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I think one of the hardest kinds of loneliness to explain is the kind that happens when you aren’t actually alone.
You have people in your life. Maybe you’re married or in a relationship. You have family. Friends. Coworkers. People you talk to, people you see, people who would probably be surprised to hear you describe yourself as lonely.
And yet you are.
For a long time, that kind of loneliness can make you wonder if there’s something wrong with you. Why can’t you be satisfied with the relationships you have? Why do other people seem to know how to create these close friendships and families and partnerships that you somehow missed the instructions for?
Eventually, it can start to feel less like loneliness and more like being a misfit.
But I’ve been thinking about another possibility. Sometimes we aren’t lonely because there aren’t enough people around us. We’re lonely because somewhere along the way, maintaining connection became more important than being fully present inside it.
This doesn’t usually happen in one dramatic moment. It happens in small ways that can look remarkably reasonable at the time. You don’t say something because it isn’t worth an argument. You go along with the group. You don’t tell a friend that something hurt your feelings because you don’t want to make things awkward. You become the reliable one, the helpful one, the easygoing one. You tell yourself you’re being flexible.
And sometimes you are.
Relationships require compromise. Other people aren’t going to anticipate every need or respond exactly the way we want them to. There is nothing healthy about expecting everyone around us to constantly prove that we matter.
But there is a difference between occasionally compromising and slowly learning that connection works better when you require less of it.
That’s where loneliness can become tangled up with self-betrayal.
If you’re afraid of losing people, you can get good at keeping them. You can become useful. Agreeable. Understanding. You can overlook things. You can lower expectations. You can convince yourself you don’t need much.
The strange part is that it can work.
The relationship survives.
You’re still invited. You’re still married. You’re still part of the family. You’re still in the group chat. You’re not alone.
And somehow you’re getting lonelier.
I think that’s because there’s a difference between maintaining a relationship and experiencing connection. If keeping a relationship requires you to continually edit yourself, eventually the people around you may be relating to a version of you that has been shaped around what the relationship can tolerate.
Then something else can happen. You start interpreting the loneliness as information about yourself.
Maybe I’m too sensitive.
Maybe I expect too much.
Maybe I’m difficult.
Maybe other people just don’t need the kind of connection I seem to need.
Or maybe, eventually: maybe I just don’t fit anywhere.
That’s a painful conclusion to reach because once loneliness becomes an identity, we stop questioning the relationships that helped create it.
Sometimes it takes a long time to see that.
We can look back at things we once accepted and understand them differently. A relationship we thought was close may look different once we notice how rarely we felt safe disagreeing. Something we called loyalty may look different when we realize how much of it depended on one person accommodating the other. What we once thought was being easygoing may turn out to have involved abandoning ourselves more often than we knew.
Taking off the rose-colored glasses isn’t always liberating at first. Sometimes it’s incredibly sad.
But there’s something important on the other side of it.
If you’ve spent years feeling lonely around other people that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re incapable of connection. It doesn’t mean you’re inherently difficult to know, too needy, too different, or destined to feel outside of everything.
It may mean you’ve gotten good at maintaining relationships that don’t give you enough room to exist inside them.
And that’s a different problem.
Because being a misfit feels permanent. It makes you the problem wherever you go.
Learning that you’ve been disappearing inside relationships gives you somewhere to begin.
You can start noticing the tiny moments when you leave yourself behind. The yes that wanted to be a no. The opinion you almost expressed and then swallowed. The hurt you immediately explained away. The relationship you keep maintaining almost entirely through your own effort.
You don’t have to blow up your life every time you notice one. You don’t have to stop compromising or start demanding that everyone meet every emotional need.
You can simply begin allowing yourself to be present.
To have preferences. To disappoint someone occasionally. To notice whether another person is curious about you. To stop automatically treating your needs as the problem whenever they inconvenience someone else.
And perhaps, over time, something else becomes possible.
Instead of asking:
What’s wrong with me that I feel so alone?
You can start asking:
Where do I feel most like myself? Who makes room for that person? And where am I making room for her too?
Maybe loneliness isn’t always telling us that we need more people.
Sometimes it’s telling us that we need to stop disappearing from the relationships we already have.
~
author: Amy Hale
Image: miraalou/Instagram
Editor: Lisa Erickson
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