Millions of Americans know what it is to be lonely. Their need for satisfying relationships has stimulated a flock of new enterprises in recent years, including singles’ bars, encounter groups, singles’ apartment complexes, and computerized dating services. Even the Christian community has entered the market. An ad in a Christian newspaper assured single Christians that “God did not ordain loneliness” and urged them to subscribe to a monthly publication through which they could supposedly get to “know” other single Christians on four continents. Popular music sounds a constant lament of broken relationships and loneliness in songs like “All By Myself,” “Lonely Street,” “Have You Ever Been Lonely,” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody.”
A fourth of the people questioned in one survey said they felt very lonely or cut off from other people at some time during the preceding few weeks. In another study, 27 per cent of the unmarried women (plus 10 per cent of the married women) and 23 per cent of the unmarried men (plus 6 per cent of the married men) expressed intense loneliness. Almost half of the widows over fifty living in one large metropolitan area said that loneliness was their worst problem. Loneliest of all, researchers find, are elderly men who live alone and are infirm.
For so pervasive a problem, loneliness has received surprisingly little attention from psychologists. A University of California psychologist, Anne Peplau, compiled a bibliography on the topic that as of April, 1977, had only 175 articles, dating back to 1937. Among the first to consider it a distinctive problem were the personality theorists Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Clark Moustakas. Erich Fromm suggested, in 1941, that if society did not meet five basic human needs—the needs for relatedness, transcendence, rootedness, identity, and a frame of orientation—widespread loneliness would result.
The emotional pain of loneliness is often expressed in physical symptoms, such as “an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach,” or nausea. People who are chronically lonely seem to have an underlying anxiety, a fear either of not obtaining or of losing a desired relationship. Loneliness is very often accompanied by depression.
Although loneliness is distinct from grief, there is considerable psychological overlap. The yearning and pining, restless movement, scanning, and focus on the lost person that mark grief are characteristic of loneliness also. The lonely person is highly motivated by his emotional pain to seek out the desired or lost relationship. At the same time he may, because of societal norms, behave in ways that overtly deny his need.
Loneliness seems to involve the feeling of not only wanting another but also not being wanted by another. Anyone who has sat alone in a bustling cafeteria while other people sit together talking and laughing has probably felt for a moment the intertwined twinges of loneliness and wanting to be wanted.
Of course, one needn’t be alone to be lonely. Some people feel intensely lonely even when they’re with others. And to be alone is not necessarily to be lonely.
People of all ages and descriptions experience loneliness. It is not clear, however, whether there are different kinds of loneliness. Do infants and children experience it differently from the elderly? Singles differently from the married?
The psychologist Robert Weiss has suggested that there are at least two basic forms of loneliness: emotional isolation and social isolation. Emotional isolation involves the lack or loss of a psychologically intimate relationship with another person or a very few others. A person can overcome it only by establishing a very similar kind of relationship. This type of loneliness is generally experienced, according to Weiss, as a sense of utter aloneness, whether or not companionship with others is available. Social isolation, on the other hand, is marked more by feelings of being on the margin of life and of aimlessness. The person needs a supportive network of accepting friends who regard him as a member of the network, rather than a specific companion.
A third kind of loneliness might well be added to these: existential loneliness. The person feels his life has no meaning, and he feels alienated from God. Existentialist writers have repeatedly written about the isolation of human beings from the transcendent and from purpose in life. They have painted graphic pictures of fundamentally lonely people.
The lonely person is isolated and unattached. For some reason he is unable to develop significant relationships, or is unable to gain emotional satisfaction from the relationships that are important to him.
Two basic feelings underlie the various forms of loneliness. The first is a lack of the sense of belonging. Not being chosen by others, the lonely person is unsure that he is really wanted by anyone. The second is the feeling that no one understands. The lonely person has either lost or been unable to form relationships in which he can share intimate concerns with another person who is interested, sympathetic, and accepting.
