Am I the Only One Who Feels Lonely as Shit?
I woke up feeling a little different today.
It began as it usually does –with me making myself an omelet and a coffee.
But then I went to my room to sit down and do a reading in preparation for my class later. I looked at the page and the first sentence. I couldn’t understand why, but I was looking at that sentence and my brain just wouldn’t let me read it. It was kind of like when you leave your flat, walk down the street, and momentarily forget why you left your flat in the first place. And it was accompanied by this awful pit in my stomach.
I tried the second sentence. Same thing.
I skipped a page, and I tried again. Nothing was going in. I knew what I had to do, but I just couldn’t so I gave up.
I decided to go for a walk to clear my head a bit. I walked past Sally’s Quad, took a right down the Scores, and headed towards East Sands. I was walking across that bridge that connects the harbor area to main beach area. As I walked down it, a woman passed me with her golden retriever. I don’t even have a golden retriever. I have a yellow lab. But all I could think about was how much I missed her and how much I wanted to give her a massive belly rub. I felt like giving up right there and booking a ticket home.
I decided to get coffee with a friend. It cheered me up immensely, and it felt good to just shoot the shit with someone. We walked out of Costa and said goodbye to each other. I had this overwhelming urge to hug her. But St Andrews had a bunch of Covid cases this past week, and I didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable so I just waved.
I had a meeting that afternoon over Microsoft Teams for a research project I’m a part of. Seeing the faces of my other team members, I thought to myself, I would quite like to meet these other people. Which is weird because I usually don’t like meeting other people.
My friend (who lives alone and is part of our extended household) came over to listen to a lecture in my kitchen. I needed to get some work done but did not want to work in my room alone so I dragged my entire desk down the hallway and into the kitchen. I told my friend to get off my couch. In spite of his protests I pushed the couch into the corner. I moved a couple tables around and pushed my desk against the wall.
I looked at my friend. He was staring at me like I had lost my marbles. Maybe I had lost my mind. I had been feeling weird all day. I’ve never been known to rearrange the furniture in my flat. Was I turning into a middle-aged woman? But then it occurred to me. It was the simplest reason for why I was in a funk. Maybe it’s because my experience this semester has made me feel lonely as shit.
I came back to St Andrews in late-July to do an online internship. I was living with a friend who was also doing an online internship. The town was practically empty, hardly anyone was back, and there were no events to speak of– but for some reason I loved it. It’s only been since this semester started that I have begun to feel this way.
How is this possible? Now that university has started, I can get a pint with friends, go to soccer practice, and discuss issues that I am passionate about in class. This summer, it was just me and my friend doing our online internships in a ghost town.
It’s because loneliness is a feeling of relativity. University of Chicago social neuroscientists Hawkley and Cacioppo write that “Loneliness is synonymous with perceived social isolation, not with objective social isolation. People can live relatively solitary lives and not feel lonely, and conversely, they can live an ostensibly rich social life and feel lonely nevertheless”.
It is how we view and perceive our relationships that determine how we view loneliness. There are two definition of loneliness that are prevalent in the literature today. One is the experience of suffering from contact deficits. The other, and this is the one I believe is relevant to those who are in university right now, is the social cognitive definition that psychologists Pinquart and Sorensen define as the “an experienced discrepancy between the kinds of interpersonal relationships the individuals perceive themselves as having and the kind of relationships they would like to have”.
Ask yourself, currently do the expectations you have of your relationships mirror how your relationships unfold in everyday life? I believe being in university creates the perfect conditions for answering no to this question.
This summer, when I was in St Andrews with just one friend, most people my age were stuck at home with their families, yearning for social interactions with others their age. I felt lucky to be in the situation I was in with someone I enjoy spending time with.
Currently, I am experiencing what is meant to be one of the most social times of a human being’s life – university. But every little interaction falls just a little short of how I expect it to, and us university students experience a hundred of these little interactions a day. I feel uncomfortable hugging my friend goodbye in public. I can’t lean over to a peer in a lecture and ask them a question. If I’m at the gym, I can’t ask a stranger for a spot. It’s death by a thousand cuts.
Am I the only one who feels lonely as shit? Why does no one talk about loneliness? In 1980, social psychologists Russell, Peplau, and Cutrona showed through a clinical research study that there is a negative correlation (r = -.2) between loneliness and social desirability. Subsequent studies have backed up this finding. The point being, we don’t speak about loneliness because chances are it will just make us more lonely.
So here it is. I have a message for everyone else at university right now. I feel lonely, and I hope you can say that you feel lonely too (if you do). And it’s not because there’s something wrong with you or that you’re a friendless loser. It’s probably because we all have memories of what university used to be like. We all have expectations of our relationships that just can’t be fulfilled right now.
It’s just that our dopamine receptors don’t know that we are in the middle of a pandemic right now.
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Thumbnail Image Credit: andrxahh
Sources:
Martin Pinquart & Silvia Sorensen (2001) Influences on Loneliness in Older Adults: A Meta-Analysis, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 23:4, 245-266, DOI: 10.1207/ S15324834BASP2304_2
Hawkley LC, Cacioppo JT. Loneliness matters: a theoretical and empirical review of consequences and mechanisms. Ann Behav Med. 2010;40(2):218-227. doi:10.1007/s12160-010-9210-8
Russell, D., Peplau, L. A., & Cutrona, C. E. (1980). The revised UCLA Loneliness Scale: Concurrent and discriminant validity evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(3), 472–480. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.39.3.472