; and loss of intimate partner relationships [ 136 , 155 ]. These all resulted in the deeply emotional character of loneliness connected to low mood, a lack of sense of purpose and feelings of suffering, family abandonment, and pervasive worry. Such negative consequences of emotional loneliness could be further entrenched by disadvantaged living conditions, such as low income and limited access to spaces/places with good amenities [ 132 ]. This evidence points to the significance of high quality and meaningful relationships and an understanding of the role of place/space in countering social and emotional loneliness. When relationships (particularly intimate ones) are not high quality, there is a negative impact on emotional loneliness, shaped through feelings of disappointment, abandonment, and feeling devalued or powerless [ 157 ]. In studies of people living with learning disabilities or mental health conditions [ 142 , 146 ], the structuring of exclusion was identified as a contributory factor to emotional loneliness, characterised by a sense of exclusion and lack of acceptance even in the presence of people. In one of these studies, the potential of reframing loneliness in terms of the benefits of solitude was considered possible [ 142 ].

Approaches to alleviating emotional loneliness for those living with physical and mental health conditions included nostalgic activities, allowing remembering and reminiscing about happy times, keeping busy, and engaging in activities involving meeting people, which could lead to feelings of pride in self-management [ 141 , 147 , 151 , 152 ]. Participating in therapy was also considered to help strengthen a sense of connection to the world and alleviate emotional loneliness for those living with mental health conditions [ 141 ]. Alleviating emotional loneliness associated with insecurity or a lack of attachment to place, either rural or urban, through place-based strategies was reported in one study [ 154 ]. Creating place-based opportunities for the development of a sense of neighbourhood was similarly suggested in one study as a potential solution to emotional loneliness [ 156 ].

3.6. Existential Loneliness

A total of 20 the 155 included studies conceptualised existential loneliness [ 159 , 160 , 161 , 162 , 163 , 164 , 165 , 166 , 167 , 168 , 169 , 170 , 171 , 172 , 173 , 174 , 175 , 176 , 177 , 178 ]. In contrast to emotional or social loneliness, existential loneliness was defined as a feeling of fundamental separateness from others and the wider world, not simply as the absence of meaningful relationships and negative emotional experience. Participants described it as a feeling that occurred when important others were absent through some form of psychological rejection or absence [ 159 , 161 , 162 ], or when people felt left behind by life events, such as death or divorce, and/or experiences of physical or mental decline or limitation through illness, traumatic experience, aging, and a sense of one’s mortality [ 160 , 163 , 164 , 165 , 166 , 167 , 168 , 169 , 170 , 171 , 172 , 173 , 174 , 176 , 177 , 178 ]. Similar explanations of existential loneliness were reported by healthcare professionals supporting older people experiencing this type of loneliness [ 175 ]. This conceptualisation of existential loneliness was connected, in all studies examining the concept, to feelings of separateness from other human beings, feelings of loss and longing, and/or a sense of being an outsider against a need for connectedness, belonging, and companionship. Studies indicated that existential loneliness may also be felt while with others, as a sense of disconnection from a group [ 159 , 161 , 163 , 167 , 168 , 170 , 171 , 172 , 174 ]. In such situations, participants reported that existential loneliness was experienced through being misunderstood, psychologically and emotionally detached, and more deeply as a perception of being without others. For AIDS patients in one study, this was shown to lead to stigma for this population group [ 159 ]. Negative feelings of existential loneliness were connected to healthcare contexts via the concept of the ‘lonely patient’ who, while in close proximity to other patients or healthcare professionals, may feel disconnected because of a sense of vulnerability, lack of care [ 161 , 163 ], or issues with communication [ 169 ].

Existential loneliness was not always conceived of as a negative experience. Evidence in one study suggested that existential loneliness could be meaningful if developed as part of a voluntary transcendental experience [ 161 ]. Such self-directed and potentially positive experiences of existential loneliness were conceptualised as a powerful force for calm and peace, a type of temporary recharging experience adopted when people felt a need to break from human connection for a while. While old age, frailty, and impending death were most often considered in the context of negative feelings of existential loneliness, there was evidence in two studies that such life experiences contributed to an understanding of loneliness as a balance between solitude and meaningful human connections that involved both social and emotional experiences, and the building of new and trusting relationships [ 173 , 177 ].

3.7. Multidimensional Models of Loneliness

Perhaps representing an advance in understandings of loneliness, six studies in this review proposed what we would refer to as multidimensional models of loneliness [ 29 , 37 , 63 , 69 , 82 , 94 ]. Multidimensional models of loneliness in studies of older people reflected the influence of interactions between relationship quality, becoming and being old, personal troubles/personality traits, and sickness on feelings of loneliness [ 29 , 37 , 94 ]. In these models, social loneliness intertwines with emotional loneliness in complex ways revealing loneliness to be deeply or intensely felt, potentially hidden or masked, and diverse in experience. In two studies, the complexity of social loneliness was explored in terms of cultural difference and diversity [ 69 , 82 ]. Social loneliness was conceptualised as embodied and culturally nuanced in terms of physical, emotional, and spiritual expression [ 69 ]. Disrupted cultures and communities were linked with diverse cultural experience of loneliness [ 82 ]. Severe mental illness (SMI) had the effect of reducing or changing social networks even though many people with SMI desired to have greater social networks [ 93 ]. Social loneliness was also characterised as emotionally as well as socially excluding and reported as the feeling of being somehow removed from life [ 63 ]. Such findings demonstrate some overlap with existential types of loneliness for those living with mental health conditions [ 63 ].

4. Discussion

Principal findings and contribution to knowledge.

The findings in this review support calls for better understandings of the complexity of loneliness in different population groups and social contexts [ 179 , 180 ] to inform policymakers and practitioners in the field. We have thematically synthesised the evidence for three types of loneliness: social, emotional, and existential. This supports but significantly develops a preliminary typology of loneliness, focused only on loneliness in healthcare research [ 181 ].

In summary of our findings, social loneliness describes the perception of dissatisfaction with the quality of relationships [ 182 ] and as a discrepancy between the actual and desired quantity and quality of social interactions [ 28 , 133 , 183 ]. This type of loneliness most closely reflects established ways in which loneliness is defined and measured in the current literature, where it is understood as a negative experience in which our social relations are deficient in some way, quantitively or qualitatively [ 184 ]. It also reflects the evidence showing correlations between loneliness and poor physical and mental health [ 5 , 14 ].

Emotional loneliness arises from the absence or loss of meaningful relationships, possibly of a primary attachment figure, such as a spouse. Emotional loneliness is also a consequence of a loss of health and social opportunities that are not easily replaceable. It is also interconnected with not meeting the need to be recognised and to belong. This type of loneliness reflects the extant literature, which identifies the connection between feeling lonely and distressed, emptiness, and loss [ 135 ]. Moreover, existential loneliness describes an expression of separateness from others that can occur at any time, but particularly so when facing life threatening illnesses, trauma, and one’s mortality [ 159 , 185 ].

Central to our findings is the implication that unlike social loneliness, emotional and existential loneliness may not be relieved by interventions focused on social connectedness and integration into a social community. Hence, a key finding from this review is that it provides a more nuanced understanding of loneliness, which can inform a targeted approach to alleviating loneliness, particularly in policy and intervention work.

Our review identifies some key gaps in the literature on loneliness. We found only two published studies focussed on the link between emotional loneliness in young people living with a parent with cancer [ 139 ]; children of Holocaust survivor parents, [ 149 ]). Innovative work reported in the grey literature shows that emotional loneliness in youth is complex and associated with a variety of life experiences [ 118 , 186 ]. Indeed, feelings of loneliness arise during key moments of transition in life, and they are unlikely to be fully captured by the current static and unidimensional definitions that solely focus on the quality and quantity of social relationships. This links to another key gap we found in that there is a dearth of studies on loneliness across the life course since this could show how loneliness is experienced distinctly at different points in time and through different life events [ 187 , 188 , 189 ] The review also identified a lack of studies on loneliness and inequalities, such as socio-economic status and disability, since the included studies present thin demographic data. This, therefore, provides a direction for future research in this area.

More specifically, our review also highlights the importance of conceptualising existential loneliness in order to design effective interventions in circumstances and contexts in which people feel hopelessly detached from social life or misunderstood [ 190 ]. The extant literature on existential loneliness has predominantly focussed on chronic illness [ 172 ] and end-of-life care [ 181 ]. However, our review reveals other contexts in which existential loneliness requires attention. In studies of mental health, existential loneliness appears to be conceived as the sense of physical separation from others, sometimes as a development from having a disturbed self-image or as a consequence of being unable to form social connections, resulting in feelings of exclusion from normal life, stigma, emptiness, and being an outsider.

Each type of loneliness and the potential overlaps between them illustrates the diverse and complex interplay between social, psychological, and contextual factors which contribute to loneliness and potentially its alleviation in people’s lives. Understanding these conceptual differences demonstrates the need for theoretical development in multidimensional studies of loneliness, critical reviews of and methodological developments in both how loneliness is measured, and the interventions that need to be designed and implemented. At present, the current definition of loneliness is not sufficiently broad in its scope or sophisticated in its conceptualisation to capture the range, diversity, and depth of experiences that people define as lonely [ 17 , 191 ]. It also often confuses loneliness, a subjective phenomenon, with social isolation, an objective condition arising from quantitatively diminished social networks [ 28 , 44 ]. Imprecise definitions and, indeed, generalised and broad measures will limit understanding of the impact of loneliness on health.

Most studies in our review focused on social loneliness ( n = 108), reflecting the current academic focus. Using the CERQual rating, we have high confidence in this evidence. However, there was a dearth of studies examining emotional loneliness ( n = 27) and existential loneliness ( n = 20), and both these types of loneliness have been found to be associated with negative health outcomes. This reflects both the more recent emergence of these two types of loneliness as distinct conceptual and empirical entities. The most established measures of loneliness implicitly or explicitly focus on social loneliness. These findings suggest a need for detailed studies of these different types of loneliness and points to the scope for public health policy and practice developments rooted in an understanding of loneliness types, interactions, and settings. We need to comprehend more clearly who feels lonely, when, where, and in what context.

5. Conclusions

5.1. strengths and limitations.

The rigorous and systematic search strategy and comprehensive nature of this review is a strength. We focused on loneliness only and did not include social isolation and other similar concepts. The pre-publication of our protocol on PROSPERO ensured methodological transparency and mitigated any potential post-hoc decision-making, which may have introduced bias. Dual screening of the searches and data extraction and independent quality assessment of the included reviews ensured a rigorous process.

Systematic reviews and evidence syntheses of conceptual frameworks and models are unusual, and methods for such reviews are not yet well-developed. Our use of a PEEST inclusion criteria meant that the types of studies we were interested in were clear to all team members. The focus on concepts, models, theories, and frameworks of loneliness means that it is possible that some relevant evidence was not included. Seventeen potentially includable studies were unavailable, and they may have influenced findings had they been available. There is also a potential risk of publication lag where possible important new evidence has not yet been included in published articles and reports, and thus not identified and included. The grey literature search was used to mitigate that risk in part. The use of the CERQual criteria also acts as a checklist as much as an evaluative tool or measure of quality. A consistent approach to judgements across the different interventions has been applied, but it should be recognised that these judgements are open to interpretation.

5.2. Implications for Policymakers and Future Research

Our review identified an extensive qualitative literature conceptualising social, emotional, and existential loneliness, providing theoretical frameworks for understanding loneliness that are adaptable for decision-making in policy and practice. The literature is dominated by research conceptualising social loneliness, which understates the potential significance of emotional and existential loneliness. We suggest that a parallel review evaluating how loneliness is conceptualised in our commonly used measurement tools would be valuable.

Improved measures and high-quality mixed-methods studies would help to address this. We would recommend rigorous and systematic quantitative methods, longitudinal process evaluations, and cost effectiveness evaluations alongside appropriate qualitative methodologies and analytical techniques. Research, policy, and practice approaches to loneliness can be enhanced through co-production methods involving mutually beneficial working practices in service design, implementation, and evaluation.

5.3. Concluding Remarks

This systematic review summarises all the available qualitative literature on conceptualising social, emotional, and existential loneliness in diverse adult populations. Our evidence base would benefit from an improved understanding of these different types of loneliness, their inter-relationships, and how these may vary across the life course. Such evidence would underpin more effective decision-making and intervention development and influence developments in measuring loneliness. This would enable policymakers and practitioners to determine what intervention would work, for whom, and in what context.

Our findings showed that there is a lack of detail in the literature on loneliness and inequalities (gender, ethnicity, disability, and socio-economic status) because of limited reporting of demographic data in the included studies. There remains, therefore, a need for future rigorous research on loneliness and inequality to understand how loneliness may be experienced differently and thus how to address the detrimental health effects of the interaction of these issues. The findings will be useful for decision-making in public policy and practice that seeks to identify who is lonely, why loneliness occurs, how it is experienced, and the most effective ways to alleviate loneliness or optimise the positive aspects of solitude for enhanced health and wellbeing outcomes. If public health interventions and policy decisions for alleviating loneliness are not based on accurate definitions and understandings, it is unlikely that they will be effective.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the expert support for the searches provided by library-based information scientists at Brunel University London and the University of Brighton. We also acknowledge the support of doctoral researchers at Brunel University London in completing the updated review (Helen Pickford, Amelia Beddoe, and Jake Gifford).

Supplementary Materials

The following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/article/10.3390/ijerph182111522/s1 , Supplementary S1: Search strategy; Supplementary S2: Table of excluded studies; Supplementary S3: Characteristics of included studies conceptualising loneliness (published and unpublished literature); Supplementary S4: Quality checklist scores for qualitative studies (published); Supplementary S5: Quality ratings for grey (unpublished) studies; Supplementary S6: CERQual qualitative evidence profile.

Author Contributions

The review was conceived and designed and the protocol developed by L.M., C.M., N.D., A.T. and C.V.; article screening was carried out by L.M., C.M., N.D., A.T., J.L., K.G. and C.V.; data extraction, quality checks of data and interpretation were completed by L.M., C.M., N.D., A.T., J.L., K.G. and C.V.; and the was manuscript drafted by C.M. and L.M. and critically reviewed, updated, and edited by N.D., A.T., J.L., K.G., A.G. and C.V. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This study was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/NOO3721/1).

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Alain de Botton: the three ingredients for love

The philosopher and author writes about the meaning of love and why the lonely are the real experts

If ever there was a time to celebrate love it's in the darker periods when we most need our faith restored. It's why Laura Lambert, the founder of ethical jewellery brand Fenton, decided to call on her favourite writers to compile an anthology of expressions of love - what it means and how it manifests itself.

Notes on Love was curated during the first lockdown, and was self-published in October, featuring contributions from high-profile names such as Candice Brathwaite, Elizabeth Day and Alain de Botton. Here, we share an abridged version of de Botton's essay on the three components that characterise love - and why the lonely are the best placed to be experts on the subject.

Alain de Botton: What is love?

