If you could take a pill that would "cure" your loneliness, would you take it? The epidemic of loneliness has been a topic of conversation worldwide for several years, affecting both young and old.

Governments and policymakers have urgently gotten involved in addressing this issue. However, some researchers question whether we truly have credible data supporting such claims.

Even if there is sufficient evidence of a loneliness epidemic, it is important to consider what that would mean for loneliness itself. Should we strive to eradicate it from our lives, as we would with a virus or disease?

Psychologist James Hillman had reservations about the perspective of "loneliness as pathology." He emphasized that solutions like Prozac or even group recovery meetings might reflect the idea that we should "remove" loneliness.

An inevitable part of life
But what if, as Hillman argued, loneliness is an inevitable part of human existence? Would we then try to "cure" something that is as much a part of our journey as death? He put it this way:

If loneliness is an archetypal feeling built into us from the very beginning, then being alive also means being lonely. Loneliness will, therefore, come and go as it pleases throughout life, regardless of our efforts to deny or avoid this reality.

Researching loneliness
In various ways, I have spent most of my career researching loneliness. I have conducted hundreds of interviews and observed the many ways it can manifest in people's lives, from childhood to deep old age.

Many studies of human suffering have led me to believe that loneliness may not be so much "one feeling" as a label we give to a multitude of human experiences and unmet needs that revolve around a sense of disconnection that can be inevitable from time to time.

In my recent book, All the Lonely People: Conversations on Loneliness, I presented a range of examples of the different ways loneliness can manifest. The conversations emerged from various projects and interviews I have conducted over the years, each offering insight into a particular nuance of loneliness. I gave my interlocutors pseudonyms to protect their anonymity.

Jake: Childhood loneliness
As with adulthood and later life, encounters with loneliness are often part of children's lives. Sometimes these are brutal encounters, and sometimes more subtle or fleeting.

Jake's story is an example of one of the more extreme nuances of loneliness that can envelop childhood. He was ten years old when he participated in a study on the experiences of foster children conducted by my colleague and me. Jake was removed from his parents due to abuse and neglect in early childhood. He had been in seven different foster homes, and no one showed interest in his permanent adoption due to his particularly challenging and complex behavioral issues. He lived in a foster home with Trudi, his foster carer, and her dog Zak. Jake told me:

Maybe I'd feel safer if I were, like, adopted or something, but I'm in foster care, you see, so the social worker comes and checks on me because they, like, own me, or something. The problem is that nobody wants to adopt me, so I can live there permanently without needing to move to new homes.

Jake's loneliness stemmed from a complete disbelief in kind, caring adults. He simply hadn't found a kind family or place he could call home, a secure base to rely on. Understandably, he had stopped trusting adults and no longer allowed them to get close to him.

But I learned from Jake's story that, even against all odds, we can find unexpected ways out of loneliness. Jake's way was his relationship with Zak, the family dog.

I don't mind that I'm really close to Zak because he won't reject me. I feel really safe with him ... I think he's my friend because he wants to be, not just because he has to be.

Zak was a six-year-old golden retriever. He was calm, gentle, and had a kind of caring wisdom that some dogs exude. We quickly realized that Zak's role was crucial in helping Jake feel less lonely in the world and in learning to trust Trudi.

Jake spoke openly to us about the important role Zak played as the only living being on Earth who could help him feel less lonely, especially regarding his inability to have a place to call home.

When someone knocked on the door, I used to hide in the living room with Zak. I was afraid it was the social worker coming to take me away. I didn't feel safe without him, and when I was with him, just holding his ears, I felt relaxed and didn't have that big thumping feeling in my body.

Jake told us that he often felt scared and lonely at night, and the intensity of his feelings often prevented him from falling asleep. He described how one night he wandered down the dark hallway in his pajamas and peeked through the stairwell into the kitchen below. He saw Trudi's silhouette. She was washing dishes, and Zak was sitting next to her.