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The loneliness of not feeling accepted and understood may be experienced by married as well as single people. Married persons who become too busy in separate spheres of activity, or who do not talk to each other about deep feelings for fear of being hurt, or who fail to encourage intimate communication, are likely to experience loneliness.
Some people suffer from long-term or chronic loneliness. Others experience short-term or acute loneliness, which is generally associated with a temporary condition, whether biological, interpersonal, or environmental—having moved to a new place, for instance.
Chronic loneliness is often the result of negative childhood experiences. The child as he develops has three fundamental needs that must be met if he is not to experience this. He needs (1) to feel attached, (2) to feel accepted, and (3) to acquire adequate social skills.
Only in recent years have psychologists come to realize that to form bonds of affection or attachment, an infant needs more from a mother-figure than the satisfaction of his physical needs. The psychiatrist Rene Spitz found that over one-third of a group of babies who were in an institution and did not receive adequate cuddling died within two years. The children who survived were drastically retarded in mental, motor, and social skills, even though they had had adequate physical care. Other psychologists have found that infants seem to form specific attachments to their caretakers within their first five months. Some psychologists have suggested that an important cause of crying during the first three months of life is loneliness. This kind of crying promptly stops when the infant is picked up and cuddled, whereas crying because of physical need does not.
A young child may be severely affected by being separated from his mother. Short-term separation for two weeks or more may cause the child to experience grief. Upon meeting the mother again, the child remains emotionally distant and detached for hours or even days. When he gets over this he is likely to cling to his mother, apparently afraid he will lose her again.
The longer-term effects of disrupted attachment are slowly being understood. The British psychologist John Bowlby has suggested that many psychological difficulties seem to be associated with a long-lasting impairment of attachment. He found that the person who develops a psychopathic personality or a depression syndrome is very likely to have suffered a disruption of affectional bonds during childhood. We can readily assume that this disruption would lead also to chronic feelings of loneliness.
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If this is so, then we need to learn much more about how to compensate for the disruptions caused by death, divorce, and out-of-home care during early childhood. There is now one divorce for every two marriages in the United States. In 1974 the parents of more than a million children were divorced. One-parent households increased in number from almost three million in 1966 to almost five million in 1975. Child abuse, which can certainly disrupt a child’s attachment bonds, has increased, and this is undoubtedly feeding into the problem of chronic loneliness. The long-term effects of institutional child-care and shifting a child from babysitter to babysitter because a family moves or due to other factors need to be explored; these things, too, seem likely to play some part in chronic loneliness.
The second fundamental need of the developing child is acceptance. Parents communicate acceptance or rejection in many ways: by whether they meet his basic needs without lengthy delays; by the way in which the child is held, caressed, and talked to; by the frequency and form of discipline; by the amount of spontaneous affection they show; by how much they interact with the child.
Parental rejection may destroy the attachment bond if extreme, but more often it handicaps the child by damaging his self-esteem. When the child receives mostly negative responses from the people who are most significant in his life, a foundation of doubt and insecurity is laid. The child who feels rejected by his parents is likely to conclude that he’s not good enough to be wanted by anybody. He is afraid to approach others for fear of further rejection. Persons with low self-esteem are less open in relating to others than are people with normal self-esteem, and they are more likely to have their feelings hurt. Furthermore, they feel too “weak” to overcome their problems. Either they assume that nobody would want anything to do with them because they don’t have anything to offer, or they behave in ways that tend to repel others. Rejection by parents also hinders people from forming the basic trust that is essential to an intimate relationship.
The third developmental factor important for avoiding chronic loneliness is the acquiring of adequate social skills. Children with disrupted affectional bonds and those with low self-esteem find it hard to develop the social skills that enable them to carry on intimate relationships.