One way to get a sense of why love should matter so much, why it might be considered close to the meaning of life, is to look at the challenges of loneliness. Too often, we leave the topic of loneliness unmentioned: those without anyone to hold feel shame; those with someone (a background degree of) guilt. But the pains of loneliness are an unembarrassing and universal possibility. We shouldn’t – on top of it all – feel lonely about being lonely. Unwittingly, loneliness gives us the most eloquent insights into why love should matter so much. There are few greater experts on the importance of love than those who are bereft of anyone to love. It is hard to know quite what all the fuss around love might be about until and unless one has, somewhere along the way, spent some bitter unwanted passages in one’s own company.

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When we are alone, people may well strive to show us kindness; there may be invitations and touching gestures, but it will be hard to escape from a background sense of the conditionality of the interest and care on offer. We are liable to detect the limits of the availability of even the best disposed companions and sense the restrictions of the demands we can make upon them. It is often too late – or too early – to call. A radical editing of our true selves is the price we must pay for conviviality.

All these quietly soul- destroying aspects of single life, love promises to correct. In the company of a lover, there need be almost no limits to the depths of concern, care, attention and license we are granted. We will be accepted more or less as we are; we won’t be under pressure to keep proving our status. It will be possible to reveal our extreme, absurd vulnerabilities and compulsions and survive. It will be OK to have tantrums, to sing badly and to cry. We will be tolerated if we are less than charming or simply vile for a time. We will be able to wake them up at odd hours to share sorrows or excitements. Our smallest scratches will be of interest.

In the presence of the lover, evaluation will no longer be so swift and cynical. They will lavish time. As we tentatively allude to something, they will get eager and excited. They will say ‘go on’ when we stumble and hesitate. They will accept that it takes a lot of attention to slowly unravel the narrative of how we came to be the people we are. They won’t just say ‘poor you’ and turn away. And instead of regarding us as slightly freakish in the face of our confessions, they will kindly say ‘me too.’ The fragile parts of ourselves will be in safe hands with them. We will feel immense gratitude to this person who does something that we had maybe come to suspect would be impossible: know us really well and still like us. Surrounded on all sides by lesser or greater varieties of coldness, we will at last know that, in the arms of one extraordinary, patient and kindly being worthy of infinite gratitude, we truly matter.

2. Admiration

In Plato’s dialogue, The Symposium, the playwright Aristophanes suggests that the origins of love lie in a desire to complete ourselves by finding a long lost ‘other half’. At the beginning of time, he ventures in playful conjecture, all human beings were hermaphrodites with double backs and flanks, four hands and four legs and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. These hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male and female half – and from that day, each one of us has nostalgically yearned to rejoin the part from which he or she was severed. We don’t need to buy into the literal story to recognise a symbolic truth: we fall in love with people who promise that they will in some way help to make us whole. At the centre of our ecstatic feelings in the early days of love, there is a gratitude at having found someone who seems so perfectly to complement our qualities and dispositions. We do not all fall in love with the same people because we are not all missing the same things.

Our personal inadequacies explain the direction of our tastes

The aspects we find desirable in our partners speak of what we admire but do not have secure possession of in ourselves. We may be powerfully drawn to the competent person because we know how our own lives are held up by a lack of confidence and tendencies to get into a panic around bureaucratic complications. Or our love may zero in on the comedic sides of a partner because we’re only too aware of our tendencies to sterile despair and cynicism. Our personal inadequacies explain the direction of our tastes. We hope to change a little in their presence, becoming – through their help – better versions of ourselves.

We shouldn’t expect to get there all by ourselves. We can, in certain areas, be the pupils and they the teachers. We usually think of education as something harsh imposed upon us against our will. Love promises to educate us in a very different way. Through our lovers, our development can start in a far more welcoming and energising way: with deep excitement and desire. Love gives us the energy to construct and hold on to the very best story about someone. We are returned to a primal gratitude. We thrill around apparently minor details: that they have called us, that they are wearing that particular pullover, that they lean their head on their hand in a certain way, that they have a tiny scar over their left index finger or a particular habit of slightly mispronouncing a word... It isn’t usual to take this kind of care over a fellow creature, to notice so many tiny touching, accomplished and poignant things in another. This is what parents, artists or a God might do. We can’t necessarily continue in this vein forever, the rapture is not necessarily always entirely sane, but it is one of our noblest and most redemptive pastimes – and a kind of art all of its own – to give ourselves over to appreciating properly for a time the real complexity, beauty and virtue of another human being.

One of the more surprising and at one level perplexing aspects of love is that we don’t merely wish to admire our partners; we are also powerfully drawn to want to possess them physically. The birth of love is normally signalled by what is in reality a hugely weird act; two organs otherwise used for eating and speaking are rubbed and pressed against one another with increasing force, accompanied by the secretion of saliva. We can only start to understand the role of sexuality in love if we can accept that it is not – from a purely physical point of view – necessarily a uniquely pleasant experience in and of itself, it is not always a remarkably more enjoyable tactile feeling than having a scalp massage or eating an oyster.

Through sexual love, we are accepted for who we really are

Yet nevertheless, sex with our lover can be one of the nicest things we ever do. The reason is that sex delivers a major psychological thrill. The pleasure we experience has its origin in an idea: that of being allowed to do a very private thing to and with another person. Another person’s body is a highly protected and private zone. We’re implicitly saying to another person through our unclothing that they have been placed in a tiny, intensely policed category of people: that we have granted them an extraordinary privilege. Sexual excitement is psychological. It’s not so much what our bodies happen to be doing that turns us on. It’s what’s happening in our brains: acceptance is at the centre of the kinds of experiences we collectively refer to as ‘getting turned on.’ It feels physical – the blood pumps faster, the metabolism shifts gear, the skin gets hot – but behind all this lies a very different kind of change: a sense of an end to our isolation.

In general, civilisation requires us to present stringently edited versions of ourselves to others. It asks us to be cleaner, purer, more polite versions of who we might otherwise be. The demand comes at quite a high internal cost. Important sides of our character are pushed into the shadows. The person who loves us sexually does something properly redemptive: they stop making a distinction between the different sides of who we are. They can see that we are the same person all the time; that our gentleness or dignity in some situations isn’t fake because of how we are in bed and vice versa. Through sexual love, we have the chance to solve one of the deepest, loneliest problems of human nature: how to be accepted for who we really are.

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150 Quotes About Loneliness in Life, Love and Relationships and Depression

Loneliness is a feeling of being empty within. a bunch of loneliness quotes might get your spirits back. here are the top 150 loneliness quotes about life, love, relationships and depression that you will be able to relate to..

Loneliness is a feeling that can strike to anyone, anytime, anywhere. If you are here and reading these loneliness quotes, chances are high that you are familiar with the feeling of being alone. 

Sometimes loneliness can be very painful. Did you ever wonder why loneliness hurts so much? Because the feeling of being alone makes you vulnerable. So, give yourself enough time to overcome it.

Although it might seem hard, you can do it. This selection of loneliness quotes will help you overcome the feeling of being alone. We've compiled a comprehensive list of loneliness quotes to help you find strength in that temporary state. Right from loneliness quotes about love to loneliness quotes from the bible, read all types of quotes here.

Loneliness quotes about love

Loneliness is a feeling of being empty within. It's hard to describe and even harder to deal in matters which make the person feel low and emotionally tattered. Take for example, the matters of love . Feeling lonely in love is way more common than you actually think. Therefore, we bring you some of the best curated loneliness quotes about love that you can relate to.

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them. JODI PICOULT

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty. MOTHER TERESA (more Mother Teresa quotes)

Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened. DR. SEUSS (more Dr. Seuss quotes)

I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone. ROBIN WILLIAMS (more Robin Williams quotes)

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets. PAUL TOURNIER

The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself. MARK TWAIN (more Mark Twain quotes)

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration. PEARL S. BUCK

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives. BERTRAND RUSSELL

The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely. CHARLOTTE BRONTE

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. BELL HOOKS

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up. MARK TWAIN

At the beginning and at the end of love, the two lovers are embarrassed to find themselves alone. JEAN DE LA BRUYERE

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love. GEORGE ELIOT (more George Eliot quotes)

I've also seen that great men are often lonely. This is understandable, because they have built such high standards for themselves that they often feel alone. But that same loneliness is part of their ability to create. YOUSUF KARSH

All I ever wanted was to reach out and touch another human being not just with my hands but with my heart. TAHEREH MAFI

The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved. MOTHER TERESA

sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love. GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being. JOHN JOSEPH POWELL

I felt her absence. it was like waking up one day with no teeth in your mouth. you wouldn't need to run to the mirror to know they were gone. JAMES DASHNER

Are you upset little friend? Have you been lying awake worrying? Well, don't worry...I'm here. The flood waters will recede, the famine will end, the sun will shine tomorrow, and I will always be here to take care of you. CHARLES M. SCHULZ

We are born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Everything in-between is a gift. YUL BRYNNER

Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for. DAG HAMMARSKJOLD

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe. The others have a certain stickiness, they stick to the mass. D.H LAWRENCE

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain. ELIZABETH BOWEN

I'm tired of living unable to love anyone. I don't have a single friend - not one. And, worst of all, I can't even love myself. Why is that? Why can't I love myself? It's because I can't love anyone else. A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself. HARUKI MURAKAMI

Everyone keeps telling me that time heals all wounds, but no one can tell me what I’m supposed to do right now. Right now I can’t sleep. It’s right now that I can’t eat. Right now I still hear his voice and sense his presence even though I know he’s not here. Right now all I seem to do is cry. I know all about time and wounds healing, but even if I had all the time in the world, I still don’t know what to do with all this hurt right now. NINA GUILLBEAU

If you learn to really sit with loneliness and embrace it for the gift that it is…an opportunity to get to know YOU, to learn how strong you really are, to depend on no one but YOU for your happiness…you will realize that a little loneliness goes a LONG way in creating a richer, deeper, more vibrant and colorful YOU. MANDY HALE

Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you. HARUKI MURAKAMI

That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other. RAINER MARIA RILKE

Loneliness quotes about relationships

Loneliness can be felt because of many reasons. It could be due to missing someone or just because you had a bad day. The reason can be minute or severe. Therefore, we bring you some hand-picked loneliness relationships quotes to solve your issues and be with them again.

Loneliness is not lack of company, loneliness is lack of purpose. GUILLERMO MALDONADO

Being alone is scary, but not as scary as feeling alone in a relationship. AMELIA EARHART (more Amelia Earhart quotes)

If you feel lonely within your relationship, pay attention to this inner warning signal! DOREEN VIRTUE

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other. JOHN STEINBECK

Being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right. CHARLES BUKOWSKI (more Charles Bukowski quotes)

I would rather share one lifetime with you than face all the ages of this world alone. ARWEN (from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings)

There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a dead marriage. ERICA JONG

A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person. MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

I’d rather be single, happy, and lonely sometimes than married, lonely, and happy sometimes. MARK FIORE

At the end of the day, I know that I would rather be alone and occasionally lonely and unhappy than in a miserable marriage and lonely and unhappy all the time. I don't mind being single. In fact, I like it. ALANA STEWART

Being single isn't the cause of loneliness, and marriage is not necessarily the cure. There are many lonely married people as well. RENEE JONES

Marriage. Don't be pressured into it. Is the fear of loneliness really greater than the fear of bondage? SUMIKO TAN

Fortunately for women, most men mistake loneliness for love before marriage, and habit for happiness afterward. HELEN ROWLAND

I learned that day that there is no more lonely state than being in a lonely marriage. JULIE METZ

On the night of the winter solstice, when the dead get their annual reprieve, they go up to the 24-hour donut shop and wedding chapel to get hitched. Marriage is a good and proper pursuit for dead people. For a while, it relieves the dark, shuddering loneliness of the afterlife. RACHEL SWIRSKY

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (more Friedrich Nietzsche quotes)

When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives. GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

How we need another soul to cling to. SYLVIA PLATH

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. RAINER MARIA RILKE

Separation - Your absence has gone through me, Like thread through a needle, Everything I do is stitched with its color. W.S MERWIN

I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I've been in the arena. How comforting the presence of another human being can be. SUZANNE COLLINS

I'm not much but I'm all I have. PHILIP K. DICK

I was always holding onto people, and they were always leaving. LILI ST. CROW

If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him. CRISS JAMI

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all. DEB CALETTI

But nothing makes a room feel emptier than wanting someone in it. CALLA QUINN

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend! EDITH WHARTON

Related Reading: 5 Ways to Transform Your Loneliness into Enjoyable Solitude

Loneliness quotes from the Bible

Loneliness isn't just a modern word coined by the millennials , it goes a long way back. In fact, the concept of loneliness goes back to the Bible. So, here are a few Bible loneliness quotes that may lead you through this phase with flying colours. 

Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. DEUTERONOMY 31:6

Though my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will receive me. PSALM 27:10

For the sake of his great name the LORD will not reject his people, because the LORD was pleased to make you his own. 1 SAMUEL 12:22

ROMAWhat, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? ROMANS 8:31

He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? ROMANS 8:32

Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. ROMANS 8:33

Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. ROMANS 8:34

Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. PSALM 25:16

and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age. MATTHEW 28:20

So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. -ISAIAH 41:10

Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. 1 PETER 5:7

God sets the lonely in families,he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land. PSALM 68: 6

I am never lonely when I am reading the Bible. Nothing dissolves loneliness like a session with God's Word. BILLY GRAHAM

Those who are without friends, God puts in families; he makes free those who are in chains; but those who are turned away from him are given a dry land. PSALM 68:6

No longer do I call you servants, for the servant doesn’t know what his lord does. But I have called you friends, for everything that I heard from my Father, I have made known to you. JOHN 15:15

 He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. PSALM 147:3

No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it. 1 CORINTHIANS 10:13

Be free from the love of money, content with such things as you have, for He has said, “I will in no way leave you, neither will I in any way forsake you." So that we say with a good heart, "The Lord is my helper; I will have no fear: what is man able to do to me?” HEBREWS 13:5-6

Behold, the time is coming, yes, and has now come, that you will be scattered, everyone to his own place, and you will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me. I have told you these things, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have oppression; but cheer up! I have overcome the world. JOHN 16:32-33

For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:17

As for me, I will see Your face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I awake in Your likeness. PSALM 17:15

If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. COLOSSIANS 3:1-4

Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. MATTHEW 11:28

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. GALATIANS 6:2

Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others. PHILIPPIANS 2:3-4

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. ROMANS 38-39

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 2 CORINTHIANS 1:3-4

Listen to me in silence, O coastlands. let the peoples renew their strength. let them approach, then let them speak; let us together draw near for judgment. ISAIAH 41:1

Then the LORD God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.' GENESIS 2:18  

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. PSALM 23:4

Quotes about overcoming loneliness

We have been talking about loneliness quotes, but haven't discussed how to overcome it. Well, it's way easier said than done. When an individual is lonely, it is like they are sick from within. Subsequently, they don't feel the urge to get off the bed or to converse with someone. To sum up, it's hard for real.

Therefore, we bring quotes about overcoming lonelines s to help you come out of this phase in life.

