Coping With Loneliness (In & Out of Relationship)

I recently had a conversation with a friend about how ironically lonely it could be to have polyamorous relationships. Or, perhaps more specifically, even to be part of the polyamorous community. Not to mention how hard coping with that loneliness could be.

They agreed, and offered the observation that being on the edge of something can be lonelier than not being involved at all. It strikes me that if those of us who can theoretically have as many relationships as we want struggle with loneliness, it must be a function of something deeper than our connections with others.

I can see echoes of this all over my personal life: how much harder it is when most of my poly friends have relationships and I don’t; how I’d much rather know quite a bit about my lovers’ or partners’ other connections than letting my mind fill in the blanks; how much I struggle with the grey areas of being on the edges of relationship.

Avoiding Loneliness

The thing is, it’s so easy to not be alone. Or rather, it’s so easy to take small actions that will temporarily quench the loneliness we feel, but that don’t have the depth or the connection or the commitment or presence to really feel satisfying. I am talking, of course, about posting on Instagram, swiping on Tinder, snooping on Fetlife… Whatever our particular preference for non-committal, at-arms-length connection. 

I should be clear that it’s not necessarily the medium here that’s the problem. These channels can be extremely useful when used mindfully. But their ubiquitousness, their lack of friction, and the deliberate way they demand our attention create a situation where we can find it incredibly hard to get our needs really met, while believing we have over and over again. 

I have one person in my life who is definitely not a texter. At first, I was a little disappointed at how uneasy I felt not to be in as frequent contact with him as I am with other people I’m close to. I could feel stories starting to play out in my mind about how it’s only me that they don’t text, and that there was something wrong with me. Because I didn’t want this to build to resentment, I decided to knock this on the head and bring it up with him.

After much hand-wringing over the best way to word it I blurted out, 

“You’re a bad texter!” 

Not my most eloquent moment. But it did start a conversation about our different communication styles, and for me it raised an issue that has bubbled away for a little while in my mind, about how I can tend to seek validation through less-committal forms of communication like texting and social media engagement. I’ve had friendships and relationships that have involved texting every day, and I remember noticing how obligatory this communication sometimes felt, how much more we had to actually talk about after giving ourselves, occasionally, some space from one another.

My bad-texting friend, on the other hand, prefers to call. This means that, every so often, we will commit to being present with each other throughout a conversation, the unspoken agreement being that we will say goodbye and end the exchange explicitly when either of us would prefer to be doing something else. I’m down for more of this style of talking. 

I can remember when texting and MySpace were novelties. When most of my socialising happened in person or on a landline. I wonder whether I still had the same need for validation and reassurance then; I suspect it’s a need that has grown with these new communication styles, and the unwitting voyeurism that Facebook and Instagram coaxes out of us. 

It would be easy for me to talk about turning your phone off more often, or deleting apps, or all the other methods for combatting this that so many people have said better than me before. While useful for interrupting habitual behaviour perhaps, these solutions feel like they are only treating symptoms.

How do we learn to be satisfied with ourselves, confident that we are enough, and able to feel secure without needing to seek validation through constant contact with others?

So How Do We Learn to Cope with Loneliness?

Roan Coughtry recently wrote about how we can find this sense of security in ourselves by being unapologetically ourselves: overcoming a fear of abandonment by never abandoning our own needs and wants. Allowing ourselves to be seen and heard. I certainly know that this is something I would like to be better at, and I wonder whether developing my capacity for being with the discomfort of asking for what I want might help me to feel more secure.

I’m also aware that it’s a fear of abandonment and loneliness that often prevents me from speaking my wants in the first place. It seems to me that the only way to break such a pattern is by changing my behaviour, and the only behaviour in this instance that it would be helpful to change would be to be more honest with others in speaking up. 

There’s another piece to this too, though. A deeper questioning of what it is that we are asking others to do for us in our loneliness: to distract us? To reassure us? To hear our insecurities?

I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with requesting these things, as long as we understand what we’re doing and speak about them honestly. A process of noticing what it is we want to be distracted from, what we need reassuring about, which insecurities we need to speak. Otherwise, our loneliness can overwhelm us and leave us chasing after something that never quite helps – such as more frequent and superficial contact with someone – because we’re unwilling to look at the real fears underneath it.