Trudi was talking to Zak. It wasn't strange to Jake that she was talking to the dog - after all, he talked to Zak more than anyone else. Zak was, in fact, the only one he truly trusted. What bothered him wasn't that she was talking to the dog, but what she said. What he heard caused a deep jolt in his body; his heart pounded so hard he almost shook.

Trudi told Zak that she "loved having Jake around." She said she thought he was "a wonderful boy" and that she "hoped he would be there for a long time."

Jake said, "No one ever said that about me." It excited and frightened him in equal measure that Trudi felt that way about him. Jake had never experienced what it meant to be wanted. He had never experienced the feeling of someone wanting him around, caring for him, or loving him. And, oddly enough, hearing it in secret, eavesdropping in the hallway, made it all the more believable.

Trudi wasn't saying it to make him feel better. How could she? She didn't even know he was listening. But what she said to Zak that night shook the world of a lonely boy and opened up the possibility that maybe it was possible to be wanted in this world.

Alex: Adolescent loneliness
Unlike Jake, Alex was a 13-year-old teenager who lived in a relatively privileged home in the sense that he had a loving family and a stable home environment. In our conversation, he talked about the experience of loneliness that stemmed from the fear of revealing himself to the world.

He said he often tried to hide, blend into the background, disappear, and as a consequence of not being seen, he experienced a sense of loneliness.

When I was little, I was the complete opposite. I could say whatever I wanted, and I didn't care what people thought of me or whether they liked me. I don't know where it all started. But it started. I'm afraid people won't like me if I show them who I am.

"Do you associate that with a feeling of loneliness?" I asked him.

"Because no one really gets to know me. No one really knows who I am," he replied. "That's a bit lonely, isn't it? There are so many opportunities where I could share things about myself, but I don't because I don't think they'd want to know." He offered me a recent example from his school life.

He was in a computer class, and the teacher assigned a task where students had to tell the rest of the class what kind of music they liked, via a PowerPoint presentation. Students had to name their favorite band or artist and explain why they liked them. He said:

It was so hard for me to say what I liked that I told her I never listened to music. I lied to her so I wouldn't have to say what I liked. In the end, she told me what she liked, and I put that in my PowerPoint, and I didn't have to reveal anything about myself.

I asked him if he knew at that moment what kind of music he liked. "Of course, I knew," he replied firmly. "I like a lot of things, but I just couldn't risk saying it because I was so afraid of being judged."

Will: Heartbreak loneliness
Sometimes, loneliness inevitably stems from an obvious experience of loss. For example, I talked to Will, a 21-year-old young man, about the loneliness he experienced after a recent heartbreak.

"I'll tell you, she became someone else within a week. Cold. Heartless. Unresponsive." he told me.

"And I feel like I've turned from someone she loved into a traumatized nuisance she'd rather not see anymore because she just felt guilty and bad about herself when she looked at me."

"Have you seen the movie Ghost?" He asked me for confirmation.

"Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, 1990?" I replied. "Yes, I've seen it several times." Satisfied with my answer, he continued.

Will was a big movie buff, and during our interview, various movie plots helped him articulate how he felt. "Well, then you know the plot of that movie, which really sums up how I feel right now. It's the whole thing where Patrick Swayze is killed and becomes a ghost. And the woman he loves, Demi Moore, just can't see him anymore - he's invisible to her because he's a ghost and, in the literal sense, he's dead to her - and there's this whole sad story where he's no longer visible to the woman he loves."

"That's exactly how I feel, like I've suddenly turned into a ghost, and Melissa just ... stopped seeing me. Does that sound crazy?"

It didn't sound crazy to me. I remembered times in my life when partners I deeply loved suddenly stopped seeing me as someone they loved and turned into someone I no longer recognized, almost overnight.

Will's story highlighted some of the unique features of loneliness often associated with heartbreak. Psychologist and therapist Ginette Paris suggests that we use metaphors when trying to understand the unknown. People have used metaphors like "being erased from a masterpiece and replaced as easily as I was painted into it" or "being lost in a harsh, barren desert" to describe heartbreak.

