A case study in loneliness

I became infatuated with someone recently, and for a little while it was mutual. When it became apparent that he wasn’t interested in me anymore, I had overwhelming feelings of loneliness. Again when I found out he was seeing someone else. Then one day soon after I was chaperoning a couple of teenagers to the airport, and while waiting to hear if their flight got away safely I had some good time to analyse what I what the source of the loneliness was. Here is what I came up with.

Upon realising the infatuee didn’t like me, my initial reaction was upset at not being able to have what I wanted and resistance of the reality. Then came feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness, then loneliness and sadness.

Naturally, I had the thought that he was never going to love me and I was never going to be with him, but also that I was never going to be able to know and love him. Was the loneliness have been the result of my thinking the former or the latter – that I was never going to be loved by him, or that I would never be able to give my love to him?

My attention was one hundred percent on myself - and I wasn’t loving. I didn’t care whether or not the people around me felt loved. When, in the moment, I generated love for other people I had flashes of a kind of lightness and relief. Could the loneliness have been generated by the inhibition of my own expression of love, triggered by the thought that this person didn’t love me? Could the lack of the expression of love in fact have been the cause? Is it possible to feel lonely in a moment in which you are expressing love for someone else (romantic or otherwise, but genuine)? I think no. Is it possible to feel lonely in a moment in which you are receiving love from someone else? I think yes.

Then, generally, how important is it for me to experience that the loved I have expressed has been received? Imagining a situation in which I am giving love to someone and they are not accepting it, I don’t feel lonely. That feeling only comes if I turn that into an experience of being unloved by them. The love I have for them cancels out the lack of love from them, if I manage to maintain it through their rejection.

Why is it that my love for others is stifled when I experience being unloved? It feels like a kind of stinginess – like I can’t be bothered giving to other people if I can’t have what I want. My experience when I first realised the infatuee didn’t care about me was one of complete single-mindedness. I could hardly think about anything else and felt unequal to working or anything other than obsessing. I wonder how much the chemical component of infatuation contributed to this? Like hunger can become overwhelming. Maybe a chemically driven obsession did overwhelm me and limit my ability to love others. But then, loneliness occurs without infatuation. Is it that I normally do feel unloved when love I express is not received, triggering the thought that there is no point in expressing love and a vicious circle of being unloved and unloving?

My feeling of loneliness was furthered I think by a perceived paucity of people to love and be loved by – or even simply to have a connection with. If I open myself, I notice beautiful warm faces everywhere and that blows away the loneliness. If I create the belief in myself of an abundance of people to love and connect with, I don’t feel lonely anymore.

Mum, how does this fit with your experience of loneliness as a child? Is it possible that it was triggered by a perception of a lack of people to love – or even the reality of that lack?

What I have gotten out of this is that giving my attention to other people, focussing on loving them, having them feel loved and appreciated when they are around me and relating to the world as a place abundant with loveable people is – for me – an antidote to loneliness.

Just as an aside, isn’t it interesting and funny that the word infatuation looks like “in a fatuous state”!?