It’s far better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone. MARILYN MONROE

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. ALDOUS HUXLEY

Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better. HENRY ROLLINS

If you learn to really sit with loneliness and embrace it for the gift that it is… an opportunity to get to know you, to learn how strong you really are, to depend on no one but you for your happiness… you will realize that a little loneliness goes a long way in creating a richer, deeper, more vibrant and colorful you. MANDY HAL

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. JANET FITCH

A lonely day is God’s way of saying that he wants to spend some quality time with you. CRISS JAMI

Introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward. SUSAN CAIN

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. HENRY DAVID THOREAU

The strongest men are the most alone. HENRIK IBSEN

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity. ALBERT EINSTEIN

I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else. JOSHUA SLOCUM

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone. JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone. MITCH ALBOM

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free. ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they’ve got to come. You can’t force them. D.H LAWRENCE

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself. MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. HERMAN HESSE

You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with. WAYNE W. DYER

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. These are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel. AUDREY HEPBURN

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. MAYA ANGELOU

I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me. ELIZABETH GILBERT

Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don’t find themselves at all. ROLLO MAY

All great and precious things are lonely. JOHN STEINBECK

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. HENRI J.M NOUWEN

If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself. PAULO COELHO

If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even one companion you belong only half to yourself. LEONARDO DA VINCI

My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people. PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

I think it’s good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are. AMY SEDARIS

Related Reading: How to Survive the Holiday Season If You’re Alone

Loneliness quotes about life

An individual can go through a lot of emotions and feelings throughout his life. One of these emotions and feelings is loneliness. It's hard to deal with because loneliness is hard to explain in words. It's like everything within you is broken like a shard of glasses, and hurting you everywhere. Thus, we bring you a list of loneliness quotes about life that will help you sail through this too.

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony. DOUGLAS COUPLAND

Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment. HARUKI MURAKAMI

The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It's the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared. LOIS LOWRY

If one's different, one's bound to be lonely. ALDOUS HUXLEY

I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone. DANIEL KEYES

It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored. DAVID LEVITHAN

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know. DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness. POPPY Z. BRITE

It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them. D.H LAWRENCE

My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it. URSULA K. LE GUIN

We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding. RUDYARD KIPLING

I also believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward. SUSAN CAIN

Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up. PEARL BUCK

Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone. WENDELL BERRY

You are never alone. You are eternally connected with everyone. AMIT RAY

But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. BELL HOOKS

Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt; In solitude, where we are least alone. GEORGE GORDON BYRON

It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us. JACKSON PEARCE

Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old. ANNE FRANK (more Anne Frank quotes)

Words are loneliness. HENRY MILLER (more Henry Miller quotes)

For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces. OSAMU DAZAI

If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Half of the time I don't know what they're talking about; their jokes seem to relate to a past that everyone but me has shared. I'm a foreigner in the world and I don't understand the language. JEAN WEBSTER

People cannot win against their loneliness because loneliness is this world’s worst kind of pain. GAARA

When was it I realized that, on this truly dark and solitary path we all walk, the only way we can light is our own? Although I was raised with love, I was always lonely. Someday, without fail, everyone will disappear, scattered into the blackness of time. BANANA YOSHIMOTO

You do not have to be alone. The world never inflicts loneliness upon us. That is something we choose or reject by ourselves. DARREN SHAN

I learned much too late that what you called love was nothing but a desperate and irrational fear of a life lived alone. BEAU TAPLIN

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Stranger Has No Idea He's Hitting On A Female MMA Fighter

Dating is hard and courtship is confusing. Why does it seem the men we want to approach us never do and the ones we don't, we can't seem to keep away? We've all been there in one way or another. Someone we do or don't know expresses interest in us and the feeling isn't mutual. So what do we do when the feeling isn't mutual? For lots of single women, sometimes lying is easier. There's the old "I have a boyfriend" trick, or grabbing your nearest girlfriend and saying "we're together." Any white lie will do in order to turn the hot pursuit, cold! But sometimes suitors can be persistent. They put up a good fight – and dodging their advances can be a lot like stepping into the boxing ring. Thankfully, this female MMA fighter, Racquel Todor was more than up for the fight. But she had no idea she would soon meet the stranger who would prove to be a worthy opponent.

Stranger Had No Idea Who He Was About To "Hit On"

Racquel Todor, the rising star in the MMA scene, found herself at the center of attention in an unexpected encounter that left her both amused and bemused. It was just another day for Todor, casually going about her business when a stranger approached her, undoubtedly unaware of the caliber of the woman he was about to meet.

In her Instagram post that swiftly went viral, Todor recounted the scene with a wry sense of humor. The stranger's intentions were clear: he aimed to strike up a conversation, perhaps even ask her out. But Todor, like many women, wasn't exactly thrilled by the prospect. Her nonchalant eye roll spoke volumes, a silent protest against the all-too-familiar scenario of unsolicited advances.

Navigating such encounters can feel like dodging punches in the ring for many women, but Todor's background as an MMA fighter gave her a unique perspective. While she may possess the skills to hold her own in a physical altercation, even she acknowledges the challenge of deflecting unwanted attention with grace and poise.

The stranger, oblivious to Todor's skills, unwittingly stumbled into a situation where he was "hitting on" someone who could hit back — both literally and figuratively. Little did he know, his casual approach would soon lead to an unexpected twist that would leave him, and Todor's audience, utterly stunned.

Watch Racquel Todor's Video:

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tee Rex (@dinosaur.arms)

He Said: "I'm Safe To Reject" And It Made All The Difference

Navigating the world of dating can feel like tiptoeing through a minefield, especially when faced with unwanted advances. Racquel Todor's recent encounter with a stranger hitting on her struck a chord with many women who have found themselves in similar situations.

In the midst of this all-too-common scenario, the stranger's unexpected declaration — "I'm safe to reject" — was a game-changer. It offered Todor a lifeline, a way to gracefully decline without resorting to the usual evasive tactics.

With those four simple words, the stranger shattered the stereotype of rejection leading to hostility or resentment. Instead, he created a space where Todor felt empowered to assert her boundaries without fear of backlash.This small but significant gesture highlights the importance of clear communication and mutual respect in romantic interactions. It's a reminder that consent should never be assumed and that everyone has the right to say no without guilt or judgment.

Women Don't Hate Being "Hit On" — They Hate Feeling Like They Can't "Hit Back"

Todor's experience prompts us to rethink the way we approach dating and relationships. Rather than viewing rejection as a personal affront, we should see it as an opportunity to foster mutual respect and understanding.

"It's not that I dislike being approached," Todor explains. "It's the feeling of being trapped, with no safe exit strategy."

In a culture where the fear of rejection often overshadows genuine connection, Todor's encounter serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of mutual respect. By embracing a mindset of consent and autonomy, we can create a dating landscape where everyone feels valued and respected.

So, the next time you find yourself in a similar situation, remember the significance of those four simple words: "I'm safe to reject." They may just pave the way for a more respectful and empowering approach to dating and relationships.

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Man Still Sends Ex-Wife Anniversary Cards Years After Split

When a couple divorces, it’s because they can no longer be together romantically. But that doesn’t mean that love can’t still exist between two former partners, which this man has proved for the past 22 years.

An Amicable Goodbye

Melvin Tavares and Mary Widman divorced in 2002, yet according to their daughter, Jodylynn Tavares, her father sends her mother an anniversary card or a text message every single year.

“There was only one year that he forgot, and my mom was kind of disappointed about it,” Jodylynn told People .

The 24-year-old was three when her parents divorced, but she has fond memories of how they co-parented her and her sister. That includes her dad sending her mom sentimental messages and cards, which could be considered a marker of the past and what their marriage represented.

“My dad always picks cartoon and funny cards. He isn’t a mushy card buyer. My dad usually writes, ‘Happy Anniversary Wifie, love Mel,’” Jodylynn continued.

“I think it shows that he still loves my mom, but not romantically. They both are living different lives; he does it out of respect. He still refers to her as his ‘wifie.’ My dad doesn’t mean any harm or have bad intentions; he is just a sentimental, mushy kind of guy.”

A Positive Upbringing

@jodylynntavares not the $1 bill

This year, Jodylynn marked the anniversary by sharing her parents’ story on TikTok. The video she shared, which included her mom receiving a card and a $1 bill, went viral. That’s likely because the heartwarming story is a positive example of co-parenting and being there for your kids, even when you can no longer be together.

To People , Jodylynn added that she and her sister lived with their mom in Hawaii for most of their childhood but spent summers with their dad.

“My mom was good and never talked bad about my dad,” she continued. “She always said that just because she couldn’t be married to him didn’t mean that he wasn’t still our dad. My parents were always on their best behavior when together for graduations, my sister’s wedding, and now they have grandkids together.”

Jodylynn also revealed that her mom has probably thrown away most of the cards she’s received, but she still has the one from the viral video.

“Married at one time but will always be connected to each other. My parents still love each other, but not romantically,” Jodylynn added.

Embracing the Love

When you’re hurt or disappointed to no longer have the life you once envisioned for yourself, it can be hard to forgive and move on with love in your heart. That’s especially true if someone who was supposed to be your life partner hurt you or acted unforgivably. However, there are circumstances where a positive post-divorce relationship can exist, and this story is one of them.

If you’re able to, working through the pain and remembering the love that brought you together in the first place — for the sake of kids or even for yourself — is essential to healing and growing. Making room for forgiveness and love can be powerful, and it can create surprising long-term bonds.

At the very least, it can help you get back to you after a period of loss and grieving. As with anything in life, letting go of what you thought was supposed to happen and making the best of the reality of a situation will open the door to happiness and success.

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Between Solitude and Loneliness

By Donald Hall

At eighty-seven, I am solitary. I live by myself on one floor of the 1803 farmhouse where my family has lived since the Civil War. After my grandfather died, my grandmother Kate lived here alone. Her three daughters visited her. In 1975, Kate died at ninety-seven, and I took over. Forty-odd years later, I spend my days alone in one of two chairs. From an overstuffed blue chair in my living room I look out the window at the unpainted old barn, golden and empty of its cows and of Riley the horse. I look at a tulip; I look at snow. In the parlor’s mechanical chair, I write these paragraphs and dictate letters. I also watch television news, often without listening, and lie back in the enormous comfort of solitude. People want to come visit, but mostly I refuse them, preserving my continuous silence. Linda comes two nights a week. My two best male friends from New Hampshire, who live in Maine and Manhattan, seldom drop by. A few hours a week, Carole does my laundry and counts my pills and picks up after me. I look forward to her presence and feel relief when she leaves. Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.

Born in 1928, I was an only child. During the Great Depression, there were many of us, and Spring Glen Elementary School was eight grades of children without siblings. From time to time I made a friend during childhood, but friendships never lasted long. Charlie Axel liked making model airplanes out of balsa wood and tissue. So did I, but I was clumsy and dripped cement onto wing paper. His models flew. Later, I collected stamps, and so did Frank Benedict. I got bored with stamps. In seventh and eighth grade, there were girls. I remember lying with Barbara Pope on her bed, fully clothed and apart while her mother looked in at us with anxiety. Most of the time, I liked staying alone after school, sitting in the shadowy living room. My mother was shopping or playing bridge with friends; my father added figures in his office; I daydreamed.

In summer, I left my Connecticut suburb to hay with my grandfather, on this New Hampshire farm. I watched him milk seven Holsteins morning and night. For lunch I made myself an onion sandwich—a thick slice between pieces of Wonder Bread. I’ve told of this sandwich before.

At fifteen, I went to Exeter for the last two years of high school. Exeter was academically difficult and made Harvard easy, but I hated it—five hundred identical boys living two to a room. Solitude was scarce, and I labored to find it. I took long walks alone, smoking cigars. I found myself a rare single room and remained there as much as I could, reading and writing. Saturday night, the rest of the school sat in the basketball arena, deliriously watching a movie. I remained in my room in solitary pleasure.

At college, dormitory suites had single and double bedrooms. For three years, I lived in one bedroom crowded with everything I owned. During my senior year, I managed to secure a single suite: bedroom and sitting room and bath. At Oxford, I had two rooms to myself. Everybody did. Then I had fellowships. Then I wrote books. Finally, to my distaste, I had to look for a job. With my first wife–people married young back then; we were twenty and twenty-three–I settled in Ann Arbor, teaching English literature at the University of Michigan. I loved walking up and down in the lecture hall, talking about Yeats and Joyce or reading aloud the poems of Thomas Hardy and Andrew Marvell. These pleasures were hardly solitary, but at home I spent the day in a tiny attic room, working on poems. My extremely intelligent wife was more mathematical than literary. We lived together and we grew apart. For the only time in my life, I cherished social gatherings: Ann Arbor’s culture of cocktail parties. I found myself looking forward to weekends, to crowded parties that permitted me distance from my marriage. There were two or three such occasions on Friday and more on Saturday, permitting couples to migrate from living room to living room. We flirted, we drank, we chatted–without remembering on Sunday what we said Saturday night.

After sixteen years of marriage, my wife and I divorced.

For five years I was alone again, but without the comfort of solitude. I exchanged the miseries of a bad marriage for the miseries of bourbon. I dated a girlfriend who drank two bottles of vodka a day. I dated three or four women a week, occasionally three in a day. My poems slackened and stopped. I tried to think that I lived in happy license. I didn’t.

Jane Kenyon was my student. She was smart, she wrote poems, she was funny and frank in class. I knew she lived in a dormitory near my house, so one night I asked her to housesit while I attended an hour-long meeting. (In Ann Arbor, it was the year of breaking and entering.) When I came home, we went to bed. We enjoyed each other, libertine liberty as much as pleasures of the flesh. Later I asked her to dinner, which in 1970 always included breakfast. We saw each other once a week, still dating others, then twice a week, then three or four times a week, and saw no one else. One night, we spoke of marriage. Quickly we changed the subject, because I was nineteen years older and, if we married, she would be a widow so long. We married in April, 1972. We lived in Ann Arbor three years, and in 1975 left Michigan for New Hampshire. She adored this old family house.

For almost twenty years, I woke before Jane and brought her coffee in bed. When she rose, she walked Gus the dog. Then each of us retreated to a workroom to write, at opposite ends of our two-story house. Mine was the ground floor in front, next to Route 4. Hers was the second floor in the rear, beside Ragged Mountain’s old pasture. In the separation of our double solitude, we each wrote poetry in the morning. We had lunch, eating sandwiches and walking around without speaking to each other. Afterward, we took a twenty-minute nap, gathering energy for the rest of the day, and woke to our daily fuck. Afterward I felt like cuddling, but Jane’s climax released her into energy. She hurried from bed to workroom.

For several hours afterward, I went back to work at my desk. Late in the afternoon, I read aloud to Jane for an hour. I read Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” twice, the Old Testament, William Faulkner, more Henry James, seventeenth-century poets. Before supper I drank a beer and glanced at  The   New Yorker  while Jane cooked, sipping a glass of wine. Slowly she made a delicious dinner—maybe veal cutlets with mushroom-and-garlic gravy, maybe summer’s asparagus from the bed across the street—then asked me to carry our plates to the table while she lit the candle. Through dinner we talked about our separate days.

