In the privacy of our minds, one thought – highly shameful by nature – may haunt us as we evaluate whether to stay in or leave an unsatisfactory relationship: what if we were to end things and end up in a place of appalling loneliness?
We’re meant to be above such pragmatic worries. Only cowards and reprobates would mind a few weekends (or decades) by themselves. We’ve heard of those books that sing the praises of solitude (the divorcee who relocated to a solitary hut on a bare Scottish island; the one who went sailing around the world in a dinghy). But we can admit that we’re not naturals at this sort of thing: there have been empty days when we almost lost our minds. There was one trip that we took on our own years back that was, behind the scenes, a psychological catastrophe. We’re not really in a position to wave away the dangers of being left alone on our rock.
But without wishing to play down the dangers unduly, there are nevertheless one or two things we might learn to weaken our fears. We can begin with a simple observation: it’s typically a lot worse to be on our own on a Saturday than on a Monday night; and a lot worse to be alone over the festive period than to be alone at the end of the tax year. The physical reality and the length of time we’re by ourselves may be identical, but the feeling that comes with being so is entirely different. This apparently negligible observation holds out a clue for a substantial solution to loneliness.
The difference between the Saturday and the Monday night comes down to the contrast between what being alone appears to mean on the two respective dates. On a Monday night, our own company feels like it brings no judgement in its wake, it doesn’t in any way depart from the norms of respectable society, it’s what’s expected of decent people at the start of a busy week: we get back from work, make some soup, catch up on the post, do some emails and order a few groceries, without any sense of being unusual or cursed. The next day, when a colleague asks us what we got up to, we can relate the truth without any hot prickles of shame. It was – after all – just a Monday night. But Saturday night finds us in a far more perilous psychological zone: we scan our phone for any sign of a last minute invitation, we flick through the channels in an impatient and disconsolate haze, we are alive to our own tragedy as we eat tuna from a can, we take a long bath at 8.30pm to try to numb the discomfort inside with scalding heat on the outside; and as we prepare to turn out the light just after ten, the high-spirited cries of revellers walking by our house seem to convey a targeted tone of mockery and pity. On Monday morning, we pass over the whole horrid incident with haste.