Jungian analyst Aldo Carotenuto once wrote that when someone breaks our heart, there is an immediate collapse of psychological order. We lose what we were to our lover, what we were with them, and what we were for them. Each relationship is different, so no one else can ever exactly know what it is like to lose what you have lost. It is an experience for which there are no reference points in the outside world. And what could be lonelier than that?

Ray: Loneliness from losing someone to dementia
There are stages of life that create unique sets of circumstances leading to special kinds of loneliness and disconnection. My colleague Chao Fang from the University of Liverpool and I have written extensively about our efforts to listen to the experiences of older people.

Our work has identified that, if we live long enough, we are more likely to experience a series of inevitable losses that often bring a deep sense of loneliness. These can be the loss of significant long-term relationships, our health and fitness, or our careers, roles, and identities. Each experience of these losses is unique.

Ray, for example, was 78 years old and had been married to Pam for most of his life. "We've been married for over 50 years, you know - 54 years to be exact - but Pam now has dementia. That's why we moved to this retirement community," he told me.

From this point in the conversation, the essence of Ray and Pam's loneliness began to unfold. "This was supposed to be a community for us, for her," he said, "a place where she could keep the things she loves."

As he spoke, I began to understand how difficult it was for him to come to terms with the fact that he was slowly losing his wife, watching her become increasingly detached from the world around them.

"Pam used to belong to a book club - it was an important part of her life," he continued. "Well, at first she found it funny, but now she cries at the same time. You know, she taught all those kids, through, god knows how many years of teaching ... 35 years of teaching, and taught all those kids to read and write - and now she can't read herself, and she can't write." As he said this, I noticed a tear rolling down his left cheek.

"It's so cruel to her that she can no longer do the things she earned a living doing ... the things she loved doing." He stared into space, and I waited for him to collect himself. "So, she belonged to a book club," he continued, "she tried the book club here, and it's so ... how best to describe it? Frustrating. Because she can't finish a sentence. Frustrating. Because she couldn't read the books. The font size is too small," he said, incredibly.

"There are all these little things that gradually strip her of the things she loves. We tried audiobooks, but she falls asleep as soon as she starts listening." Ray then said something that moved me.

In a way, I feel like she's a bit of a leper, really, because no one actually wants to be around her.

He began to cry. "She's a wonderful girl, a lady, an old lady ... you know?" He cried openly.

I feel very lonely ... Can I tell you what the real agony of it all is? Just sitting here, like you're already mourning someone you've lost, and you're still living with them - it's sad, but true.

Ray identified a key feature of marital loneliness associated with dementia - that the loss and grief begin long before their spouses actually die.

Learning to live with loneliness
Stories of everyday loneliness like these are precious because they help us appreciate that loneliness has many forms and is not actually a universal phenomenon. When someone tells us they feel lonely, we know almost nothing about their experience until we hear the story of their loneliness and the unique circumstances that lead to it. The feeling is really just the tip of the iceberg. Stories help us discern what loneliness looks like and how it is lived.

Stories of loneliness also help us appreciate that it is a part of most people's lives at some point. We all have stories like these within us, whether we have shared them or not. Perhaps accepting this reality is more meaningful than trying to pathologize what might be an inevitable human experience.

In fact, we can do more harm than good by stigmatizing and pathologizing loneliness, creating a sense of shame around it that forces people to share the experience, mask it, or suppress it.

Of course, this doesn't mean we should take loneliness lightly. It is a challenging and difficult part of life. But that's where stories come in. In stories, we have the opportunity to share our loneliness with others, easing the burden, and no longer keeping our loneliness exclusively to ourselves. A significant part of the suffering in loneliness is often the fact that we are alone with our loneliness. In my experience, stories of loneliness have great value for both the listener and the storyteller, fostering empathy, compassion, and connection.

Ultimately, the answer to loneliness may be found in learning how to live alongside it, rather than denying its existence or seeking to eradicate it.

Original:
Dewi Alter
Lecturer at the Department of Literature, Theory and Creative Research at Cardiff University