Alone and Loving It, or Lonely, and Dying Fast?

Reveling in our own company or pining for others

As I write this story from the second floor dorm room of the Eugene Whiteaker Hostel at 6:15 am, a disheveled man dressed in filthy camos is rummaging through the big trash containers set out last night for pickup.

Think that guy might be lonely?

As I drive through town every day on my way to hike the lovely Spencer Butte, I pass many makeshift housing setups, tattered tents and folks sleeping upright against phone poles.

Think they might be lonely?

Lots of us already know, or at least we can feel, how loneliness can be a downright killer:

From the article:

A 2018 article in The Lancet described the situation like this: “Imagine a condition that makes a person irritable, depressed and self-centered, and is associated with a 26% increase in the risk of premature mortality.”

I see plenty of stories on Medium about people half my age, a third my age who feel lonely.

I also see pieces that speak to the unspeakable horror of feeling alone and isolated at my age (67) and older.

While I get the point, and I don’t argue the stats, one of my concerns is that pieces like this further scare the holy shit out of anyone approaching their later years. For some, that means thirty. The specter of doing it solo, well.

I get it. But I also have a different take on this.

The first question is whether or not you or I really have to have a partner. Sometimes the best thing is that we don’t…for a while, perhaps a long while…maybe for the rest of our lives. I have no idea, other than that I am not entitled to one, at least someone other than myself.

Do we really need to be paired off? Even if you want to be a parent, these days you don’t have to be a pair of anything. Even a pairent. (sorry, I couldn’t help myself). Solo folks can adopt or visit sperm banks. Lots of things you and I can do solo. So I wonder, do we really need to pair off? I guess it depends.

About that dating thing.

Dating Sunday, which is the first Sunday in January, is now a “holiday” gaining about as much notoriety as Valentine’s Day. Created largely because of the online dating business, that manufactured event acknowledges the fed-up single who simply does not wish to suffer one more holiday season solo.

I can relate. However when I was supposedly in a relationship with my last BF, the holidays were vastly more lonely. Said BF failed to call, check in, bother to send a card but for once in a decade of holidays, and twice gave me spa days despite the fact that I cannot bear to have strangers touch my face unless they are medical professionals. Even then. Up until the last year I saw him four or five times a year for two hours (as long as it took for a fuck and for him to recover, dress and sprint). Wanna talk lonely while in love? Let’s. Please.

Ask any married person how lonely it feels to be in a bad relationship. Anyone who reads Charles Roast is well aware of the kind of pain that a 58-year-old man feels being quarantined with a hate-machine and a teenager, while desperately wanting freedom, feeling immensely lonely, and hoping to start over. Many of us can relate.

Loneliness is not assuaged if you are holed up with an unholy relationship. It’s exacerbated. Another word for that is prison.

Perhaps a greater question here is whether our loneliness is driven by feeling imprisoned with ourselves, which is another kind of deeply unhappy marriage. That marriage is in no way solved by a search for that mystical “other half out there somewhere.” Stay with me here, please.

You and I can feel deeply lonely. What complicates this is online dating, which feeds the notion of I fucking deserve perfection, the shallowness of folks who have out-sized opinions of themselves and what they think they deserve (as in the 85-year-old men in wheelchairs who get annoyed at me for not finding them particularly good dating material).

Really, folks. Just. Really?

Then there’s this whole incredibly confusing gender identification thing. This morning, out of curiosity and because a fellow Medium member suggested it (see? I do pay attention), I set up an OKCupid profile and ran into this mind-boggling list:

It’s almost enough to send me running in the opposite direction. I just wanted someone of the opposite gender (as in, possessing a penis, and with any luck, a brain larger than that which would fit under his Jimmy Cap). These days, as with all things American, we have to do what we do in a grocery store: seriously baffle the shit out of people. How many kinds of breakfast cereal? Probably around six thousand. This is what we do in America. We confuse the crap out of folks, and by doing that we make things a thousand times worse.

Does looking for company honestly have to be as confusing as the first time someone walks into a Starbucks?

