In this no-holds-barred, provocative book, the author tells a story that often remains hidden—that of a successful professional who has many friends and family and yet all her life has struggled with a loneliness she’s never revealed to anyone.
“A book I wish I had read in my early years…I might have grown up a little sooner had I been able to share the author’s frank insights int the nature of love, sex, and loneliness in their various aspects. I hope youths of all ages—from sixteen to 60—will read it.”
– Howard Koch primary screenwriter of Casablanca
NEW
“If you read only one book this year, let it be this.
It just may change your life.”
– Gloria Vanderbilt
artist, author, and socialite
On
Loneliness
The culmination of four years of soul-searching conversations with America’s leading psychologists and psychiatrists about loneliness—how to cope with it, why it is a normal and necessary stage of healthy growth, and how to stop resisting it.
Personal Notes
I ASKED A MAN to sleep with me last night. He was my friend—affectionate, handsome, and, most important, available. After I asked him, he sat very quietly on the footstool near my chair for several minutes, and then he said no. I felt rejected, hurt, and when he left, I asked myself why I needed affection and closeness so desperately that I had to use sex to get it.
The Nature of Loneliness
IT CAN STRIKE AT unexpected times. At a party one evening, a biologist told me that when he was growing up, he identified love with food. “At mealtime, the whole family would try to act close, but would always end up bickering,” he said. “I kept trying through those meals to live up to the dream, and the only result was that I got fat. But I still feel the urge to go home for all the holidays to feel less lonely. I’m still searching for that promised dinner that will represent warmth and unity.”
Childhood
EACH OF US carries a child within. That child is the acorn that contains the oak and feeds every fiber of the living growing tree. The loneliness we feel today comes from a loneliness we felt before when we were young, even at birth. There is no escaping it, and perhaps we should not try. Loneliness is a pain that is intrinsic to life. We all feel the anxiety of loss from the time we are born.
Romantics and Masochists
AN OLDER FRIEND told me that every time he thought of high school he thought of a 1950s song by a singer named Bobby Vinton. “Blue, blue, blue— the connotation that it is not a good thing to be alone and lonely, that we must stay away from it, and so we have Valentine’s Day and fortieth wedding anniversaries and romanticized wars and wasn’t-it-great-in-high-school and God-what-a-prom, and meanwhile the night of senior prom I personally went home and tried to kill myself.”
Sex
THE PROS AND CONS of sex without love have been debated without end—both in cities, where it can be hard to meet people, and in the countryside, where everyone knows everyone else. As a result, the question is so muddied that it is hard to see it at all. In the cheering corner tend to be liberals, feminists, swingers, and chauvinists of all kinds. In the booing corner tend to be parents of daughters (and sons), romantics, nearly every established religion, and traditionalists. Sex, it seems, makes strange bedfellows.
Love and Marriage
ANGER DOES HAVE its place in love, and people who do not feel free to shout at one another may well be dependent on each other but are not likely to be intimate. There is a big difference between intimacy and dependency, which is why some people can begin and end a marriage feeling they never knew their partner—and, indeed, they never did.
Friends
FRIENDSHIPS ARE the bedrock of my life. Last fall, I stood silently with a friend watching a big-bellied freighter slide down the Hudson River, emptied of its cargo and heading back to sea. Its red underside was high above the waterline. Swallows encircled it in a twilight sky. A train going north hooted once in passing and the freighter hooted back. From distant bluffs came the echoes of their greetings. “Friendship needs no words—it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.” (Dag Hammarskjold)
Living Alone
THE LOCKSMITH arrived to put a deadbolt lock on my front door. As he got out his drill and bits, he asked me if I lived alone. Yes, I live alone, I told him. “Why do you live alone?” he asked. I thought a minute and answered: “Because I am more free, more independent.” He tested the new lock, snapping the bolt up and down. “You don’t have freedom,” he said. “All you have is convenience.”
Emotional Anesthesia
IF WE RESPONDED to the cruelties we see in real life or online, we wouldn’t be able to bear it; we would be screaming in the streets. To protect our sanity, we look the other way, bury our feelings. When did we start feeling this way? Was it 9/11? Mass shootings of children in schools, of people at worship? Bloody body bags from endless wars? Race-hate murders on our streets? All now part of our emotional geography.
Soul Searching
FOR MANY YEARS, I looked for ways to rid myself of the habits that isolated me and made me lonely. In trying to discover, or rediscover, the real emotions beneath my social veneer, I journeyed through half a dozen therapies, movements, and faith-based organizations. I uncovered some of the dynamics behind my loneliness. I found out how to use my loneliness creatively instead of letting it destroy me.
Freedom
ONE DOCTOR, usually busy with hospital rounds and patients, travels alone on vacations. “I’ve walked in Greece and Italy and on the wharves of Le Havre by myself, and I always feel…the kind of loneliness that adds a third dimension to my life. I suddenly realize I’m just one guy walking on this globe in this universe…When I walk for days in silence, I feel something that must be similar to what the astronauts feel in space, or passengers feel on the deck of an ocean liner at dawn. I am small in time and space and life, and suddenly I am more precious to myself.”
AMAZON READER REVIEW
August 31, 2016
“A milestone in the journey of my life.”
“It was the 1970’s and I was desperate and lost after a break-up; my feelings were hard to bear. I was young, a college student. By some good fortune, I came upon this book. Reading it was a transcendent experience that gave me what I believe was my first awareness of the strength and beauty of self-connection and the joy of solitude. Over many years, I would recall that book and its significance in my life. About a decade ago, a current friend discovered the book and, as a woman in her 50’s, had a similarly appreciative response to the material. A milestone in the journey of my life.”
AMAZON READER REVIEW
October 27, 2011
“Extraordinary. It’ll warm your heart.”
“I was visiting a friend in Montreal for Christmas in 2000 and was exploring the closet in the guest room one cold, gray day when I discovered this book on the floor in a corner. The cold, gray day turned brilliant and warm as I opened the cover and started to read. This is, bar none, my favorite book in the world. If I were on a desert island, this is one book I would hope to have at my side. It’s not a novel, but a treatise on loneliness. Sounds dreary but, trust me, it’s extraordinary. It’ll warm your heart.”