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The person who is rejected by his peers because of his inadequate social skills may focus his efforts on tasks and things rather than people. Instead of developing a feeling of self-worth in a network of accepting relationships, he tries to gain acceptance by what he can achieve and acquire. The result is further isolation and loneliness, because self-esteem based on this kind of comparison is inevitably competitive. The task-centered person is playing a serious game of oneupmanship, and so he finds it increasingly difficult to trust others. Instead, he is likely to see them as objects to be manipulated.
Up to this point we have been looking at individual conditions, the particular psychological factors that may hinder a person in relating to others. The prevalence of loneliness in modern America suggests the need to look also at some social conditions that are a part of the backdrop of our life. I believe that the following all contribute to loneliness in modern America: technology, television, urbanization, and the acceptance of certain Renaissance values.
The desire to increase production and profit has motivated the development of an impersonal technology and a commodity-orientation. The individual has become a means to an end, a production tool. Although this orientation is not new in our society, we have done something new with it: we have taken it into our personal lives. The technological emphasis on efficiency—on maximum output at minimum time and cost—has been extended to human interaction. When efficiency and the accompanying goals of convenience and comfort become internalized as guiding values, human relationships become more superficial. Deep, satisfying relationships take time, effort, and sometimes pain to develop; the process may at times be inconvenient, uncomfortable, inefficient.
The increasing need for specialists in our complex technological system fosters further isolation. Persons who are not specialists in the same thing may find it hard to talk to one another, and so loneliness increases.
Television, too, enhances separation. Family members may sit beside one another for hours every day without communicating. There is little talk and virtually no play in millions of homes. Family members can hardly feel a part of an intimate network of understanding and caring if they seldom interact directly.
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Further, some recent studies have shown that heavy TV viewers tend to have distorted pictures of social reality and are more distrustful, more fearful of others. In both the ads and the programs, those who get the rewards are the ones who are the most scheming, unattached, competitive, and coolly ruthless—these are hardly the characteristics that nourish deep, trusting relationships.
Urbanization is another heavy contributor to society-wide loneliness. One may feel surrounded by too many people; one reacts by shutting them out and by zealously guarding privacy. In midtown Manhattan, to take an example, an office worker could encounter 220,000 persons within a ten-minute radius of his office. We can be stimulated only so much; then we try to cope by filtering out stimuli. The people-weary worker may at the end of the day feel he wants to escape from people, even his family. He may ignore the stranger who needs help. He may avert his glance when encountering another person and not say hello.
Related to urbanization is the phenomenon of mobility. Modern transportation, the rise of large national and international corporations, and the economic lure of the city have combined to make moving a common experience for Americans. Each year forty million of them change their residence, according to estimates, and the average person will move at least fourteen times during his lifetime. Between 1970 and 1975, almost half the people in America moved. Mobility not only disrupts existing friendships but also makes people more hesitant to try to develop new ones. It is becoming unusual for people to have “old friends” whom they see regularly. People may be reluctant to involve themselves with newcomers to their neighborhood because either they or the newcomers will probably move in the next two years, and the effort doesn’t seem worth it.
The last social condition I cited as a contributor to loneliness had to do with values. A decreasing consensus of values is due in part to secularization, but is related also to the fact that metropolitan areas are international centers. Tolerance of the pluralism doesn’t cover up the inability of people to understand one another at intimate levels of value commitment.
On the other hand, in America at least, there does seem to be agreement about four Renaissance-derived values: independence, individualism, freedom, and competitiveness. The problem is that these are values that separate people.
Even under ideal developmental, biological, and sociological conditions, people experience loneliness. It may come at a point of crisis, in a moment of solitude, or at the point of considering one’s death. It is experienced as a sense of personal insignificance in relation to the universe, an inability to find meaning for life that transcends the immediate, or a feeling that God either does not exist or does not personally relate to human beings. It first appears at the point at which we recognize our separate existence and exert our self-will. Much of the current love affair between Americans and Eastern religions seems to be an attempt to overcome existential loneliness, to find unity with the Divine, to transcend separateness, to find peace with life.