“I’ll take a jumbo-hetero-lumber- sexual with mild gyno-binary tendencies, hold the homophobia, and three large squirts of extra-dark beard grooming cream on top. Oh. And don’t forget napkins. We’ll be needing them.”

This doesn’t mean we don’t have the right to choose our gender. It does mean, and I can only speak for myself here, that when faced with 22 flavors, I do what I used to do at Baskin-Robbins: choose vanilla. The confused mind can’t buy, something I’ve been teaching in sales for nearly forty years.

I skipped most of the questions, filled out the profile part, and promptly got an invitation from a horribly overweight gun-toting beer-swilling Trump-voting Billy Bob who clearly didn’t read a goddamned thing in my profile. Wherein I clearly stated no alcohol, no Trump, athletic only. Talk about sending folks running.

My gay friend Melissa, who has been through a rough marriage and a few rough relationships, said to me the other night that she saw a couple out together holding hands. It hurt. A lot. I get that. Imagine wanting love and being in one of the “other-gendered” categories where dating can be fraught with misunderstandings, and the emotional challenges can be even more difficult because of public censure in one way (or a lot of ways) or another.

People have written on Medium about how touch-starved they are. How hugs are essential to health. My buddy Ann Litts wrote about this once and I figured out that I was something like ten thousand (give or take a few) hugs short of optimum health.

With all due respect, I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about hugs if they didn’t almost always involve wandering hands by men who interpret hugs as honey let’s fuck. In fact I no longer want much of anyone hugging me for this reason. Hugs ARE essential to health. But not if they are simply one other way for a horny POS to take advantage of a polite social custom to cop a feel.

That is also very isolating, when a simple hug becomes a trigger. Because they can and they do, especially with my sexual history. I am hardly alone in this. I have come to deeply resent those meeting cultures where hugs are insisted upon instead of handshakes, which means that if I feel the need for distance, someone is going to get miffed. I just took my juicy little ass away, asshole. Grow up. I’m tired of having to explain myself, and now quarantine fixed the issue for those of us who feel forced into unwanted physical contact. Funny how stuff works.

My last BF was utterly incapable of giving comforting hugs. For him, any physical contact was a precursor to a fuck or a blow job. There was no safe inbetween. The way I read that, rightly or wrongly, is that was too much work. He argued- and this was a fifty-year-old man, not a goddamned teenager- that his libido was too much and he’d get a hard on. In other words “I have absolutely no control over my body.” Will you kindly grow the fuck up.

So it was be alone in the house, or fuck. I was supposed to take that as a compliment. No. Really.

Kinda takes the breath away. Because that absolutely, positively reinforces the message that my only role in his life was an open legs/open mouth policy.

This is how twisted human beings can get. As I’ve said elsewhere, what a cruel waste of gorgeous man flesh.

This has led me to question loneliness. For the older I get, the less I am willing to tolerate that kind of behavior just to have someone around. The 1979 ABBA hit Gimme Gimme Gimme a Man After Midnight speaks to that ridiculous notion that a body, ANY body will do, and that a woman, in this case, will forfeit any kind of dignity for a fuck because she’s lonely, and not for a particular man for his character, but only for his cock.

What a wet dream for some guys. In this scenario I’d have welcomed the gun-toting, Trump-voting Billy Bob into my bed just because he had a dick and I was just that desperate.

Again, whatta wet dream for some guys. Sure feeds the lie that the only thing a man is good for is his dick. Which is monumentally unfair to every good man I know, and I know plenty. Which, as other very smart women have written, is part of the stupid patriarchal paradigm than harms men, making them compete over ridiculously stupid things like dick size, testicles and testosterone levels.

The BF used to brag about those, too.

You and I are going to feel lonely at some point in our lives, and perhaps for long periods. Part of this is because, for my money, this is how we learn to question that lie. For we are always and forever in excellent company: ourselves. Learning how to be in and appreciate that excellent company is the whole point. Quarantine allowed me to do plenty more of just that. It still is.

