About a half-a-year after my relationsihp with G. failed, I realized I wasn’t faring very well trying to get past her, and so at my sister’s suggestion, I decided to go see a counselor. In one of my sessions with this man, the topic came up that perhaps my issue was not merely all about my losing G. as an ideal and friend, but that I also was simply suffering from a fear of loneliness. At the time, I scoffed inside at the suggestion. I thought, “I’ve been alone for years. Certainly I haven’t felt a hurt like this just because I feared being alone.”

Thinking about that relationship over the last year, though, and the pain from its loss has helped to add some perspective to my thinking. I certainly hated losing G. as a person in my life because she looked like everything I could hope for in a woman (beautiful, godly, devoted, serving, etc.), and I wanted to be around all of that in her as much as I could. But what I experienced by her disappearance that also darkened the loss and added to the hurt was a movement from comfortable closeness to her and her family- which had created a web of attachments to people I loved and wanted to go forward with- to an expulsion where I was back all alone again. A seismic shift had happened in my heart, in my desires and hopes, in my network of valued relationships. I was back alone again.

Charlotte Brontë said “The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.” “Loneliness is the human condition”, Janet Fitch writes. The reality is, loneliness is a part of every person’s life, and it doesn’t matter whether we are single or not. Single people feel it because they face the reality of their solitariness day by day. But perhaps worse is the married man and woman who, supposedly join in heart and hopes, live in separation and isolation as well. Loneliness is not just the single’s state, just as intimacy is not just reserved for the married. Anyone can be deeply alone. Be different, be good, be a leader, be bad, be unique, be wealthy, be poor: any of these can bring one to a state of isolation.

The hard part is that loneliness brings a pain to the heart that is so unique and so deeply felt that it can undo the physically strong and the mentally mighty. Loneliness hurts in a psychic way that is all its own, as almost a negative pain. “Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there,” Joss Whedon pens. “Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds (John Powell).” In The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford wrote “We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.”

I have grown to accept some of my counselor’s suggestion about what really eats at me, under the pain of losing this woman I adored. It is the pain of simply being lonely- and having been in this place for much of my life.

Why do we permit ourselves to remain so alone when we hunger for connection and companionship? Mother Theresa said it well: “The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved.” Perhaps feeling unloved, we submit to the idea that feeling unloved means we may not actually be loved, and we choose to circle the wagons in our heart, and protect what meager love resources we think we have. We ultimately choose it- out of fear, or out of hurt. Steinbeck observes in Mice and Men, “Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”

However, an irony of the heart lies in the fact that if we will accept the loneliness- if we will let ourselves roll in its tides and not panic- we will discover solitude, and have a great opportunity to learn some of the most important lessons in life about ourselves. We learn about who we are and what we’re made of as we trek through the dark desert. We discover resourcefulness and self-reliance and patience.

“Solitude is the soil in which genius is planted, creativity grows, and legends bloom; faith in oneself is the rain that cultivates a hero to endure the storm, and bare the genesis of a new world, a new forest.”
― Mike Norton

Perhaps more importantly, if we go through loneliness to its end, we realize we are not alone in it, and that others are there in it, or have been in it. And we also realize we are capable of meeting others in deeper and fuller ways because of it.

“The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart’s history.”
― Stefan Zweig

Hopefully, though, we realize that the only way out of loneliness is to return to loving others. And to the deep truth that we need others in our life. Loneliness can prepare us to love deeply and fully.

“The only time you are not alone is when you forget yourself and reach out in love — the lines of self blur, and just for a wild, flickering moment you experience the miracle of other.

And now you know the secret.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

I can now acknowledge that my counselor was onto something, bringing up this loneliness thing as a probable source of pain. I can understand it now, how it would amplify a relational loss.

At least I can call it by a name now, which is a first step in dealing with it.