There’s a kind of loneliness that’s surprisingly difficult to explain: the kind you can feel when you’re surrounded by people.
You go out with friends, join in conversations, have people who care about you, and perhaps you’re even the one who organises get-togethers. From the outside, nobody would imagine you feel lonely, would they? And yet, you come home feeling as though you’ve spent hours in other people’s company without really connecting with anyone. You might even feel exhausted, although you struggle to explain quite why.
If you try to talk about it, someone will probably suggest going out more, meeting new people or joining a group. I have no doubt they mean well. In fact, I suspect you and I have probably offered similar advice at some point. But there’s a small problem with it: it assumes what you’re missing is company, when you’ve just explained that company isn't the problem.
Being around people isn't the same as feeling connected
We tend to talk about loneliness as though it were a matter of numbers. How many friends we have, how many messages we receive or how often we leave the house. But loneliness doesn't quite work like that. Things are rarely so straightforward.
You can enjoy your own company without feeling lonely. Equally, you can have a fairly busy social life and still long for a relationship where you can speak without constantly choosing your words, share something that matters to you or simply feel understood.
That distinction matters because, when we confuse loneliness with a lack of social contact, we can end up looking for solutions that don't address what we actually need.
And I'm not suggesting that every relationship needs to be deep or emotionally intimate. We have friends who share our interests, colleagues we laugh with and people whose company we genuinely enjoy without feeling any need to tell them our life story. Those relationships matter too. We don't need to turn every conversation into a personal confession for it to be worthwhile.
The difficulty comes when, despite having people around us, we feel there's nobody with whom we can share certain important parts of ourselves. That can be a particularly painful kind of loneliness, partly because it's so difficult for other people to recognise.
The effort of belonging
Sometimes that distance has something to do with what we do to fit in. We learn which opinions make people uncomfortable, which parts of our personality are better received and which things we'd rather keep to ourselves. To some extent, we all adapt how we relate to others depending on the situation. We don't speak to our friends in quite the same way we would in a work meeting, and that doesn't necessarily mean we're pretending to be someone else.
But for some people, that adaptation takes a considerable amount of effort. It may happen when we feel different from those around us, when we live between cultures or languages, when we've had experiences that are difficult to explain, or when we've spent years feeling that certain parts of ourselves are simply too complicated for other people.
And here's an interesting contradiction: sometimes we manage to gain acceptance precisely because we've learned to hide the things we're afraid others won't accept. It's as though we gradually show only the parts of ourselves that fit most comfortably, and if we do that for long enough, we can begin to lose sight of what we actually want, feel or need. In a way, we start to disappear into other people's expectations.
That doesn't always happen, of course. But when it does, being included may not bring the sense of belonging we hoped for. People may know us, appreciate us and even genuinely love us, while remaining unaware of important parts of ourselves that we've learned to keep out of those relationships.
It's also worth remembering that difficulties connecting with others don't always come from personal insecurity. Sometimes our circumstances, our environment or the relationships available to us simply don't offer what we need. Not everything has to become an individual problem that we must solve by working on ourselves.
So what can we do about that loneliness?
I don't believe there's a simple, universal answer, and I'm rather suspicious of anything that promises to resolve complicated human experiences in three easy steps. You know the sort of thing: “Follow me and transform your life in five days!” Apparently, there's a solution for everything. If only life were that simple.
For some people, it may help to find more opportunities to meet others. For someone else, what matters might be spending more time with an existing friend, finding spaces where people share their interests or gradually feeling able to express parts of themselves they usually keep hidden.
Others may discover that they don't need to expand their social circle at all. Perhaps what they need is to become more comfortable with the fact that they genuinely enjoy their own company. We don't all need the same amount of social contact, and preferring to spend time alone doesn't mean there's a problem to be fixed.
It may also mean recognising that certain relationships, however important they are and however much affection there is, cannot offer everything we need. That doesn't automatically make them bad relationships, nor does it mean we should walk away from them. We can appreciate what a relationship brings to our lives without expecting it to meet every one of our needs.
And if that feeling of loneliness persists, causes distress or begins to affect everyday life, talking to someone we trust or seeking professional support may help us understand what's happening.
What I wouldn't do is assume that someone feels lonely because they simply aren't making enough effort to connect with other people. Wouldn't life be easy if things worked like that? Loneliness can have many different explanations, and not all of them can be addressed by doing more of the same.
Perhaps one of the most important things we can begin to recognise is the difference between relationships in which we're present and those in which we genuinely feel we have a place. Because sometimes we don't need more people around us. We need ways of relating to others that don't require us to leave so much of ourselves out of the conversation.