While I get that a good clickbait article (not without merit, but still) like this will get you eyeballs, it misses the point. It’s not about fighting it. It’s about learning from, embracing and understanding it:

Loneliness is a teacher. Not something to run from at speed. Not an excuse to get a body, any body, join a group, any group. It’s that little-worn path with overgrown weeds beckoning us to explore the wilderness of our internal emotional landscape to understand why being with ourselves isn’t plenty enough, for however long that period might be.

What people don’t always get is that there is a lot of money to be made by pushing us into couple- hood. Society isn’t going to fall apart if we aren’t all married. And, as we evolve into lots of different sexual iterations, the quaint notion of marriage as we might have thought it portrayed (with grotesque dishonesty) by the Cleaver family is dying a well-justified death.

Couplehood isn’t the point. The point is how well we can sit with the fullness of our feelings. When alone, I have to deal with a lifetime of mistakes, miscues, muddles, failures and flops, faceplants and fuckups.

Being alone for much of my adult life has taught me to find the funny in all of them. Had I been distracted by a man- and those times one was around holy shit was I distracted from real work by their needs- I’d never have developed that skill.

Because I also learned to look at my victories, my achievements, my joys, my best memories and all the shit I do right. There’s a lot of it. I’ve learned how to better redirect and re-frame my thoughts. That’s part of what Deep Work looks like.

Being alone is a gift. Most of us don’t get near enough of it. And when we do have it, all too often we pine for a soul mate.

If I see that stupid phrase one more goddamned time on a dating profile I am going to puke right onto my computer. That phrase sets us up for failure. You already ARE your soul mate, and if you will forgive me, your sole mate.

For in order for us to not feel lonely (and here I am going to steal unmercifully from my Medium buddy Rosennab), we have to stop looking for that “other half.” Every relationship is a relationship with ourselves, she says, to which I would add, the “other half” that we so believe is out there, is already in here.

I’m not the first nor the last to point out with some vehemence that you and I showed up complete. Period full stop. The forever (fake)chase for someone to complete us is a terrible, life- and love-sucking lie.

I want to grow into the person I deserve to spend time with all the time. Still working on that. Getting better at it. That work has drawn a completely different kind of friend my way: women and men who are of a wholly better character, competence, wisdom, way of being. That trend reflects my inner work, not people I’m collecting as a way to validate who I am.

I would love company. I would. Well, sometimes. Rarely. NOT overnight. Not any more. I like my own company much better than most other peoples.’ I do indeed feel loneliness, but these days that is far more an indication that I need to do some completion work rather than hook a finger out the window after midnight for whichever swinging dick might be passing by.

What about a community of friends? Family can often be so toxic that they are the ones who were the first to force feelings of terrible loneliness upon us very young, when we might have been learning how to like and trust them and ourselves in the process.

Being without community as we age is a potential death sentence, but not always. It depends.

There’s no question that getting old can be lonely. My challenge to you, as it is to myself as well, is how much work are you willing to do to create a circle of friends? I am new to Eugene, and I make sure I carry business cards with me at all times. That way if I meet someone I would like to get to know, I have a way to connect. I’ll be ignored, set aside, rejected. Guarantee it. Planning on it. No surprises. I am not a lot of people’s cuppa.

However that’s not a statement of my value or lack thereof. I like my company. The people I need to meet will show up. They will hang around as long as they need to and move on, if they do, to other adventures.

Meanwhile, I drive to the coast and lunch alone. Explore alone. Hike alone. I put myself out into the mainstream when I feel like company. I can pick up on other people, enjoy their laughter, take pleasure in their obvious love for each other without vilifying myself for not being partnered.

For I am already. That’s the whole point. The only time I tell myself the lonely story is when I am buying the bullshit that I have to have someone else to feel loved.

I guarantee you this: every single time I have ever sat on a ridge watching a perfect sun set, watching a moon rise in the morning at altitude, I know I am loved. For I loved myself enough to get myself there to enjoy the view.

Nothing lonely about that whatsoever.