Summer afternoons we spent beside Eagle Pond, on a bite-sized beach among frogs, mink, and beaver. Jane lay in the sun, tanning, while I read books in a canvas sling chair. Every now and then, we would dive into the pond. Sometimes, for an early supper, we broiled sausage on a hibachi. After twenty years of our remarkable marriage, living and writing together in double solitude, Jane died of leukemia at forty-seven, on April 22, 1995.

Now it is April 22, 2016, and Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year, at eighty-seven, I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. I was sick and thought I was dying. Every day of her dying, I stayed by her side—a year and a half. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last January I grieved again, this time that she would not sit beside me as I died.

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By Nathan Heller

By Louis Menand

number 59 • Spring 2024

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From Loneliness to Love

Daniel wiser, jr., winter 2023.

In the darkest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, many Americans felt alone. Confined to their homes, people struggled to work remotely or take classes online without the in-person aid of friends, teachers, and colleagues. Religious services were streamed online; weddings were canceled or postponed. The elderly remained captive in their residences or nursing homes, barred from visiting with relatives and hugging grandkids. Hundreds of thousands of older Americans perished from the virus, while tens of thousands of children lost their parents. Funerals were held over Zoom.

Yet even before the pandemic, rates of loneliness in the United States had reached concerning levels. A study from health insurer Cigna found that 61% of Americans were considered lonely in 2019, leading researchers to declare an "epidemic of loneliness." Reports of loneliness remained high in Cigna's latest data from the end of 2021, with 58% of U.S. adults deemed lonely — including more than three-quarters of young adults aged 18 to 24.

The signs of loneliness are all around us: mass shootings by young male loners; an alarming rise in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide among teenagers — especially young girls; millions of able-bodied, working-age men out of the labor force and disconnected from civil society, as political economist Nicholas Eberstadt has detailed in these pages ; and the more than 100,000 deaths from drug overdoses that occurred in 2021, which were heavily concentrated among people who suffer most from social isolation.

We all feel lonely during different seasons of our lives; it's part of the human condition. Christian apologist C. S. Lewis wrote that "[a]s soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves." But today's crisis of loneliness is partly self-imposed. We suffer from what Yuval Levin calls "pathologies of passivity" — a reluctance to live life "in loving commitment to others." Isolated and afraid, we seek refuge in technology, politics, work, individualism, and self-fulfillment. None of these brings us closer to the happiness, connection, and love for which we long.

Happiness cannot be found within ourselves. As philosopher Josef Pieper put it, "our desire for happiness can be satisfied precisely by such affirmation directed toward another, that is, by 'unselfish' love." The answer to humanity's yearnings for "existential fulfillment," in Pieper's words, is to build relationships of love. Such commitments, it should be said, are not easy; love requires sacrifice. It requires recognizing one's need for love, taking risks, being vulnerable, and giving up one's life for the good of the other. But it is the only path out of loneliness.

The English language contains only one word for love, but the ancient Greeks developed terms for at least four different forms, as Lewis recounted in his book The Four Loves . These include friendship ( philia ), affection ( storge ), romance ( eros ), and charity ( agape ). By taking a closer look at these institutions of love — what they are, why they have declined in our society, and how we might help them flourish again — we can come to a better understanding of the remedy for our alienation.

Lewis called friendship the "least instinctive" of the loves. But it is one that helps us not only live, but live well.

Americans' friendships in general have weakened in recent decades. As a May 2021 poll from the American Enterprise Institute's Survey Center on American Life noted, "Americans report having fewer close friendships than they once did, talking to their friends less often, and relying less on their friends for personal support." In 1990, 33% of Americans said they had 10 or more close friends, compared to just 13% in 2021. The percentage of Americans who reported that they have a "best friend" decreased from 75% to 59% over the same period.

One explanation for the contraction of Americans' friendships is that we don't value them very much. From a young age, children are taught to prioritize achievement over relationships — a lesson that carries over into adulthood and the workplace. Research shows that we are most involved with friends in our teens, but shortly thereafter, the time we devote to friendships steadily diminishes. Americans today work longer hours and travel more for their jobs, making it difficult to find the time to form lasting friendships. Meanwhile, those who are less economically independent and live with their parents — a group that includes more than half of young men, as the AEI survey noted — tend to rely on family rather than friends for support.

Technology matters too. It can certainly help us sustain friendships over long distances, but it can also discourage us from forming deep and meaningful connections. Psychology professor Jean Twenge has found that between 2000 and 2015, the number of teenagers who spent time with their friends in person nearly every day decreased by more than 40%. These teens are members of what Twenge calls "iGen" — the post-Millennial generation that has grown up with smartphones from a young age.

Interacting through phones is an artificial form of friendship because friends, by definition, do things together. As Lewis put it in The Four Loves , "we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead." We do not form meaningful friendships by gazing at our friends through screens; it is better to "fight beside [them], read with [them], argue with [them], pray with [them]."

This is especially true for men. While the AEI survey found that friendships also waned for women, the friendship decline among men was steeper. The percentage of men with six or more close friends has dropped by half since 1990, from 55% to 27%. Today, 15% of men report having no close friends at all — up from 3% 30 years ago.

Women tend to rely more than men on their friends for emotional support, and thus they invest more time and effort in friendships. Men, by contrast, participate in activities with their friends but rarely form deeper connections; they tend to turn to their spouse (if they have one) for emotional intimacy. Single men in particular are struggling to form friendships: 21% have no close friends, compared to 12% of married men. Getting married or joining a local religious congregation can provide access to new social networks, but men also marry later in life than women and are less likely to become involved in a religious community, which can deprive them of significant sources of friendship.

Men in particular are not interested in long, intimate meetings face to face. They want to do something together, which can create the opening for more frank conversations. The nature of male friendship explains the success of the Men's Sheds movement, a program that started in Australia in the mid-1990s and has since spread to nine states in America and over 1,000 groups worldwide. Founded principally to help lonely older men, these groups meet at a shed or warehouse to cut firewood, complete woodworking projects for their community, or even just play pool and chat. Men feel more comfortable talking at the sheds, where the motto is "shoulder to shoulder" — reflecting Lewis's "side by side" remark.

Another factor behind the decline in friendship is that in America, friendship is often treated as transactional. In other words, we tend to seek friends who can do something for us.

The ancients had a different view. In his Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle delineated three types of friendships: those focused on utility, those directed toward pleasure, and those that emphasize virtue. Friendships based on utility or pleasure, says Aristotle, have selfish motives — "[h]e who is loved in each case is not loved for himself but only insofar as he is useful or pleasant" — and are "easily dissolved" as needs and passions change. "Complete" or "perfect" friendships of virtue, on the other hand, are more "stable"; they involve "those who wish for the good things for their friends, for their friends' sake." For Aristotle, only complete friendships teach us how to pursue virtue with another. They are also the only ones that make us happy.

True friendship rests on more than utility, pleasure, political alliance, or other superficial distinctions; it aims higher. It elevates souls and instills virtue through devotion to others. "In a circle of true Friends," Lewis wrote, "each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares twopence about any one else's family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history."

True friendship is also rare, in part because building friendship takes time. As Aristotle wrote, "there is...need of the passage of time and the habits formed by living together; for as the adage has it, it is not possible for people to know each other until they have eaten together the proverbial salt." Finding such friends is certainly worth it, however, as one can tell from reading Lewis's description of the "golden sessions" of friendship:

[W]hen four or five of us after a hard day's walking have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life — natural life — has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?

Americans seeking more friendships might begin by thinking about what interests them, and then acting on that interest by finding a group of like-minded enthusiasts. Such groups can be organized around anything from woodworking to poker, fantasy football, or even a television show. In communities like these, people find friends from outside their normal professional and educational networks — friends who can do nothing for them except provide companionship.

Aristotle reminds us that true friendship is rare. Still, we should be open to cultivating these deeper friendships, no matter how uncommon they are or how long they take to develop.

Consulting his Greek lexicon, Lewis defines storge as "'affection, especially of parents to offspring'; but also of offspring to parents."

Affection thus originates in the family — the bedrock of loving communities. For years, the mid-20th-century ideal of the "nuclear family," in which two parents raise two or three children, dominated the narrative. Yet since then, a variety of economic, cultural, and institutional forces — falling marriage rates and a rise in divorces, declining male wages and the entrance of women into the workplace, sinking birth rates and the prevalence of nursing homes for seniors — have eroded America's family structure. Not all of these trends are negative, particularly greater economic opportunity for women. But as a result of these currents, writes David Brooks in an essay for the Atlantic , "Americans today have less family than ever before." He continues:

From 1970 to 2012, the share of households consisting of married couples with kids has been cut in half. In 1960, according to census data, just 13 percent of all households were single-person households. In 2018, that figure was 28 percent. In 1850, 75 percent of Americans older than 65 lived with relatives; by 1990, only 18 percent did.

Everyone involved suffers from the breakdown of family and familial affection. Single mothers bear the burden of being both breadwinner and caregiver, while single men struggle to find a purpose. Children of broken homes suffer psychologically, emotionally, behaviorally, academically, and in future relationships, while older Americans without families lack relatives to care for them. The wealthy have the resources to purchase the benefits that extended families used to offer, such as babysitters, tutors, coaches, and therapists; the poor and working classes are not so lucky.

After decades of familial decline, Americans today are making more of a conscious effort to form closer family connections. For example, the percentage of children living with both birth parents has begun to increase slightly in recent years. What's more, the number of Americans residing in multi-generational households has risen since the 2008 financial crisis: A record 64 million people, or 20% of the U.S. population, lived in such homes in 2016. This group included young adults living with their parents due to economic difficulties and the cost of education, but also seniors being taken care of by their adult children — combating the loneliness of both youth and old age.

There has also been an increase in what some call "forged families" — families made up of members who are not necessarily kin but who choose to live together, to love and to sacrifice for one another. At "co-housing" communities like Temescal Commons in Oakland, California, multi-generational families congregate in shared public spaces, have two communal dinners a week, babysit one another's children, and help each other through hard times. Hundreds of such co-housing communities have sprung up across the country.

Forged families can certainly contribute to the recovery of the American family, but the fact remains that many Americans have been choosing to delay the formation of their own families or forgo them altogether. The number of babies born in the United States ticked up in 2021, but in 2020, it reached its lowest point in more than four decades.

In surveys, Americans report that they want more children: Demographer Lyman Stone tells National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru that "Americans actively intend and plan to have 2 to 2.3 children on average, yet at current rates will have just 1.64." To address this disparity, Stone says we should seek to make a "more livable society for everyone" through measures such as providing cash assistance to families with young children and lowering housing and education costs.

Brooks agrees that "no recovery is likely without some government action." But he also acknowledges that "the most important shifts will be cultural, and driven by individual choices." Indeed, it may take something more radical — a "religious transformation," as Ross Douthat put it in an essay for Plough  — to change our trajectory:

[H]aving a bunch of kids is the form of life most likely to force you toward kenosis, self-emptying, the experience of what it means to live entirely for someone other than yourself....[I]f that's the worldview required to make our society capable of reproducing itself again, then we're waiting not for child tax credits, better work-life balance, or more lenient car-seat laws, but for a radical conversion of our hardened modern hearts.

Of course, before one can experience the affection of children and family, one must love a partner and be loved in turn. Among today's youth, however, the sexes are having trouble pairing off. To gain a deeper understanding of this problem, we can turn to Lewis's discussion of a third form of love: eros .

At the heart of modern eros , or romance, is a paradox: People have more ways than ever to find it, but everyone has less of it. In theory, the invention of dating apps and the consequent widening of social networks should make it easier to find romantic partners, go on dates, get married, and have sex. Yet all of these activities are on the decline.

Atlantic editor Kate Julian wrote in 2018 that Americans were living through a "sex recession." Citing research from Jean Twenge and others, she described the decrease in dating and sexual activity among teens and young adults. Marriages, too, have plunged to a new low: Researchers at AEI, the Institute for Family Studies, and the Wheatley Institution reported that in 2020, the marriage rate "fell to 33 per 1,000 of the unmarried population and the total fertility rate fell to 1.64 per woman — levels never seen before in American history."

Not all of this is bad news: As rates of dating, marriage, and sex have dwindled, so have divorces and teen pregnancies. But we should not be too quick to celebrate this dip in socially negative outcomes — which has partly occurred because Americans are shirking romantic relationships, with all their blessings and burdens, in favor of activities that require less responsibility.

This risk-averse approach to eros begins at a young age. As Julian observes, parents urge teens and 20-somethings to prioritize themselves over relationships, leading their children to "[absorb] the idea that love is secondary to academic and professional success." These young Americans eventually enter adulthood lacking social skills, the confidence to respectfully ask someone out on a date, or even a sense of what romantic love is. This leaves them "ill-equipped for both the miseries and the joys of adulthood." The result is a confused hookup culture — or no hookups at all.

Americans prefer to avoid public discussions of the scourge of pornography, but it is another significant factor behind the decline of dating, marriage, and sex among young adults. A 2016 study found that increased access to broadband internet accounted for at least 7% of the drop in the teen birth rate from 1999 to 2007. Greater diffusion of broadband internet may have helped teenagers — teenage girls in particular — access more information about birth control, and fewer teen pregnancies is certainly a positive outcome. But more internet connectivity also means more people can distribute and view pornographic material, giving them more reasons to avoid social interaction. Consumption of pornography is particularly harmful for men: A March 2022 report from the Survey Center on American Life found "a strong relationship between pornography use and a variety of negative social conditions and circumstances" for men, including insecurity, dissatisfaction with their personal appearance, and loneliness.

The internet doesn't replace in-person relationships, but it does provide enough incentive to eschew the risk that romance entails. As a 24-year-old man told Julian:

The internet has made it so easy to gratify basic social and sexual needs that there's far less incentive to go out into the "meatworld" and chase those things. This isn't to say that the internet can give you more satisfaction than sex or relationships, because it doesn't....[But it can] supply you with just enough satisfaction to placate those imperatives....I think it's healthy to ask yourself: "If I didn't have any of this, would I be going out more? Would I be having sex more?" For a lot of people my age, I think the answer is probably yes.

Going out on dates should be about more than just satisfying our libidos; dating, after all, is the first step toward the pursuit of loving commitment. But in today's world of online dating, romance is harder to come by than one might suspect. A decade after the advent of dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, many users feel a "bad case of burnout," as Catherine Pearson recently put it in the New York Times . Constant scrolling can leave one exhausted and resentful toward others who have had better experiences, but at the same time still hopeful that the perfect match is just a few swipes away.

Dating apps do have benefits. They are an important source of community and connection, and their filtering tools can help users find compatible partners much more easily than certain in-person environments. Online dating has also helped many couples pair off and get married: A study by sociologist Michael Rosenfeld found that 39% of couples met online in 2017, compared to just 20% who met through friends.

The evidence, however, indicates that the online commodification of dating has not always lived up to its matchmaking promise. According to an analysis by an engineer of the dating app Hinge, the top 1% of men who are viewed as the most "desirable" receive more than 16% of the "likes" on the platform, while the top 10% of men receive nearly 60% of the likes. Research suggests that the apps also privilege women who are considered attractive and successful. This dating-app inequality likely results in even more resignation and loneliness, especially for those of lesser means.

