We Need to Talk About Loneliness

A new study has found that loneliness can lead to Parkinson's Disease. Past studies have shown it can lead to Alzheimer's, cardiovascular disease, & premature mortality. So what's the solution?

The loneliest I’ve ever felt was during my quarter-century long marriage. Imagine my confusion, then, when I read a bunch of op-eds¹ this past summer extolling the virtues of marriage as the be-all and end-all of panaceas for what ails us, our children, and American society at large. Followed by this doozy from the Washington Post editorial board two weeks ago, urging liberal women to marry conservative men, if only to save our country from the scourge of cultural division. Never mind that no woman should ever a marry a man who views her as unequal, her autonomy over her body as negotiable, and Joe Rogan as the voice of reason. Or that the data used to support these marriage-as-societal-panacea theses, as both Rebecca Traister and Lyz Lenz have both expertly pointed out, is problematic at best, since they’re not counting those of us who were once married but now no longer are.

Look: there’s a reason why half of all marriages end in divorce. Some marriages are awesome! And thank goodness for that. Others muddle along year after year, plagued by neglect and inertia but somehow vaguely bearable until one day one spouse either dies from old age or disease or cries uncle. Still others are marked by what the Gottman Institute calls the four horsemen of the apocalypse: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.

You’ve seen this. I’ve seen it. Because we have eyes. One spouse says something so casually cruel to the other, in public, you can’t help but wonder what goes on behind closed doors. Plus let’s not forget that a full twenty percent of all marriages are plagued by domestic abuse, whether physical or emotional. And then there are those marriages—guilty as charged—that are so high-conflict, they harm us, our kids’ psyches, and leave us more shattered and traumatized than if we’d stayed single.

To bastardize Tolstoy, all happy marriages are alike; every unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way; and please trust me when I say you’re much better off not married than being in a toxic marriage. The best illustration I’ve seen of this comes from this post. It’s called the “Figured It All Out Staircase,” and it looks like this:

© Wait But Why from their post on February 12, 2104

I happened upon it one day in the wake of my separation from my marriage, and it really helped me see, in the simplest of visual terms, where I stood, now that I’d extracted myself from my marriage: being alone was eminently preferable to being in a high-conflict, cortisol-producing dyad. And until I could find a partner who improved my life instead of depleting both it and me, I would choose to stand halfway up the “Figured It All Out Staircase” until, if the stars aligned and I were lucky, someone who made my life better for being in it came along.

But standing halfway up the staircase—I think it’s important to admit this, having stood there for years—has its pain points. Yes, women do not need a man anymore to lead a good life or to earn a living. And plenty of women are out there living their best lives solo. But, for me—for me, I want to stress this—the loneliness of falling into bed alone every night and having no one with whom to share the details of my day, never mind life’s triumphs, losses, and that weird thing that happened at work that one day, was real and devastating. And I think we need to to acknowledge this truth and talk about it.

Here’s where I think we need to define our terms before moving forward. Being alone and living alone are not a priori lonely. Solitude, when chosen, is not only good for us, it can be vitally important after a marital rupture or the death of a spouse, providing the needed space, time, quiet, and energy for internal assessment, for grieving the loss, and, in the case of divorce, for asking ourselves the hard questions: What went wrong in my past relationship(s)? What was my role in that rupture and what was my spouse’s? How might I avoid those same relational pitfalls in the future?

I did this hard internal work for years after my marriage ended, until the benefits of solitude started to feel outweighed by the burdens of loneliness. I was so, so lonely by year four of (mostly) sleeping alone that my heart hurt. I didn’t have a nearby Rhoda to