Lonely… I am so Lonely…

I remember walking into a nice restaurant for dinner a couple of years back and asked for a table for one. The host then raised his eyebrows a little and paused slightly longer than usual, probably wondering if I was joking with him or why a pleasant-looking lady is dining alone on a Friday night, before he showed me to my table. On some other occasions, dining alone seemed to be such a taboo that I was seated in the Timbuktu equivalent location of the establishment, away from their other coupled guests, so that I won’t infect the others with my communicable Lonesome disease. To top off the ostracism, I once bumped into my good friend’s colleague in a restaurant while I was eating alone during lunch, and shortly after lunch, I received a call from my friend asking if anything was wrong with me. Well if anything is wrong, I’d like to say, it’s how Singaporeans view people who venture into the public domain alone, regardless of whether their partners were busy or they simply enjoyed some solitude.

I even tried to talk to two of my friends about dining out alone and both almost simultaneously said they felt like losers if they did that. I wondered why anyone would want to entrap themselves by making such a statement.

Katherine Martin, a Life Coach in the US, believes that ‘many people have this idea that being alone means something's wrong with them, but it can be a truly beautiful experience. All you need is some retraining to appreciate solitude. If you have the time (and are willing) to look inside yourself, you can start to ask hard questions that will help you grow.’ This reminds me of my friend who never breaks off with a guy until she’s already in a new relationship. She’s already in her 30s and still doesn’t know what can truly make her happy.

Over the past year, I’ve also encountered many single men who told me that they really needed to find a mate because they felt lonely. This always got to me. So I tried suggesting that they pick up a hobby that didn’t require the dependence of another individual, and most of them apparently do have one. A hobby of finding a mate. This is what psychologists call the ‘loneliness of emotional isolation’, where they need to be emotionally intimate with someone in order not to feel lonely. It’s like, their lives (other than their careers) come to a halt because they need to find someone to fill a void in them. They are incomplete without a partner. Though this may sound really romantic in some cases or in a Jerry Mcguire movie, I find this sorely depressing for people who are single and unattached. And contrary to popular belief, I believe that loneliness doesn’t hit you only when you’re alone. Despite being a person who hardly gets threatened by loneliness, I actually felt lonely when I was married.

So back to lonely men, I initially thought that men tend to feel lonely more easily than women due to their male-inherited longing to be taken care of because men simply can’t care for themselves. I just suddenly realised that a nanny cum domestic helper might just be the solution for all the lonely men out there. Ah-hem…. wait….. Somehow, the visual I’m getting isn’t looking too wholesome. Ok, moving along….. I then went on to gather more information about men and loneliness and found that according to Joe Zoske, a healthcare consultant specialising in men's health and wellness, feelings of loneliness is due to gender conditioning. ‘In striving to be 'real men’, they (men) live higher-risk lifestyles, driven by internalised messages of competition, invulnerability, control, emotional suppression, and independence. So when symptoms occur, they have learned to not acknowledge them and tough-it-out alone, leaving them isolated from information, interventions, and support. Relating, nurturing, caring, listening, fostering, allowing emotions, seeking medical aid and the like are for women. ‘Real men’ are only allowed three emotions: humor, anger and sexual feelings.’

To support the above statement, Dr. Shoshanna, a psychologist who founded the Institute for Personal Development, and wrote five books, including Zen and the Art of Falling in Love and The Anger Diet : Thirty Days to Stress-Free Living, remarks that ‘it's amazing how many men feel tremendously alone. Not only have they been trained for silence, taught that it is unmanly to express what they are going through, they usually don't get feedback from the guys in their world.’

It’s no wonder that a guy friend of mine, who’s a self-proclaimed S-N-A-G, professes to a preference of being with his girl buddies when he needs to talk about any challenges in his life.

So maybe since men are only allowed three emotions, I realised that the society is more tolerant to men eating, going to a movie, having a drink in a café or pub or doing anything in public alone than to women doing likewise. But despite this, I’m proud to say that there are still some very confident women (you know who you are, girlfriend!) who still venture out alone to do the things they enjoy doing without looking at all, lonely. Kudos to you!