For young women who meet partners online or in person, sexual encounters can be deeply unsatisfying — even harrowing. In today's post-sexual-revolution culture, "consent alone is the standard for good and ethical sex" says Washington Post columnist Christine Emba. But even if consented to, dehumanizing sexual acts (often learned from pornography) leave women feeling uncomfortable. As Emba writes:

Many of my contemporaries are discouraged by the romantic landscape, its lack of trust, emotion and commitment, but they also believe that safer options and smoother avenues aren't possible. Instead, they assume that this is how things go and that it would be unreasonable to ask for more — and rude not to go along with whatever has been requested.

As a result of these troubling trends in America's dating culture, young women and men are growing further apart, unsure of how to bridge the divide growing between them. How might we begin to recover a more fruitful vision of eros  — one that encourages both sexes to take on the duties and delights of loving relationships?

One goal should be to provide young Americans with more incentives to put down their screens and engage with human beings in the real world. Political leaders appear to have given up trying to restrict or ban pornography due to its pervasiveness, but anti-porn activism used to be a rare opportunity for agreement among liberal feminists and social conservatives — and there's no reason why it can't be once again. Conservatives should take heart from the successes of the #MeToo movement in rejecting the sexual predation of men and the objectification of women, and seek to form coalitions where possible to limit the spread of sexual material. They might just find some unlikely allies: As New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has noted, "there have been growing signs of young women rebelling against a culture that prizes erotic license over empathy and responsibility."

Indeed, the key to a healthier dating culture lies in reckoning with the costs of sexual liberation. A society saturated with pornography, dating apps, and an anything-goes approach to sexual encounters (as long as they are consensual) leaves us with "a world in which young people are both liberated and miserable," Emba writes. In her book Rethinking Sex , she proposes an alternative sexual ethic based on Saint Thomas Aquinas's definition of love — "willing the good of the other." "Willing the good means caring enough about another person to consider how your actions (and their consequences) might affect them — and then choosing not to act if the outcome would be negative," she writes. This Thomistic ethic "might lead to less casual sex," she concedes, and represents a "much higher standard than consent. But consent was always the floor — it never should have been the ceiling."

Given their ubiquity, dating apps are likely here to stay. We can acknowledge their benefits while also recognizing their limitations and inequalities. An ethic of willing the good of the other applies here too: Individuals with dating profiles are not avatars, but real human beings with hopes, fears, dreams, and dignity, and they deserve to be treated as such. Those looking for a more committed relationship might also try skipping the apps and adopting some older norms of courtship, as opinion writer Michal Leibowitz has suggested:

It might be worth eschewing the relative privacy and autonomy of an app to ask our friends for help, worth refraining from acting immediately on our sexual freedoms in order to give our relationships time to develop, worth losing out on an abundance of potential options in order to narrow the pool to those who might actually want to share a future with us.

Whether young people seek out dates online or in person, they could learn much from the model of courtship depicted by Lewis in The Four Loves . His ideal of eros is much less concerned with sex, pleasure, and the self than our modern understanding of the concept. "Eros," he wrote, "though the king of pleasures, always (at his height) has the air of regarding pleasure as a by-product....For one of the first things Eros does is to obliterate the distinction between giving and receiving."

If we can teach our young men and women to fuse and order their sexual and romantic desires into a self-giving eros , as opposed to a self-serving one, they are more likely to find the human intimacy, companionship, and love they seek.

"God is love," writes Saint John the Apostle in one of the most succinct statements of the Christian faith. Divine love, or charity — what the Greeks called agape  — is gratuitous, limitless, and universal. We exist because of it. As Lewis wrote, "God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them."

This love can feel distant in a lonely, cruel world filled with suffering. But in truth, we experience charity all the time. "All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children," Lewis wrote, "may be sure that at some times — and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit — they are receiving Charity, are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them."

As discussed in the preceding sections, Americans no longer form as many friendships, marriages, or families as they once did; they are therefore less likely to give or receive charity. At the same time, church attendance and religious affiliation have ebbed, meaning fewer people gather to contemplate the divine. In turn, fewer people know that they are loved.

Several studies chart America's religious decline over the decades. About 30% of U.S. adults are religious "nones," meaning they do not identify with a particular religion; this includes 29% of Millennials and 34% of Generation Z. Pew Research Center projects that the religiously unaffiliated could represent a majority of the country by 2070. For the first time in Gallup's eight decades of polling on the issue, fewer than half of Americans say they belong to a religious congregation. Lastly, the percentage of Americans who express a "great deal/quite a lot" of confidence in the "church or organized religion" has dropped significantly in recent decades: from 64% in 1981 to 31% in 2022.

Americans may be leaving institutional churches in droves, but that doesn't mean they're rejecting religion entirely. Tara Isabella Burton has written that increasing numbers of young adults are pursuing "intuitional" forms of spirituality outside the confines of organized religion. In her book Strange Rites , Burton highlights the 72% of religious nones who believe in a higher power of some kind (whether the God of the Bible or another divine force), as well as the 27% of Americans who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious." Researchers at Baylor University have also found that

many individuals who report no religious affiliation or check "none" on surveys (as well as atheists and agnostics) display a wide variety of religious and spiritual practices and beliefs. Many attend religious services, pray, meditate, believe in God or a higher power, have religious experiences, and believe in heaven, hell, and miracles.

The fracturing of organized religion in America has thus yielded a strange kaleidoscope of new faiths. Some find meaning and purpose in "wellness culture" or self-care, including exercise classes like SoulCycle. Others view their career as so central to their identity that it supplants religion. Pagan practices like astrology and witchcraft are also resurgent. These new forms of spirituality are fueled by social media and consumerism, and tend to have a political bent. From social-justice activists to Silicon Valley's transhumanists to "men's rights" groups, what they all share is an anti-institutional outlook that locates the sacred within this world — often in our very selves.

Contemporary American religion is also dominated by the phenomenon of politicized Christianity — churches and believers who link their spiritual mission with right-wing political activism. As churchgoers seek out pastors who confirm their political views rather than proclaim the Gospel, evangelical congregations are splintering along partisan lines. Indeed, an increasing number of people who call themselves "evangelicals" rarely attend religious services at all, embracing the label only for its political connotations. Such blurring of the distinctions between politics and religion has undermined religious witness and sown societal division.

Americans' efforts to satisfy their religious yearnings in all sorts of unorthodox places — politics, work, self-improvement, paganism — have left us lonely and divided. But the hunger for spirituality among Americans, and young people especially, should give us hope. How might they become reconnected with traditional religious communities, with a transcendent sense of the sacred, with the giving and receiving of charity?

First, it should be noted that the history of American religiosity is not a simple story of inevitable decline amid the rise of secularism. The Revolutionary era, as Lyman Stone has written, was a "uniquely secular time." Religious affiliation rose in the 19th century — driven by the flowering of new faiths like Methodism and Mormonism, as well as Catholic and Jewish immigrants who imported their faiths from overseas — and continued to increase until the 1960s. Stone explains:

Americans today are more likely to be part of a religious community than they were in 1800; the change over time can be characterized neither by a gradual decline from a religiously pristine past nor by the onward march of rational thinking. It's better to think of these rises and falls as fundamentally contingent processes driven by a variety of factors at different times and places.

Religious disaffiliation is thus not a permanent trend, meaning it can be reversed. One place to start would be to encourage American parents to think more deeply about how they raise their children. Pollster Daniel Cox notes in a March 2022 report that most Americans who leave their childhood religion do so before the age of 18 — suggesting they never had a strong attachment to it in the first place. Members of Generation Z, the most religiously unaffiliated generation, are less likely than older Americans to have attended religious services, participated in Sunday school, or prayed with their family during meals while growing up. Parents in these families either placed less importance on religious practices or did not give their children a religious upbringing.

Indeed, the key to encouraging more adults to maintain a religious affiliation in which they find community and meaning is to ensure they are more engaged with religion during childhood. Sociologist Christian Smith has proposed a number of ways that parents might hand down their faith to the next generation, including authentically practicing religion themselves, implementing a parenting style that instills discipline but also offers "affective warmth" and support, discussing religion routinely, and making efforts to steer their children toward relationships and activities that help them personalize religion internally rather than making them feel like it has been imposed on them.

Beyond parents, how might churches and religious institutions themselves attract more congregants? Conservatives in recent years have been prone to blame the left's control of media, entertainment, universities, and other elite institutions, as well as "liberalism" more broadly, for the increasing secularism of society. Those claims have merit. Yet organized religion has also been responsible for many of its own failures. Both Catholic and Protestant churches are still attempting to rebuild trust amid scandals of sexual abuse and institutional corruption. Religious bodies writ large, meanwhile, are often deficient in teaching their faiths, cultivating welcoming and diverse communities, and avoiding the temptation of becoming ensnared in politics and our never-ending culture war.

To evangelize more effectively, religious institutions and their members would be wise to ask a basic question: What makes them different from the rest of the world?

Bishop Robert Barron, a Catholic evangelist, has highlighted the three "transcendentals" — truth, goodness, and beauty — as the most distinctive and attractive elements of faith. Understanding and emphasizing each of these elements is key to identifying what makes organized religion a unique institution in society.

Truth, the first transcendent quality of faith, might be viewed as a tough sell in an age that questions whether objective truth or morality really exist. Churches should be confident, however, that their teachings still fulfill the most fundamental desires of the human spirit. As journalist Evan Myers has noted, young converts find that faith helps them navigate the challenges of their own time and place by discovering God and transcendence in a desacralized society, living as "embodied souls" in an age of disembodying technology, and achieving unity during a period of family breakdown and political division.

Religion's radical goodness — the second element — is most visible in its commitment to charitable work and cultivation of neighborly love. Young people devoted to social justice today may not believe that religious organizations do most of the practical work to ensure that everyone is cared for and given their due, but it's true: Religious individuals and institutions play an outsized role in American philanthropic efforts, spearheading everything from adoption agencies and refugee resettlements to addiction recovery and care for the homeless.

The beauty of faith is the final element Barron identifies. Beauty in religion does not simply come from its cathedrals and sacred art; the communities and relationships within churches are also a source of beauty. It is beautiful when people find a spiritual home — a community of fellow believers to bear one another's sufferings and to share their joys. Such a home is where congregants practice the virtue of charity: loving God above all things and their neighbors as themselves.

In his encyclical letter Deus Caritas Est , Pope Benedict XVI described love as "a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God." On this journey, humanity discovers a friend — a Creator who loved us first.

THE JOURNEY TO LOVE

In 16th-century Britain, where the term "loneliness" was first coined, being lonely meant straying from society. But modern loneliness is different. It "has since moved inward," English professor Amelia Worsley writes, "and has become much harder to cure....[I]t's taken up residence inside minds, even the minds of people living in bustling cities....The wilderness is now inside of us."

Lonely Americans today are stuck. The most prominent voices in our culture tell us to find refuge in ourselves — to discover our identity, zealously guard our autonomy, and seek self-enlightenment. But within the wilderness of the self, we become lost. We ache for something more — for transcendence, for love. At the same time, we are fearful of the sacrifices it might require.

The journey from loneliness to love starts with embracing this state of vulnerability and risk, not fleeing from it. As Lewis wrote:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Much is mysterious about the operation of love, but not necessarily where to find it. It is found in virtuous friendships, in the affection of family, in the self-giving eros of married couples, in the charity of religious communities and of the Creator who gently knocks on the doors of our hearts. These loves will sometimes be in tension; as Lewis warned, if we allow our human loves to "become gods," then they will also "become demons" and "destroy us." But there can be a beautiful synergy among them in the ordinary, daily activities of life. As Lewis put it:

A game, a joke, a drink together, idle chat, a walk, the act of Venus — all these can be modes in which we forgive or accept forgiveness, in which we console or are reconciled, in which we "seek not our own." Thus in our very instincts, appetites and recreations, Love has prepared for Himself "a body."

To choose love is to embrace duties and sacrifice, yes. But it also brings communion and joy.

Daniel Wiser, Jr., is associate editor of National Affairs .

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Loneliness Can Change the Brain

Feeling chronically disconnected from others can affect the brain’s structure and function, and it raises the risk for neurodegenerative diseases.

By Dana G. Smith

Everyone feels lonely from time to time — after, say, a move to a new school or city, when a child leaves for college, or following the loss of a spouse.

Some people, though, experience loneliness not just transiently but chronically. It becomes “a personality trait, something that’s pretty sticky,” said Dr. Ellen Lee, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. These individuals seem to have “this persistent emotion that then shapes their behavior.”

Research is mounting that this type of entrenched loneliness is bad for our health and can even change our brains, raising the risk for neurodegenerative diseases. Here’s what experts know about how chronic loneliness affects the brain, and some strategies to address it.

How does loneliness change the brain?

Humans evolved to be social creatures probably because, for our ancient ancestors, being alone could be dangerous and reduce the odds of survival. Experts think loneliness may have emerged as a unique type of stress signal to prompt us to seek companionship.

With chronic loneliness, that stress response gets stuck and becomes disadvantageous — similar to the way in which anxiety can shift a helpful fear response to a maladaptive mental illness.

“Small, transient episodes of loneliness really motivate people to then seek out social connection,” said Anna Finley, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But in chronic episodes of loneliness, that seems to kind of backfire” because people become especially attuned to social threats or signals of exclusion, which can then make it scary or unpleasant for them to interact with others.

Research has shown that lonely people are hypersensitive to negative social words, like “disliked” or “rejected,” and to faces expressing negative emotions. What’s more, they show a blunted response to images of strangers in pleasant social situations, suggesting that even positive encounters may be less rewarding for them. In the brain , chronic loneliness is associated with changes in areas important for social cognition, self-awareness and processing emotions.

How could a subjective feeling have such a profound effect on the brain’s structure and functions? Scientists aren’t sure, but they think that when loneliness triggers the stress response , it also activates the immune system , increasing levels of some inflammatory chemicals. When they’re experienced for long periods of time, stress and inflammation can be detrimental for brain health, damaging neurons and the connections between them.

How does loneliness affect long-term brain health?

For years, scientists have known about a connection between loneliness and Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia . A study published late last year suggested that loneliness is associated with Parkinson’s disease , as well.

“Even low levels of loneliness increase risk, and higher levels are associated with higher risk” for dementia, said Dr. Nancy Donovan, director of the division of geriatric psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Donovan has shown that people who score higher on a measure of loneliness have higher levels of the proteins amyloid and tau — two of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease — in their brains even before they show signs of cognitive decline.

Scientists think that the stress and inflammation caused by loneliness most likely contribute to the onset or acceleration of neurodegenerative diseases in older adults. The toll loneliness takes on the cardiovascular system, increasing blood pressure and heart rate, can also have a detrimental effect on the brain and probably plays a role, as well, Dr. Donovan said.

The more general way in which loneliness affects mental and physical health may also factor into cognitive decline. The feeling is closely linked to depression, another condition that increases the risk for dementia . And people who are lonely are less likely to be physically active and more likely to smoke cigarettes. “All those different things can affect how our brains age,” Dr. Lee said. “I think there are many paths to get from loneliness to cognitive decline.”

