I’m 36, and while my love life has been varied and interesting, over the last few years I’ve started to want to settle down. I know it doesn’t happen overnight. But recently it’s been weighing on me more and more. I reminisce about past relationships. I feel hopeless about meeting someone in the future who shares my values.
On the one hand you hear things like “happiness comes from within”, but on the other we are social animals and 99% of us want to feel loved and to love.
There’s no easy answer to loneliness.
Most human beings want someone to talk to, to hang out with, to laugh at jokes with, to eat meals with, to have sex with, to share our problems with, and so on. But with that said, I think one of the great lies of society is that there is a “single special someone” out there for every person that fills all of these roles all of the time. A lot of things (monogamy, marriage, home ownership, etc.) are mere social constructs, and tied to each of them are certain expectations and pressures that society puts on us, and that we put on ourselves.
That’s not inherently wrong, of course, but what I’m trying to get at is that a lot of the things we worry about–things like “settling down” at a certain age, the fear of living or dying alone, etc., are all just imaginary concepts, which in many cases don’t even reflect reality. You could finally “settle down” with the “right person”, and still wind up divorced and single in your 40s or 50s. Similarly, you could meet the love of your life and build a great life together, but still end up “dying alone” because they go first or you end up separated for some reason. That’s a bit of a morbid way of saying that the fears you have of being alone are not something that will be solved if you “settle down”, and that being in a committed relationship or legal contract like marriage is no guarantee of happiness or fulfillment. (I’d argue that you’re much better off being single than you are being married to the wrong person for years and years.)
To make matters worse, regular human “courtship” and dating practices have been tainted by tech companies and dating apps which are inherently flawed and a superficial, one-size-fits-all solution that can’t possibly work for every type of person in every context and culture. Dating apps are toxic and letting us down as a human race, and our society mostly sucks these days, but I digress.
Ultimately I think what we all really need is to (a) be happy and comfortable alone, doing meaningful hobbies that we enjoy, seeing places and doing the things that we want to do when we have the time, etc., and (b) to find people in our lives to spend our lives with, be it friends, family, lovers, online communities, offline circles, talking to the people at your local places, and so on.
It’s a mistake to put all of your eggs in one basket or to hope for 1 person out of >7 billion to solve all of our problems with loneliness and social interaction. Be good to people, talk to people, go find people to have sex with, meet up with your sibling or old friend for lunch every once in a while, build up every relationship, big and small, and you can chip away at your own loneliness and the loneliness of others at the same time. Like the song says “we get by with a little help from our friends”, so be a good friend and build good friendships, because there is more to life than lovers and partners. (And, of course, appreciate your alone time too, the time when you can do exactly what you want and experience true freedom.)
That’s what makes sense to me and makes me feel better when I’m lonely, at least.