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An adequate understanding of existential loneliness begins in the Creation account. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness …’ ” (Gen. 1:26). God is interpersonal. And man, created in God’s image, is also an interpersonal being. Later “the LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him’ ” (Gen. 2:18). Although God obviously saw that human psychological needs required another person “corresponding to” (New American Standard Version) him, He made man a social being so that He might ultimately satisfy the need. Loneliness, therefore, reminds the human being of a fundamental emptiness in his life.
When sin entered into human experience, the basic bond between man and God was broken. From the point that Adam and Eve chose to violate their relationship with God they became self-centered and narcissistic. Human experience became forever marked by a divisive self-centeredness. Adam and Eve no longer belonged in the intimate way they had previously. They no longer belonged in the Garden, and the sinfulness that separated them from God disrupted their own union. They became defensive and tried to pass the blame. They were no longer able to communicate trustfully with one another on the deepest levels.
Once belonging, trust, and understanding were lost, the specter of competitiveness entered in. Cain competed with Abel. Self-will separated him from God; social comparison separated him from Abel. His murder of his brother permanently separated him; he was condemned to a life of wandering and loneliness rather than death. Even this was more than he could bear, however, and he pleaded with God for a place of refuge where he could belong and be safe.
The removal of God as the center of human relationship was the precursor of today’s secularization. In order to cope with sin without repenting, modern man has attempted to get rid of God by pronouncing him dead. But this attempt plunges man deeper into the depths of loneliness and despair without remedy. Instead of turning to God in repentance and having life’s most fundamental relationship restored, the secular person casts about for substitutes that will allow him to retain his narcissism but overcome his loneliness and alienation. Drugs, alcohol, sex, and marathon encounter experiences become part of the search, as do T.M., est, and countless other semireligious, semi-psychological trips.
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Sin, however, continues to prevent the non-defensive communion that brings consistent understanding and belonging. The person who denies his sin is continually shocked by the selfishness of those he thought he could trust. Attempts to become transparent are frustrated when openness is met by misunderstanding and rejection. Existential loneliness cannot be overcome by secularism. The essential of unconditional regard is humanly possible only within the confines of a carefully controlled therapeutic setting or between non-intimates. The agape love of God that makes such an intimate union possible is foreign to the person who rejects God.
At the point of separation through sin, the entrance of judgment was inevitable because of the justice of God. Although sin grossly distorted human functioning, traces of God’s image remain. However, judgment became perverted. The standard of judgment became whether or not self-centered personal rights had been violated; hence judgment became the servant of ego-defenses. This is why the path toward emotional intimacy is marked by sensitivity and hurt. This is also why the Scripture is full of exhortations to Christians not to judge one another. God is the only non-defensive judge. Christians are to evaluate and discern and correct, but only on the basis of clear biblical guidelines and in a humble manner. Any other judging, even the twisted use of those biblical guidelines for defensive purposes, will be met by reciprocal judgment.
Repeatedly, the Scriptures exhort Christians to bear with one another, to put on love, and to be united in spirit. This is the picture of a community where people belong and are understood. To the extent, however, that the church community becomes secularized and ceases to be the family of God in practice, loneliness will prevail. One Christian recently remarked that she felt great unity and communion with God during the worship service but great loneliness and isolation in the narthex. Too many churches have become trapped in the secular system of conditional regard, status orientation, and production or possessions as the measure of worth.
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Ultimately, existential loneliness cannot be overcome until God and the person are reconciled. At the point of redemption and reconciliation we become the adopted children of God. We belong. In the ultimate act of overcoming loneliness, God sends his own Spirit to be one with us by residing in us. Because we don’t lose our humanity at that point, we still need from others the human experience of belonging and being understood. But if that fails we are not cast into panic and despair, like the secular existentialists. We have the promise that one day we will have an eternal place of belonging and will become unified with God, because we will be like Christ. Heaven, it seems, is a place of oneness; hell is a place of separation and utter loneliness forever.
D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.
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