Most research on loneliness and neurodegeneration has been conducted on middle-aged and older adults, so experts don’t know if loneliness in childhood or young adulthood carries the same risk. However, Dr. Wendy Qiu, a professor of psychiatry and experimental pharmacology and therapeutics at Boston University School of Medicine, has found that if people in midlife feel lonely only transiently, not chronically, there is no increased risk for dementia.

With transient loneliness, the brain has the “ability to recover,” Dr. Qiu said. But if people “don’t have help to pull them out of the loneliness, and for a long time they feel lonely, it will be toxic for the brain.”

How can you combat chronic loneliness?

One of the most common recommendations is a little obvious: Try to make new friends . Whether that’s through art classes, sports teams, support groups or volunteer opportunities, the goal is to put yourself in places where people come together.

These types of engineered social situations have mixed results. Dr. Lee said they tend to work best if there is a “shared identity” among the people involved, like groups specifically for widows or for people with diabetes, so they have something to connect over.

The other side of the equation is addressing a person’s attitudes and thought patterns about social interactions through cognitive behavioral therapy. These approaches tend to be a little more effective, Dr. Lee said, because they “get to the root” of the problem, exploring what makes it hard for a person to interact with others.

The strategies may sound simple, but they’re easier said than done. “It’s a thorny problem,” Dr. Finley said. “Otherwise, I don’t think we would have the report from the Surgeon General saying we need to figure this out.”

Dana G. Smith is a Times reporter covering personal health, particularly aging and brain health. More about Dana G. Smith

Loneliness & Isolation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Essay

Introduction, alienation in shelley’s novel, responsibility in frankenstein, works cited.

The main character of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley was sure regarding his uniqueness: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me” (42). The reason is that Viktor Frankenstein was a young scientist obsessed with the idea of creating a unique living creature by referring to science and alchemy.

Still, he cannot love this monstrous human being, and this fact leads to disastrous consequences (Cengage Learning 7; Seal 84-86). This novel represents the key characteristics of Romanticism through accentuating isolation from society, the focus on exploring nature, and the freedom of desires and feelings (Chase 165-166; Varner 137-138). Viktor, a Romantic character, chooses alienation as his path in the world that leads him to misery, and he develops as an irresponsible scientist who does not realize his duty.

In Frankenstein, alienation is discussed through the perspective of sorrow and despair for the main characters. Although Viktor was brought up by loving parents, he always wanted to isolate himself from other people to focus on science (Gottlieb 127-129). Viktor states: “I must absent myself from all I loved while thus employed” (Shelley 117).

These words accentuate Viktor’s focus on himself and his desires that later determine his path, leading to more obsession with science and creating a new living being, as well as to more alienation while being locked in his laboratory and conducting experiments. Viktor’s alienation further leads him to despair because of creating the monster, but Frankenstein’s creature also suffers from isolation because he cannot be opened to society and accepted by it (Nesvet 348).

His first experience of interacting with people is described the following way: “The whole village was roused; some fled, some attacked me” (Shelley 83). The creature that wants to be loved faces the cruelty of the world that makes him become even more alienated and concentrated on revenge.

In addition to making him and his creature be isolated, Viktor does not accept the idea of duty and responsibility for his actions because of his inability to understand what it means to be responsible for the creation. Being focused on a scientific aspect of creating, Viktor ignores his duty as a creator and a “father” (Bloom 22; Halpern et al. 50; Nair 78). As a result, the creature is forced to ask: “How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind” (Shelley 78). In this context, Viktor understands his duty only after his creature’s words.

However, he still does not accept his responsibility as a “father” because he cannot love his “child.” Thus, the creature states, “Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us” (Shelley 78). From this perspective, it is possible to note that Viktor is unable to take responsibility for his actions and perform his duties as both a scientist and a creator despite his ambition.

Alienation and the lack of responsibility regarding the scientist’s actions for society can be viewed as partially related to the modern world. On the one hand, the isolation of a scientist today cannot lead him to impressive results, but this characteristic is typical of Romanticism. On the other hand, modern scientists change the world, and they need to be responsible for their actions. Therefore, the ideas stated by Shelley in the novel should be reconsidered from the perspective of the modern world.

Bloom, Harold. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Infobase Learning, 2013.

Cengage Learning. A Study Guide for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. Gale/Cengage Learning, 2015.

Chase, Cynthia. Romanticism. Routledge, 2014.

Gottlieb, Evan, editor. Global Romanticism: Origins, Orientations, and Engagements, 1760–1820. Bucknell University Press, 2014.

Halpern, Megan K., et al. “Stitching Together Creativity and Responsibility: Interpreting Frankenstein across Disciplines.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, vol. 36, no. 1, 2016, pp. 49-57.

Nair, Lekshmi R. “Playing God: Robin Cook’s ‘Mutation’ as a Reworking of the Frankenstein Theme of the Creator Pitted against the Creation.” Writers Editors Critics, vol. 6, no. 2, 2016, pp. 77-82.

Nesvet, Rebecca. “Review: Frankenstein: Text and Mythos.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2018, pp. 347-351.

Seal, Jon. GCSE English Literature for AQA Frankenstein Student Book. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Diversion Books, 2015.

Varner, Paul. Historical Dictionary of Romanticism in Literature. Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

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IvyPanda. (2020, March 11). Loneliness & Isolation in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. https://ivypanda.com/essays/loneliness-isolation-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/

"Loneliness & Isolation in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." IvyPanda , 11 Mar. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/loneliness-isolation-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Loneliness & Isolation in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein'. 11 March.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Loneliness & Isolation in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." March 11, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/loneliness-isolation-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/.

1. IvyPanda . "Loneliness & Isolation in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." March 11, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/loneliness-isolation-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Loneliness & Isolation in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." March 11, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/loneliness-isolation-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein/.

• Ethics as a Theme in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Critical Analysis
• "Pictures at an Exhibition" by Modest Mussorgsky
• Frankenstein: The Theme of Birth
• Frankenstein & the Context of Enlightenment
• Frankenstein: Novel & Movie Comparison
• Homosexuality in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Responsibility as a Theme in Frankenstein

How I Learned to Love My Granddaughter Without Fear

T he phone call from my daughter in North Carolina came at six o’clock in the morning, unusually early for her. “I’m pregnant,” Maggie announced, her voice bubbling with delight.

From 1,600 miles away I put down my mug of smoky dark-roast coffee and gave a shout. Her news was the last thing I would have expected as I sat in my rented house in Albuquerque, watching roadrunners skitter over the xeriscaping in the front yard, stabbing at the dried mealworms I’d just put out for them. 

Maggie and her husband, Jimmy, together for 11 years and married for eight, had been on the fence about having children. Four years into their marriage, they decided to try for a baby. But after years passed, they both assumed and then accepted it wasn’t going to happen.

Read More: What My Family Taught Me About Loneliness

I’d looked on with a mixture of curiosity and a small bit of envy as friends welcomed one grandchild after another. My oldest son, Liam, in his early 40s, was at the time unattached. I’d resigned myself to the possibility of never knowing that particular brand of joy, although I also couldn’t imagine what it would be like to actually be someone’s grandmother.

And yet, here I was, trying to wrap my head around the idea. I walked through the house, my brindle Boxer dogging my footsteps as I did a quick inventory of room after room. In the next couple of days, I began packing up my belongings and arranging for housing with dear friends back home. 

During one of our phone calls, my daughter had asked, “What do you want your grandmother name to be?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” I confessed. 

Meanwhile, I worked to tamp down a rising anxiety. My second child, Cooper, had been born 40 years ago with a heart defect. When he was 4 days old, he had closed-heart surgery to repair a coarctation of the aorta. What we didn’t know — what no one could have known then, with limited ability to see inside an infant’s heart — was there were other, more deadly defects hidden within, two holes in the wall separating the atria. When he was 6 weeks old, he died quietly at home in my arms as I held and rocked him, unaware he was slipping away from me.

Read More: I Got Divorced. But My Family Is Still Whole

When Cooper died, Liam was 2 1/2. To say I became an overly anxious mother would be an understatement. I monitored every bump and bruise, each sniffle and fever. Nightmares of childhood cancer and other life-threatening illnesses pushed their way into everyday activities. After all, I now knew that the worst was possible. 

Then I became pregnant again. After Maggie was born, I slept with her on my stomach most nights, and when she finally transitioned to a crib, I’d go into her room in the morning, half-expecting to find she’d died.

The grip on my heart gradually released, though, as my healthy children grew into their wonderful selves with nothing more than the usual list of childhood maladies and injuries. And now here was my baby having a baby. My emotions roiled with wonder and excitement, but all of it was overshadowed by a deep, resonating dread.

My daughter sent me the first ultrasound photos of “Little Bean,” a nickname they’d given in the earliest days when a pregnancy app indicated the developing clump of cells was the size of a vanilla bean.

I peered at the mottled, blurry image of my grandchild at 8 weeks gestation. “What am I seeing?” I asked.

“Here,” she texted and sent a second photo, this one with a red arrow pointing to a small darkish blob with a hazy dot in it like a dandelion tuft. “The brighter spot is the heart,” she wrote.

I peered at the picture, trying to imagine the fuzzy image as a beating heart. Something in me broke open, then just as quickly slammed shut. 

Some years before, during my tenure at the domestic-violence and rape crisis agency, a co-worker had asked if I’d mind holding her newborn while she attended a short meeting. I happily took her baby boy in my arms, cooing and grinning at him, and brought him into my office. Sinking into the chair, the first thing I did was check to make sure he was breathing, as easily as one might check to make sure his socks were still on. Hot tears of sorrow and anger spilled down my cheeks at my automatic reaction to holding an infant. 

This is how trauma lives in the body, tentacled through our sense memory. So much of the terrible night my son died remains a blur. What I have recalled all too well is the cold stillness, the weight of his tiny form, and the shock of him being so utterly gone.

Little Bean turned out to be a girl and with the given name June. All ultrasounds and other tests revealed her to be developing as she should. But I couldn’t shake the sense of dread.

“So much could go wrong,” I worried aloud to a friend.

“And so much could go right,” was her loving response.

Read More: We Didn't Have Much Money. My Daughter Still Deserved Joy

Maggie was induced early one morning, and labor progressed slowly over the course of the day. At 9:37 that night I witnessed the moment my daughter pushed her baby girl into the world, a 7 ½-lb. miracle with downy dark hair and an adorable button nose. My son-in-law said I should do the honors — the obstetrician handed me the scissors, and I cut the cord, severing June from the warm, liquid world of her mother’s womb, and officially welcoming her Earthside.

But after her first breath, the newborn cry, that plaintive, sharp wail all parents wait for, didn’t come. The nurses took June from my daughter’s arms and continued to rub and stimulate her as she blinked in the glare of the bright room, but her blood oxygen levels remained concerningly low.

“We’re going to take her to the nursery,” one of the nurses said. My son-in-law followed. My daughter, unable to leave the bed because of the epidural, looked at me from across the room.

A chest X-ray confirmed a suspected pneumothorax, a condition in which air leaks into the space between the lung and the chest. Because we live in a small town with a small hospital, June would need to be transported to an NICU an hour and a half away. Watching my daughter and son-in-law say a tearful goodbye to their newborn was one of the most wrenching scenes I’ve ever witnessed. The next morning my daughter was discharged, and I drove her to see her baby girl at the hospital where my son-in-law already was.

The neonatal specialist assured them that the small hole in her lung would likely heal on its own, and three days later they brought June home. “Just forget this happened,” the doctor said. All signs pointed to complete health.

But I was in a tailspin that I couldn’t seem to pull out of. 

Those first weeks I’d come to their house on Friday, taking charge of June at midnight after my daughter nursed her, and giving her the 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. bottles, watching her mouth as she suckled, stroking her soft skin. Did I feel like her grandmother? I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel. Friends had described a dizzying happiness at being “in the best club ever.”

What I felt too much of was terror, deathly afraid of the small bundle I held, continually monitoring her rosebud lips for signs of a bluish tint, watching to make sure her chest was rising and falling, panicking when it seemed too long between breaths. The urge to tumble helplessly in love with my granddaughter was in full battle with the freshly resurfaced memories of the night my son died. I kept my fears to myself, not wanting to foist my unease on my already traumatized daughter and son-in-law, who were struggling to return to the normalcy of welcoming this new baby into their lives after her scary start. 

One afternoon, talking on the phone with a friend while driving in town, I heard myself say, “The doctors assured them the hole in her heart would heal.” There was a stunned silence as I realized what I’d said. “I mean her lung,” I said and hung up, pulling into a grocery-store parking lot where I sat with my face in my hands, weeping. In that moment, I knew I had a choice — release the dark grief or risk missing one of the most light-filled times of my life. 

“That was that baby,” I told myself. “This baby doesn’t have any holes in her heart. This baby is fine.” I offered myself a mantra to try. “That was then, this is now.” Whenever the old trepidation would rise, I’d repeat the words, reminding myself of the distance in years and reality between the death of my son and the life of this sweet, healthy baby girl. Gradually, my heart unwound.

One afternoon, while my daughter napped in the next room, I snuggled little June close and rocked her. I leaned down to listen to the sound of her quiet breathing, this time not from fear but wonder. She looked up at me with deep blue eyes rimmed with dark lashes and stared as if memorizing my face. Unable to look away, I let her hold me in the power of her wide-open gaze.

“The brighter spot is the heart,” my daughter had written to me all those months ago, and now baby June and I sat basking in the light of a love big enough to hold it all — yesterday’s grief, today’s joy, and all the beautiful and uncertain tomorrows. 

Outside, a soft breeze blew, and a shard of sunlight shot through the trees. I kissed my granddaughter’s forehead and began to sing.

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Book Review: Memoirist Lilly Dancyger’s penetrating essays explore the power of female friendships

This cover image released by Dial Press shows “First Love” by Lilly Dancyger. (Dial Press via AP)

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Who means more to you — your friends or your lovers? In a vivid, thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays, Lilly Dancyger explores the powerful role that female friendships played in her chaotic upbringing marked by her parents’ heroin use and her father’s untimely death when she was only 12.

“First Love: Essays on Friendship” begins with a beautiful paean to her cousin Sabina, who was raped and murdered at age 20 on her way home from a club. As little kids, their older relatives used to call them Snow White and Rose Red after the Grimm’s fairy tale, “two sisters who are not rivals or foils, but simply love each other.”

That simple, uncomplicated love would become the template for a series of subsequent relationships with girls and women that helped her survive her self-destructive adolescence and provided unconditional support as she scrambled to create a new identity as a “hypercompetent” writer, teacher and editor. “It’s true that I’ve never been satisfied with friendships that stay on the surface. That my friends are my family, my truest beloveds, each relationship a world of its own,” she writes in the title essay “First Love.”

The collection stands out not just for its elegant, unadorned writing but also for the way she effortlessly pivots between personal history and spot-on cultural criticism that both comments on and critiques the way that girls and women have been portrayed — and have portrayed themselves — in the media, including on online platforms like Tumblr and Instagram.

