On Loneliness

Mark Twain once said that "the worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself."  I think most of us would agree that loneliness is one of the worst feelings in the world.  Solitude is the celebration of being alone; loneliness is being alone when you don't want to be.

We all handle our emotions in different ways, and loneliness is no exception.  Some people eat or exercise, some people watch tv, listen to music, or read.  Still others among us try to resolve loneliness through substitution--by finding someone else to fill the void while what they really want is somewhere else.  A healthy way of doing this is to find a friend to hang out with when our feelings are the most raw.  A good night out with the gal pals often cures me of my worst anxieties.  We find commonality in our emotional experiences, laugh at our own frailities, and lift each other up out of the mud.

But sometimes people choose sex as a mask for loneliness.  They find that being intimate with someone can be a temporary bandage on a wound.  Getting lost in someone else, tangled up in them and the sheets, definitely dulls the pain of loneliness.

But it can have devastating effect on the other person, especially because of the high likelihood that they don't know they're being used as a cover.  In talking with a few dear friends tonight about a friend's experience as the mask, no one would admit that they had engaged in a one-night stand for that very reason.  Still, it went unspoken between the lines.  "I was younger" and "alone" and "selfish" were frequent sentiments.

Being a social scientist...I commenced a survey.  I asked my male friends the question of why a guy would not call back after a sexual encounter on the second formal date (the fifth informal date, if you include working out together on several occasions).  I received back lots of answers, from "he's probably just a jerk" to "maybe he's seeing someone else, too" to "what if he's embarrassed about something."  And yet, they all basically admitted that, at one point or another, they had done the post-sex disappearing act and had felt badly about it.  

As I was talking it over with my bestie, she said that her guy friend had admitted to using a girl once when he was lonely.  And that's when it hit me: that loneliness can make us do some pretty stupid stuff.  Hurtful stuff, even.  Sometimes we hurt ourselves by diving face-first into a pint of Ben & Jerry's, and maybe other times we hurt others by presenting a false front on our emotional state.

A friend once told me that "only after a person has seen themselves at their lowest, most depressed, and vulnerable can they rise to the heights that they are capable of."

So guys (and girls, I suppose!): next time you feel lonely, I challenge you to spend a Friday night alone, with yourself, making friends with the person inside your head.  Grab a spoon, a pint of ice cream, and a cozy blanket to wrap up in.  You might just find that you can turn loneliness into solitude.