Alone Again

Or how we cause our greatest fears to come true

Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash

I slid into bed, laughing, with the boy I’d only just met several hours earlier. We had a room in a hotel near MEPS, the local intake facility for the US military. Or more accurately, I had a room with another female and he had a room with another male, but we’d swapped roommates.

I was 21 and I’d never kissed a boy before. I’d never held a boy’s hand. I’d never been emotionally vulnerable with anyone. But as we’d waited in line, we’d started talking and I could see he was demonstrably interested in me – maybe because we both knew we were shipping out the next day, so why not? Whatever the case, he was friendly. He made eye contact. He looked at me. He made me laugh. And he made the first move.

We spent a chaste night together, probably due to inexperience and nerves about the future. But I never forgot the moment because it marked so many firsts: the first time I’d ever received unmistakable attention from a male (at least that I’d noticed and understood); the first time I’d kissed a man; the first time I’d hugged or held hands or made out. Up until that point, I’d always, always been alone.

Being alone is one of my greatest fears. Yes, it’s the sort of fear that probably pretty much everyone shares. But I’m not talking about a fear of being alone that can push a person to settle for living with anyone who might be willing to do so. I’m afraid of it for probably a different reason than many: I’m deeply comfortable with being alone. Isolation is very familiar to me. Throw in the fact that life is so much less complicated when you don’t share it with someone, and it’s very easy to be okay with being alone. Life is simpler in solitude. You only need to consider yourself and what pleases you on any given day.

You know what terrifies me? Being so accustomed to solitude that one day, I look up and realize twenty years have gone by since I last had a romantic relationship, since I last had an intimate relationship, with anyone. I recently read a Substack essay in which a woman revealed exactly this and tossed up the benefits/disadvantages of a partner. “Maybe that part of my life is over,” she mused. And when you approach it that way, when you compare the benefits of solitude to the downsides of a partnership, doesn’t it almost always seem better to be single? Relationships take work.

But my God, I don’t want to live a sexless, passion-free life simply because it’s comfortable. I don’t want to live it because it’s more convenient, because it requires less compromise. A sort of natural outcome of struggling to connect with others is an underlying belief that one is not lovable. And this is exactly the kind of belief that becomes self-fulfilling. If you don’t believe you’re worthy of love, of intimacy, of close relationships (whether platonic or otherwise), then you’ll push everyone away who might indeed love you – right?

So I want to take stock of how my own beliefs, ideas, or stories created an outcome of solitude in my life. I want to locate this outcome, then trace the ways that I contributed to ensuring I would be alone. It’s only when we identify our patterns that we can change them.

As a teenager, I had virtually no interaction with boys and hardly any friends at all, really. Part of this was because I moved to a small town in the United States, the kind that provided a setting for ‘80s movies like Footloose. The kind where everyone knows each other and you spend the first day of high school baffled as to how everyone seems to know you’re new. Although I’d determined that I would not be adhering to my Christian sect’s strict requirements for female dress, at least not outside of church, I still struggled to fit in socially. I had one close friend who lived nearby and also went to my church.

I began taking classes at university when I was 15, which meant I was now surrounded by 20-year-olds who understandably wanted nothing to do with me. Once I transferred over to a community college full-time, the number of daily interactions with anyone my own age began to drop off a cliff. The one element of my life that linked me to my peers was a part-time job at Subway and it was there that I interacted with other male workers who were at least closer to being peers.

I remember having a crush on one and, after thinking it over, being thoroughly confused as to how someone went from acquaintance to boyfriend.¹ I knew there was some mysterious connection, some process through which this transformation occurred. There was a bridge that led from Point A to Point B, but I had no idea how to cross it. You didn’t just ask someone to be your boyfriend, did you? That seemed…mortifying. Horrifying. Embarrassing. I could never.

So I did nothing. I sat back, and waited to be noticed.

I didn’t date. I didn’t go to a single high school dance.² I didn’t seek out experiences with my peer group (if anything, I looked for other groups to join – adults who didn’t want a teenager hanging around). I didn’t flirt. I didn’t approach. I didn’t make conversation. I didn’t express interest. I didn’t do anything.

I just waited.

Eventually, I did get noticed – not in my teens, not as an undergraduate, but in the military where I was an immediate minority. I was also fairly tall, which made me stand out physically, and fairly fit, which made me stand out in other ways. All of a sudden, I was dealing with an onslaught of male attention that made my head spin.

During boot camp, the other girls would talk about their past experiences with boyfriends and I guess a few noticed that I never said anything. There’d be groups sitting around talking in hushed tones about this or that, glancing about and snickering when they saw me. Since most girls had enlisted after high school, not university,³ I was among the oldest and it bothered me that I was so obviously an outlier. That’s it, I thought. I’m figuring this junk out.

And so I did, with the first Marine who paid me attention. He was from Alabama and had the kind of accent I’d never heard in real life before. He seemed nice enough and we hung out after training for a couple weeks. Then he got drunk, took me to a hotel room at Pensacola beach, and I perfunctorily lost my virginity. I felt vaguely obligated to tell him that it was the first time I’d had sex – that’s what women in books seemed to do, after all. But when I did, he repeatedly told me he didn’t believe me, which irritated me. “I don’t care what you believe,” I said. “I’m just telling you a fact.” When he went off the next morning to continue drinking, I decided he was annoying and I didn’t want to see him anymore. I don’t think he noticed when I left.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I was not interested in dating. I found it too hard to spend time getting to know someone and building a relationship only to have it fall apart within a matter of weeks. I wanted someone in my life, someone who cared about me, and they all just seemed to find reasons to leave. They’d tell me, “You weren’t demonstrative enough,” and I’d think, “What if I had been? Would you have stayed?”