For instance, she examines the 1994 Peter Jackson film, “Heavenly Creatures,” based on the true story of two teenage girls who bludgeoned to death one of their mothers. And in the essay “Sad Girls,” about the suicide of a close friend, she analyzes the allure of self-destructive figures like Sylvia Plath and Janis Joplin to a certain type of teen, including herself, who wallows in sadness and wants to make sure “the world knew we were in pain.”

In the last essay, “On Murder Memoirs,” Dancyger considers the runaway popularity of true crime stories as she tries to explain her decision not to attend the trial of the man charged with killing her cousin — even though she was trained as a journalist and wrote a well-regarded book about her late father that relied on investigative reporting. “When I finally sat down to write about Sabina, the story that came out was not about murder at all,” she says. “It was a love story.”

Readers can be thankful that it did.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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A Love Letter To LA, From A Brit Who Never Thought She’d Fit In

The miracle of backyard oranges

Ditching the stereotype, collective marveling, l.a. lessons.

T hat first smell of the air — it is sweeter out here, I swear. The feel of sand in my toes. My first farmers market with coconut tortillas and jackfruit carnitas.

From the time we landed, I was hooked.

I’d grown up in London. I’d been happily living on the East Coast for 10 years. The L.A. I thought I knew was for other people, not me. But the minute we arrived it felt like I’d stumbled on paradise.

Gone baby, gone. It’s remained this way ever since. A decade in, I still look up as I cross the street and wonder — wait, who put those palm trees there? And I clutch myself with glee.

That first week is still vivid. Each morning I’d get up, pad outside in my bare feet and stand there, face turned up to the sun, marveling that such a life existed.

No wonder Californians seemed so damn happy and healthy all the time! The young me back in damp, cold London could only have dreamed of such things (and did, enviously watching Baywatch and 90210 ).

We’d moved into a house that had an orange tree in the yard — a miracle. In England, oranges strictly arrived in supermarkets, slightly sullen from their arduous journey from Florida.

Back home, they were reserved for unimaginative fruit salads or quartered for mid-game refreshment at cricket matches. Here, the lushness, the proliferation, the goddamn extravagance of the fruit — I mean, you could just reach out and have one for breakfast!

Which brings me to food. Such a variety! Yes, I’d lived in New York with its plethora of choices, but somehow here there was a glee about the diversity, a pride in all the different cultures rubbing up against each other.

Japanese and Korean and Ethiopian and Persian, as well as more tacos than you could possibly try in one lifetime. And the pushing of food frontiers, the willingness to blend, the “Hey, why not mix Mexican and Korean food?” When I first saw a Kogi food truck I stood in disbelief …and reverence.

Over the years I’ve learned to let go of my preconceptions. On the East Coast I grabbed my husband and said, “I can’t move to Los Angeles! All the women are so gorgeous! I’ll just never fit in. They’ve all had work done, and their teeth are so perfect!” (Actually this is true — I’m still embarrassed by my British teeth and somehow Angeleno teeth gleam whiter in the sunshine).

Then we moved to the Westside and suddenly I’m awash in yogis in leggings and no makeup, wafting through the farmers market holding a perfectly situated bunch of sunflowers, with little thought to fashion or dressing up.

How can you reduce 10 million people to a stereotype? You can’t.

In fact dressing up seemed to consist of stepping out of Birkenstocks and putting on some Uggs. (My favorite look remains a fleece and flip flops. What would be an unimaginable combo in, say, New York or London just seems to make perfect sense here).

When I did finally make it to Beverly Hills, I found the L.A. of my imagination. Walking behind women in Chanel suits, men in cashmere sweaters and dogs in sequined collars and realizing … aha ... It’s all about the neighborhoods. There are so many. And each is different.

Downtown with its lofts and the Eastside with its hipster enclaves and Pasadena pressed up against the mountains and up through the 405 to a vast landscape of valley-ness laid out below, and out east to the desert … what an array of different experiences. I had no idea. How can you reduce 10 million people to a stereotype? You can’t.

There are some ways, though, that Angelenos who grew up here do betray themselves. Early on I was in Starbucks when the barista paused mid-pour. “Wow,” he said, staring through the big glass windows to the street. “Is that what I think it is?” Customers around me right and left turned to look, and each, too, became awestruck at the sight. What was it?

Rain was falling from the sky.

(As a child of London, I spent so much time in the rain that my shoes constantly squelched and my umbrella became surgically attached to my hand.)

Still, to be fair, my family had arrived during a period of drought. I, too, had grown unfamiliar with the appearance of rain. But even now, when we’ve had plenty of rain-filled winters, it seems to catch people off guard. I’ve become so assimilated that one day I actually thought, “Wait, what is that water falling from the sky?” and looked around to see if any sprinklers had gone rogue.

What else have I absorbed? That a 6 p.m. dinner reservation is perfectly acceptable. That going to sleep at 10 p.m. on New Year’s Eve is fine. That it’s not a big deal to stay inside for three days straight because hey, the sun is going to come out tomorrow anyway.

That there are seasons here, and that during fall, the colors of the changing leaves on the trees can be as beautiful as Vermont, and that during winter it can feel damn cold because homes have no insulation.

That people really do surf before work, sun-silhouetted palm trees will make an appearance most nights, the impossibly good-looking waiter is likely an actor and that if you have to go somewhere five blocks away, driving is totally OK.

That there will always be a food truck wherever you go, there are geckos hanging out in the sun outside your house, and yes, the produce really does taste much better here — especially strawberries, even though there are two painful weeks each year when they’re just not available at farmers markets.

That there will always be someone grilling at the park, that skateboards are a legit form of transportation, and vegan soul food is not an oxymoron. And ultimately, that the sun makes you happy, the mountains are often snow-capped, and the wide horizon of the Pacific gives you room to dream.

Gillings School’s 84th commencement celebrates Class of 2024

May 14, 2024

“Love is the world’s oldest medicine. It is what I wish for you all more than anything else in the world. Your ability to give and receive love – that is your greatest gift and your greatest power.”

Dean Nancy Messonnier and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy pose with students and faculty at the Gillings School’s 2024 Spring Commencement.

United States Surgeon General and Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy, MD, MBA , joined the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health in celebrating 676 graduating students of the Class of 2024, nearly 650 of whom attended the Dean E. Smith Center for the Gillings School’s 84 th commencement on Saturday, May 11.

The Surgeon General’s commencement speech commended the newest group of Carolina public health alumni, many of whom walked the graduation stage for the first time after experiencing a remote high school graduation during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

“I’m grateful that you saw it through because the truth is that you are needed in the world now more than ever,” Dr. Murthy said in his speech. “There are major forces that you read out in the papers every day that are pulling public health in different directions.”

Chief among the forces that Murthy addressed was the widespread mental health crisis. In his tenure as Surgeon General, he has issued advisories on the youth mental health crisis and social media’s impact on youth mental health, the epidemic of loneliness and isolation, and burnout in the health worker community.

Instagram post from @u.s.surgeongeneral: Congratulations to @uncpublichealth for all you’ve accomplished on your way to today’s commencement and thank you for inviting me to celebrate with you! I feel hopeful knowing this intelligent and compassionate group will be using their talents to protect our nation’s health.

Dr. Murthy has also issued a Surgeon General’s Framework on mental health in the workplace, and he is the first Surgeon General to host a podcast —  House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy  — in which he invites guests and listeners to explore how we can all build more connected and meaningful lives.

In his commencement speech on Saturday, Dr. Murthy connected the importance of building meaningful relationships in public health to stories from his life. Some were deeply personal or painful, but all of them carried lessons on the power of love and personal connection to bring healing. One example of that connection is the Okinawan tradition of Moai (模合), in which small social groups commit to providing support for one another through all of life’s ups and downs, and which Dr. Murthy said changed his life and helped him navigate critical decisions.

He closed his speech by encouraging the audience to meditate and draw strength from the love of people who have supported them on their journeys. “Know that you are deserving of this love, and know that love is always there for you whether they are with you or not, because it resides in your heart.”

Drs. Vivek Murthy and Nancy Messonnier

Dean Nancy Messonnier, MD , echoed the importance of support and unity in public health in her own comments to the graduates.

“Remember, public health is a team sport,” she said. “It requires collaboration, empathy and a willingness to listen to diverse perspectives. Our world is a tapestry of cultures, beliefs and experiences, and it is through understanding and unity that we ourselves help create and foster that we can address the most pressing health issues.”

After walking across the stage to thunderous applause, graduates joined a network of more than 22,000 Gillings School alumni who live and work in all 100 North Carolina counties, all 50 states in the U.S. and more than 100 countries around the world.

Find photos from the event , read the Commencement program  (PDF) and watch a recording of the live-streamed ceremony .

Contact the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at [email protected] .

Use this form to submit news, events and announcements to be shared via our newsletter and digital screens.

View and download the visual elements associated with the Gillings School.

For the use of our faculty, staff and students, the School offers the following PowerPoint template, which can be modified as needed.

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This form enables Gillings School representatives to submit requests for website edits.

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The monsters that made me: Growing up disabled, all of my heroes were villains

Horror movies challenged my relationship with myself

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Every monster needs an origin story. Here’s mine.

I was born with a rare condition — radioulnar synostosis — which restricts the movement of my forearms. I am unable to turn my hands over palms up, the way you might accept loose change or splash water on your face or land an uppercut. I have lived with this condition all my life, and yet it wasn’t until my late 20s that I started referring to myself as “disabled.”

This word carries immense baggage, and many of us within the wide spectrum of disability tend to minimize our experiences or, as in my case, suffer from feelings of impostor syndrome. Could be worse , I often tell myself. You don’t deserve to call yourself disabled .

Coming to terms with my disability took a long time, to not only accept my identity, but also to discard the lingering shame and stigma that coincide with being disabled. A major part of this reconciliation was thanks to an unlikely source of solace — horror films.

I’ve been a horror obsessive as long as I can remember, but I only recently figured out how to articulate why the genre resonates so strongly with me. On-screen depictions of deformed, disfigured killers and creatures serve as reflections of my own otherness. The phantasmagoric realm of horror, though dark and violent, provides an outlet for me to express the discomfort, frustration, and anxiety surrounding my corporeal limitations.

From a young age, I subconsciously related to monsters, madmen, and every combination thereof. Many even taught me to frame disability in a positive fashion. The archetypal antagonists from the golden age of horror cinema — the Wolfman, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster — all underwent a transformation to be imbued with extraordinary, otherworldly gifts. Their differences were a source of power, inverting the traditional view of disability as a hindrance, a burden.

My attraction to horror began innocently enough. There were clamshell VHSes galore at my babysitter’s house, including all the Disney classics, many of which were plenty horrific, like the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in Fantasia . I carefully studied the imposing figure of Chernabog, the winged, devil-horned demon summoning lost souls from the underworld. To me, he seemed benevolent rather than evil, a counterpoint to the sparkling sunrise that banishes him back to the shadows, an essential element of natural balance.

Disney’s version of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” oddly lumped as a double feature with The Wind in the Willows , presented another kindred spirit — the Headless Horseman. Decked in black and adorned with a blood-red cape, clutching a saber in one hand and a flaming jack-o’-lantern in the other, the Headless Horseman, for me, came to represent the extreme limits of human endurance. A cannonball takes the ill-fated soldier’s head and still his body lingers, perseveres.

Another seminal gateway wasn’t even a horror film. On its surface, The Wizard of Oz is a saccharine Technicolor musical romp, but the dream world its characters inhabit is full of menace — maniacal flying monkeys, spear-wielding Winkie guards, and my favorite, the iconic Wicked Witch of the West. Despite her green flesh and pointy chin, I found her beautiful, alluring, and endlessly more compelling than the picture-perfect Glinda. Astride her broomstick, flinging fireballs, stalking Dorothy and her companions through Oz, the Wicked Witch became the reason I watched an old tape of The Wizard of Oz so many times that the reel snapped.

As she pointed toward the camera with her spindly fingers and sharp nails, I imagined the Wicked Witch was singling me out, inviting me into her world. There, everyone was different, from the Munchkins, notably played by a cast of dwarf actors, to the main trio of the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion, who were all “defective” in their own ways, physically and mentally handicapped by the absence of some critical inner faculty. Why Dorothy was so desperate to return to the bleak, monochromatic reality of Depression-era Kansas was beyond me. I would have much preferred to stay in Oz.

By the time I finished elementary school, my tastes sharpened, and I craved harder, more acidic fare. My appetite had been steadily whet by a diet of gory comic books and yellowed Stephen King paperbacks. Cable television in the ’90s was also rife with kindertrauma-inducing spectacle. I was allowed to watch Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Goosebumps , since both were on kid-friendly channels. When left unsupervised, which was often as the child of a single mom who had to work multiple gigs, I could sneak episodes of Tales from the Crypt or X-Files . I knew there was a world of adult horror, and I wanted nothing more than to breach this forbidden zone.

Where to watch the movies mentioned in this piece

• Fantasia : Disney Plus
• Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow : Disney Plus , as a part of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad 
• The Wizard of Oz : Max
• The Evil Dead : For digital rental or purchase on Amazon and Vudu
• The Brood : Max , Criterion Channel
• Castle Freak : Shudder, AMC Plus, and for free with ads on Tubi

I caught glimpses of it at the video rental store, where I was compulsively drawn to the horror section. I scanned the shelves, memorizing titles for future reference, studying the macabre cover art, scrutinizing the stills of sliced throats, hacked limbs, and oozing ectoplasm. Although I wasn’t allowed to take home anything rated R, I soon found loopholes that granted me access to films I was desperate to ingest.

Staying over at a friend’s house, we would wait until the grown-ups were asleep, then flip to HBO (a luxury we could not afford at my own home). It was there I first watched The Evil Dead , a personal landmark of my initiation into splatter flicks. My friend and I insisted we weren’t scared, as we cowered in our sleeping bags, squealing with perverse delight when the first possessed teenager stabbed her friend in the ankle with a pencil. We chattered throughout the movie to compensate for our obvious nerves, but by the time Ash Williams descended into the cellar searching for shotgun shells with a ravenous Deadite on the loose, the two of us had gone mute with fear.

Ash, armed with his trademark chainsaw, was clearly the hero (and himself destined to become an amputee in the sequel), but it was the Deadites who entranced me. When the demons seized control, the bodily degradation took effect. First, the teenagers’ eyes went white, and before long, their flesh wrinkled, turned sallow, decayed, bile and pus dripping from spontaneous lacerations. I had never witnessed anything so utterly bloodsoaked, resplendent in viscera, a film that relished in the ways a body can be corrupted.

Bodies are frightfully fragile, and we are all one small step away from an accident or illness that can permanently debilitate. Few filmmakers understand the body’s capacity for biological horror more than David Cronenberg , whose oeuvre introduced me to a world where disability is infused with latent eroticism and regenerative potential.

In high school, I got a job at the same video rental store I prowled as a kid. Now I had the freedom to take home whatever I pleased. The older guys who managed the shop would recommend titles to test my limits — Salò , Cannibal Holocaust , Irreversible . Cocksure teenager that I was, enduring “the most fucked up movie ever made” became my solemn quest. But disturbing or violent as they may be, few video nasties were capable of truly scaring me. Knowing I was a devotee of both horror and sci-fi, one of the clerks suggested I check out Cronenberg, so I took a chance on The Brood .

I was deeply unsettled by the story of an estranged couple fighting over custody of their daughter. What frighted me wasn’t the deformed, dwarflike progeny — birthed by the ex-wife and telekinetically driven to brutally murder anyone who crossed her. The broodlings were devoted to their mother, as was I, and would do anything to protect her. What shook me was Cronenberg’s metaphorical treatment of divorce, especially after watching my own parents’ messy split. The rupturing of a family resulting in physiological consequences illustrated the link between body and mind, a relationship of which I was all too aware, having dealt with depression as long as I could remember.

For many people with disabilities, physical and mental anguish are synonymous, feeding into one another. Feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and alienation frequently accompany disability. More often than not, disability is chronic, permanent, and insoluble. It can be mitigated, people can adapt, but full-blown cures are elusive. My disability is one such case. I may have accepted this reality, come to terms with my fate, but the journey has not been without frustration, anger, and despair — the monster’s currency.

This explains in part why monsters act as they do. Pain begets pain. Violence begets violence. Fear begets fear. As such, the monster embodies the way we perpetuate trauma, wherein the victim becomes the aggressor. This is why we sympathize with Frankenstein’s monster or the Wolfman, because we understand that they were not born to be monsters — they were made that way by forces beyond their control.

Which is precisely why I cannot totally fault my all-time favorite Lovecraftian abomination, the titular Castle Freak from Stuart Gordon’s low-budget opus, another film I chanced upon at the video rental store. The freak is imprisoned from childhood by his deranged mother, routinely tortured until his face and body are a tapestry of grotesque wounds and scars. He escapes the confines of his dungeon and spies on the American family who has moved into his home, taking a special liking to the couple’s blind daughter.

While the freak wastes no time eviscerating unlucky victims, the lecherous, alcoholic father, played by the incomparable Jeffrey Combs, is no less redeemable. The freak’s feral nature is the byproduct of a lifetime’s abuse. The father, by contrast, has no excuse. Watching this film for the first time, I empathized with the freak and thought of my innate freakishness and the times I’ve lashed out or been cruel. What was my excuse?

Even as the maimed, distorted bodies of creatures like the Castle Freak or the Brood or the Deadites or the Wicked Witch mirrored real-world disabilities and offered me an escape, a safe environment where it was appropriate to root for the villain, I realized that I didn’t want to hurt people, to injure others as I’d been, whether physically or mentally. And more than anything, I was determined not to use my disability as a scapegoat, to behave like a monster and blame it on the way I was born.

Strange as it sounds, I learned to take ownership of my mistakes and embrace my faults through horror films, to forgo hiding behind a mask like the boogeymen in slasher movies. Horror demands that we not avert our gaze from “abnormal” bodies. It challenges our prejudices, our preconceptions. These are films that celebrate disfigurement and deformity instead of shunning it. I reject the notion that horror merely co-opts disability as a cheap scare tactic. When I watch a scary movie, I do not see exploitation — I see exaltation, the disabled not as demonic but as divine.

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Feeling Lonely? Discover 18 Ways to Overcome Loneliness

Are you connected but still lonely use these strategies to overcome loneliness..

Posted February 18, 2019 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

• Understanding Loneliness
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The great irony is that as we become increasingly "connected"—on social media , video calling, and messaging—we simultaneously feel increasingly lonely. And even though we may use technology to feel more connected, it may be exactly what’s leading us to feel lonely.

After spending the last year researching and writing my new book, Outsmart Your Smartphone: Conscious Tech Habits for Finding Happiness, Balance, and Connection IRL , I've learned that most of us feel disconnected. What about you? Are you feeling socially connected? (Take this well-being quiz to see how you're feeling.) If not, try some of these 18 strategies to stop feeling lonely.

1. Practice self-kindness. In difficult moments, it's essential to practice self-kindness. Blaming ourselves when we feel lonely is not helpful. So limit your hurtful self-talk , take care of yourself , and just generally give yourself a break. Perhaps a walk in nature or a day at the spa may be helpful for getting yourself into a self-kindness mood.

2. Capitalize on the present moment. When you feel good about something, share it with others right away, and I don't mean "share" by posting on your social media. You could share by calling or texting a friend. Or share with the people you work with. Keep in mind that the positive things that you can share don’t have to be big. You could simply have woken up on the right side of the bed and think, “Hey, I’m feeling great today.” By sharing these moments, you create small moments of savoring and connection with others that can help you overcome loneliness .

3. Connect in real life. Connecting in real life may not be as easy as it once was. We often default to using our smartphones —it's easier, and now it's culturally accepted. But we can decrease our loneliness if we build stronger in-person connections. We do this by looking people in the eyes, listening, being mindful , and choosing not be distracted by our phones or other technologies.

4. Rethink how you spend your spare time. When we feel lonely, sometimes we just want to retreat into a corner and hide. Other times, our endless to-do list may leave us too exhausted to go out and be social. But opting to stay alone every night with our phones, watching Netflix, or playing on Facebook can really get us stuck in loneliness. We've created a life for ourselves that deprives of us of meaningful social connection, and the only way to get out of it is to start living differently.

If we instead use our loneliness to motivate us to reach out to people, then we can strengthen our relationships. By opting to cope with our loneliness by seeking out social support, we create more social moments with the people in our lives who matter to us, which usually reduces our loneliness.

5. Do more things with people. Engaging in face-to-face social interactions tends to improve our mood and reduce depression . Activities that involve other people—such as attending religious services or engaging in sports—are also likely to have positive effects on our mental health. So find ways to be around people more.

6. Talk to strangers. A growing body of research suggests that even seemingly trivial interactions with strangers—like chatting with a barista or cashier—may be able to keep loneliness at bay by helping us feel more socially connected. So reach out to other human beings to say hello, ask them how they are, or chat about whatever's on your mind. These small acts can make a big difference and help you reduce feelings of loneliness .

7. Be active online. Instead of passively surfing the net or your social media, if you want to go online, opt instead to do something that involves the active participation of other people. For example, you could play games with others, chat about something you care about, give advice on a forum, or have a video call with a friend. The more you interact with others while online, the more connected you are likely to feel.

8. Share for real online. Somewhere along the way, the word “sharing” got co-opted on social media to describe what is really just “humble bragging.” We post about cool things we did, nice meals we ate, or a fun party we went to—all things that we didn’t actually share with the people who are viewing our posts.

Instead of posting about things you did, reclaim the word “share” for what it really means—to give a small or large portion of what is yours to someone else. You could share advice, words of support, or even empathy, all from your smartphone. As a result, your connections are likely to be more kind and supportive.

9. Stop focusing so much on you. It's almost inevitable in our modern technology-crazed world that we start to believe we don’t have enough. Bob got a new car. Sherri got a new house. Sonja got a new job. We also see false or unrealistic images—models Photoshopped to have perfect waists and abs—and we feel envious . As a result, we become increasingly focused on how we are not measuring up.

Instead of focusing on what you can get, shift your focus to what you can give . You could sell T-shirts online to raise money for a good cause. You could ask friends to donate to a charity for your birthday. By giving to others, you take the focus off yourself and do good at the same time, helping you to feel more connected and less lonely.

10. Stop your negative thought cycles. We might repeatedly think about what we could have done differently to prevent ourselves from feeling so alone. We ruminate on the events or people or causes, because we mistakenly believe that thinking about our loneliness over and over again will help us solve it. Unfortunately, it does us no good to get caught up in our thoughts instead of taking the actions we need to feel better.

To put an end to these negative thought cycles, we need to take action—do something different that stops these thoughts and changes our experience of the world. For example, if I'm feeling lonely, I'll go to the gym or schedule lunches with friends for the next few days. And it helps.

11. Generate a sense of awe . Awe (like when we witness the birth of new baby, or a majestic mountain) makes time seem like it’s standing still and helps us be more open to connecting. Something about feeling small in the context of a big world appears to help us see ourselves as part of a whole, which may help us feel less alone. So expose yourself to something that creates awe—like landscapes, new experiences, or new foods (here's some mindful exercises to get started).

12. Spend money on experiences. If we're spending all our money on things, we won't have the cash to spend money on experiences with others. And it turns out that spending money on experiences is way better for our mental health. So get creative and think about what you want to do with others. For example, I might go on a canoeing trip, go wine tasting, plan a beach party, or host an arts & crafts night. What group activities might make you feel less lonely?

13. Pay attention to the things that matter. How do we expect to improve our loneliness when we don't know what causes it? It's hard. So it's helpful to start paying attention to the present moment. What are the experiences that make you feel lonely? And what are the experiences that make you feel connected or like you belong? Identifying these moments can help you reduce loneliness, because you can limit your engagement in activities that make you feel lonely and increase your engagement in activities that make you feel connected.

14. Create a vision board. I keep a vision board tacked up by my desk to remind me of my goals . A big chunk of my vision board is about connecting—building community, networking, spending time with family, and the like. Sometimes I have a hard time sticking to it, but having the vision board reminds me to. Once you discover the things that make you feel less lonely and more connected, it can be helpful to create a board or list or plan for what you'll do—something to keep near you so you remember what you need to do to combat loneliness.

15. Tend to your network. Sometimes we can end up feeling alone even though we are connected to lots of people. So it can be helpful to reach out to these people and schedule times to catch up. Aim to schedule at least one social hour per week—a coffee date, lunch, or happy hour. Who knows, maybe an old friendship can be reignited.

16. Join an online group of like-minded people. You can now find people online with just about any interest — for example, politics , cooking, or sports. Joining one of these mission-oriented groups can be a way to feel more connected to others, even when you don't have access to face-to-face interactions. You might get to know some new people or make lifelong friends. You can even try out a few groups to see which ones fit you best and decrease your loneliness the most.

17. Volunteer remotely or in real life. For some of us, it's hard to find people to spend time with, let alone connect with. So we have to find new people. One way to do this is by volunteering for a cause, either remotely or in your town. Just be sure you're working with others. Working on an important problem with others can help you decrease loneliness.

18. Be nice to yourself. It’s important to practice self-compassion when you fail at things. Remember, everyone fails, and there is no need to be a bully to yourself, feel guilty, or put yourself down. That kind of attitude won’t help you decrease loneliness, now or in the future. Instead, try talking to yourself in a way that is supportive, kind, and caring—and you’ll be more likely to acknowledge mistakes you may have made in trying to decrease loneliness, and hopefully do better next time.

To learn more about how to build well-being, visit berkeleywellbeing.com .

Holt-Lunstad, J., et al. (2010). "Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review." PLoS Med 7(7): e1000316.

Tchiki Davis, Ph.D. , is a consultant, writer, and expert on well-being technology.

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Ivan Specht decided to employ his love of math during pandemic, which led to contact-tracing app, papers, future path

Part of the commencement 2024 series.

A collection of stories covering Harvard University’s 373rd Commencement.

Ivan Specht started at Harvard on track to study pure mathematics. But when COVID-19 sent everyone home, he began wishing the math he was doing had more relevance to what was happening in the world.

Specht, a New York City native, expanded his coursework, arming himself with statistical modeling classes, and began to “fiddle around” with simulating ways diseases spread through populations. He got hooked. During the pandemic, he became one of only two undergraduates to serve on Harvard’s testing and tracing committee, eventually developing a prototype contact-tracing app called CrimsonShield.

Specht took his curiosity for understanding disease propagation to the lab of computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti , professor in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and member of the Broad Institute, known for her work sequencing the Ebola virus in 2014 . Specht, now a senior, has since co-authored several studies around new statistical methods for analyzing the spread of infectious diseases, with plans to continue that work in graduate school.

“Ivan is absolutely brilliant and a joy to work with, and his research accomplishments already as an undergraduate are simply astounding,” Sabeti said. “He is operating at the level of a seasoned postdoc.”

His senior thesis, “Reconstructing Viral Epidemics: A Random Tree Approach,” described a statistical model aimed at tackling one of the most intractable problems that plague infectious disease researchers: determining who transmitted a given pathogen to whom during a viral outbreak. Specht was co-advised by computer science Professor Michael Mitzenmacher, who guided the statistical and computational sections of his thesis, particularly in deriving genomic frequencies within a host using probabilistic methods.

Specht said the pandemic made clear that testing technology could provide valuable information about who got sick, and even what genetic variant of a pathogen made them sick. But mapping paths of transmission was much more challenging because that process was completely invisible. Such information, however, could provide crucial new details into how and where transmission occurred and be used to test things such as vaccine efficacy or the effects of closing schools. 

Specht’s work exploited the fact that viruses leave clues about their transmission path in their phylogenetic trees, or lines of evolutionary descent from a common ancestor. “It turns out that genome sequences of viruses provide key insight into that underlying network,” said the joint mathematics and statistics concentrator.

Uncovering this transmission network goes to the heart of how single-stranded RNA pathogens survive: Once they infect their host, they mutate, producing variants that are marked by slightly different genetic barcodes. Specht’s statistical model determines how the virus spreads by tracking the frequencies of different viral variants observed within a host.  

As the centerpiece of his thesis, he reconstructed a dataset of about 45,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes across Massachusetts, providing insights into how outbreaks unfolded across the state.

Specht will take his passion for epidemiological modeling to graduate school at Stanford University, with an eye toward helping both researchers and communities understand and respond to public health crises.

A graphic designer with experience in scientific data visualization, Specht is focused not only on understanding outbreaks, but also creating clear illustrations of them. For example, his thesis contains a creative visual representation of those 45,000 Massachusetts genomes, with colored dots representing cases, positioned nearby other “dots” they are likely to have infected.

Specht’s interest in graphics began in middle school when, as an enthusiast of trains and mass transit, he started designing imagined subway maps for cities that lack actual subways, like Austin, Texas . At Harvard, he designed an interactive “subway map” depicting a viral outbreak.

As a member of the Sabeti lab, Specht taught an infectious disease modeling course to master’s and Ph.D. students at University of Sierra Leone last summer. His outbreak analysis tool is also now being used in an ongoing study of Lassa fever in that region. And he co-authored two chapters of a textbook on outbreak science in collaboration with the Moore Foundation.

Over the past three years, Specht has been lead author of a paper in Scientific Reports and another in Cell Patterns , and co-author on two others, including a cover story in Cell . His first lead-author paper, “The case for altruism in institutional diagnostic testing,” showed that organizations like Harvard should allocate COVID-19 testing capacity to their surrounding communities, rather than monopolize it for themselves. That work was featured in The New York Times .

During his time at Harvard, Specht lived in Quincy House and was design editor of the Harvard Advocate, the University’s undergraduate literary magazine. In his free time he also composes music, and he still considers himself a mass transit enthusiast.

In the acknowledgements section of his thesis, he credited Sabeti with opening his eyes to the “many fascinating problems at the intersection of math, statistics, and computational biology.”

“I could fill this entire thesis with reasons I am grateful for Professor Sabeti, but I think they can be summarized by the sense of wonder and inspiration I feel every time I set foot in her lab.”

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