I didn’t realize until I was much older that just because someone cites you as the reason for their actions doesn’t necessarily mean what they did was really about you. They typically have their own reasons. Rejection is often impersonal, and it certainly isn’t a verdict on your worth. But that was my pattern: I hung onto relationships because they were hard for me to make in the first place, so I didn’t really learn to get better at making them. I hung on because I believed men when they said I was the reason they weren’t interested any longer. I wanted to show them they were wrong about me.

And so I began to think that for some reason I couldn’t quite parse, men didn’t like me. They definitely liked how I looked. They wanted to have sex with me – I was propositioned constantly, ridiculously. Men in my class would greet me every morning by asking when I was going to sleep with them and it always turned out they were actually serious, which was baffling in more ways than one. But they didn’t like me as a person. As soon as they got to know me better, they tended to drift away.

The same issue appeared to play out with close friends, despite logistical reasons that were more self-explanatory. In every place I lived, I’d make one close friend whom I’d spend a great deal of time with wandering the city, meeting up after work and spending our weekends together. Inevitably, they’d move or I’d move and we’d fall out of touch. I’d make an effort to maintain the relationship, but that effort was never quite reciprocated to the same extent. They didn’t appear to think I was all that memorable or important, whereas I would miss them greatly.

I could’t figure out why it was so difficult to keep people in my life but I knew that once my friends left, I was lonely. Once my relationship ended, I was lonely. In my marriage, too, I was lonely. The more my husband got to know me, the less he seemed to like me. He’d known me better than anyone else and was clearly uninterested in sticking around (we eventually smoothed things over long enough to have a child, then move on).

Over time, the emotional complexity of my long-term relationships began to overwhelm me. It was too difficult to unravel who felt what and why. Faced with uncertainty over what was actually happening in a relationship at any given time, I repeatedly found myself at a loss for what to do.

Once again, I did nothing. There was no therapy. I read no books. I sought no advice. I opened up to no one. And over time, I made peace with being alone.

Still, more than one person told me that they could sense a sadness in me.

This past week, I’ve been reflecting on my fear of being alone and how it may be shaping my behaviour – how I might be behaving in ways that ensure I continue to be alone. I can see that I’ve lacked a support network, whether in the form of parents, friends, or just contacts, for much of my life. I can see that even when I’ve joined various communities, most often for sports or hiking, I tend to be stand-offish. I don’t greet people, I don’t invite them to do things afterward. I think I still carry this belief that for some mysterious reason, I am not particularly likeable.⁴ So I generally don’t reach out, because I figure no one will want to hang out with me anyway.

These past few years, I’ve been trying to act differently in my life. I hired a therapist. I read books and listened to podcasts. I’ve pushed myself to open up, whether to a partner or a family member or even to myself in writing. I’ve tried not to be so accepting of solitude, but these lifelong patterns can be hard to shift.

Here’s one thing I’m going to do that makes me feel less alone this week: join an Al-Anon group for friends/family of alcoholics.⁵ I hate the idea of sharing with strangers. I don’t like exposing myself emotionally, although I’ve been getting plenty of practice on this Substack. But I’m going to push myself to show up, to relax, to make connections, and to start building a sort of support network. I’m going to nudge myself to assume other people are reasonably interested in me, and to respond by being reasonably interested in them. I’m going to look for shared experiences as points of connection. I’m not going to accept simply being alone in my feelings about the chaotic ups and downs of core relationships in my life.

When I was in London a few weeks ago, I stayed with a retiree who liked things just so. There were rules for virtually everything; she lived a certain way, and she wanted her AirBnB guests to fit seamlessly into her life. She told me, too, that she’d never had a relationship last longer than two years. She recounted the hardships of raising her son alone.

I think its easy for the general value – or at least desirability – of an intimate, long-term relationship to be subsumed by larger discussions about gender dynamics. But as I watched this aging woman moving through her day locked in her rigid rhythms, worried about who will care for her after upcoming surgeries, I thought, This is not what I want. I may be comfortable alone, but I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life. Pushing myself to form connections directly addresses my fear that I’ll continue to avoid them altogether, simply because it’s easier.

So I remind myself that taking action is how I’ll achieve the outcome I want, not telling stories or holding onto beliefs about how I can’t have what I want.

1. This is what happens when you grow up without a television/minimal exposure to popular culture.

2. I was never quite clear if I was allowed to anyway. My parents were slowly relaxing their rules but at that point, I probably wasn’t and didn’t feel like arguing over it.

3. This is the logical thing to do.

4. I wouldn’t say this is necessarily an indication of low self worth. *I* think I’m perfectly likeable…I don’t know what’s wrong with everyone else, but they seem to draw their own conclusions.

5. I’ll throw my father into the category of alcoholic. Although alcohol was never a problem for him, I think everyone would agree that he had significant addiction issues.