Читать книгу Stop Being Lonely - Kira Asatryan - Страница 12
ОглавлениеNow you understand the basic framework for reducing loneliness: closeness is what you’ve been craving, you can attain it through increased mutual knowing and caring of others, and your technological environment is getting in your way. Before we move on to the practicalities of creating the closeness we all crave — starting with how to pick partners — we need to let go of some outdated ideas about what “should” alleviate loneliness. These myths will trip you up along the way if you don’t first work to dispel them.
Most of us grow up believing in certain “solutions to loneliness” that we know from experience fail as often as they succeed. And when they fail, we blame either ourselves or the other people involved. . .when in reality, we should be pointing a finger at the solutions themselves.
This is a new kind of loneliness that requires a new solution. In this chapter we will work to dismantle the top three outdated myths about what we should be doing — and to whom we should be looking — to feel less lonely.
1. Love is a reliable solution to loneliness. You may be wondering why I maintain that the antidote to loneliness is closeness and not love. Yes, love is a powerful, ecstatic force that brings people together. Love is one of the highest highs human beings can experience. But can you be in love with someone and still feel lonely in your beloved’s presence? Absolutely.
2. Some types of relationships are inherently closer than others. Most of us believe that some relationships should feel close — particularly family relationships. But is believing this a reliable solution to the problem of loneliness? Someone can have two living parents, three siblings, and a spouse — and still feel desperately alone.
3. If you’re lonely, just be around people. It sounds so simple. Just put yourself out there! Can it feel refreshing to work from a coffee shop instead of at home, alone? Of course. Does it feel great to work on a team of smart people? Yes. . .usually. Does a rapid hiring spree at work make you feel less isolated? Not really. Could any of these situations actually make you feel lonelier than you feel just being alone? They definitely could.
All these myths contain a grain of truth and a mountain of misinterpretations. I’ll show you how to unlearn the useless parts and grab hold of the stuff that works. Let’s get started.
Myth 1: Love Is a Reliable Solution to Loneliness
You may have been wondering why I have yet to mention love in our discussion of loneliness. Isn’t love a perfectly good solution to loneliness? Isn’t love the deepest, strongest bond we can have with another person? Isn’t love the basis of all relationships that matter?
The answer is the same to all these questions: yes and no. Love absolutely brings people together. When someone who’s been a stranger becomes a lover, in our eyes he becomes infused with an almost surreal importance. It can be hard to tell where you end and he begins. . .and you both like it that way.
But the majestic, heightened state of love has a flip side, one with which we’re all too familiar. Love is fickle. You could fall in love with someone who’s completely inappropriate for you. You could fall in love with someone who’s not available. You could love someone who doesn’t love you back. You could love someone passionately for a short period of time and then watch the relationship fizzle for reasons you don’t fully understand.
And it’s not just romantic love that’s largely outside of our understanding. Expectant parents will attest to the fact that we can love someone before he’s even born. We can love people after they die. Whom we love (and for that matter, when, where, how, and why we love) is largely outside our control. The notion that love is a reliable solution to loneliness is a myth because, simply put: love is a mystery. Closeness, however, is not.
We can pick up methods for creating closeness because we know what generates closeness between people and what doesn’t. I don’t think anyone can say the same about love. Love certainly reduces loneliness, given the right circumstances, but it also increases loneliness under unfavorable ones. Closeness, unlike love, always works toward reducing loneliness. Closeness is useful in a way that love is not. If you do certain tangible things with a receptive partner, you will see tangible results. The more effort you put into it, the more you will get out of it.
There’s also a specific way in which closeness is a handier solution than love: it opens up the possibility of less loneliness at work. It’s generally deemed inappropriate to love anyone at work. Even if you do have a strong connection or friendship with a colleague, it’s easy to see how calling it “love” makes the relationship instantly sound unprofessional.
But most of us spend a great deal of time at work, and there are likely lots of people we know professionally with whom we could build a meaningful relationship. Closeness gives working relationships the opportunity to matter as much as strictly personal ones.
The fact is, you don’t have to be lonely just because you’re not in love. And if you are in love, closeness makes that love that much more stable and reliable.
I see evidence for this point in the ample research that’s been done on marriage and divorce. The overwhelming majority of people who get married, at least in Western developed countries, say that they are doing it for love. In our culture marriage is seen as the ultimate expression of committed love. Most who commit to marriage also expect that the love that brought them together will last a lifetime.
Let’s pair this fact about how marriages begin with what we know about how they end. The Divorce Mediation survey conducted by Lynn Gigy and Joan Kelly found that 80 percent of divorced people said their marriages broke up primarily because they “grew apart.” This cause trumped all others, including the one we generally think of as the main marriage killer: affairs. Only 25 percent of respondents said an affair played any part in the decline of the marriage.
So what does this tell us? Marriage is all about love and divorce is all about distance. Even the relationships that are most filled with love will fall apart without closeness. Closeness is the foundation for all satisfying and long-lasting relationships because love really needs closeness in a way that closeness doesn’t need love.
You can feel close to someone you’re not in love with. And if you’re in love but can’t access your partner’s inner world, it’s inevitable that the relationship will slide down the spectrum to distance.
That being said, love relationships — particularly marriages — are excellent opportunities to create closeness. The great advantage marriage has over other relationships is that it’s an explicit commitment. It’s one of the few times (maybe the only time?) when you expressly choose a partner and they choose you back. This creates an environment of deliberateness — of conscious choosing — that is very conducive to creating closeness.
But don’t wait for a love relationship to find you before you can stop feeling lonely. You can create so much fulfillment and connection with others without waiting for love.
Myth 1: Love is a reliable solution to loneliness.
Myth 1 reframed: Love is a mystery; closeness is not.
Myth 2: Some Types of Relationships Are Inherently Closer Than Others
If there’s one type of relationship we think should feel closer than others, it’s our relationship with family members. And there are perfectly good reasons why we assume this. Family relationships are the first relationships we experience, and, unlike coworkers, Twitter followers, or significant others, family has the advantage of having mattered for millions of years.
The earliest evidence of family life — specifically figurines of mothers and children — dates back to the thirteenth millennium BCE, making them as old as civilization itself. For all intents and purposes, family has always existed. Moreover, it’s always been a necessary social unit. In another time and place, a person would die without a family. If one were hungry or needed shelter, he’d go to his family. If someone wanted to marry or fell ill, she’d look to her family. It only makes sense that if someone were lonely, he’d find relief with his family, right?
If you happen to have close relationships with most of your family members, you probably think so. Parents are basically required to be there for you, right? Siblings can be really fun to vent with. Sure, you might have a close-minded grandparent who isn’t terribly supportive, but that’s okay. Everyone has a strange uncle who leers awkwardly or a smug cousin who can’t see beyond his next purchase. But that doesn’t matter too much . . .
You see the problem? It’s possible to have one or more close relationships within your family, but it’s also very likely (even expected) to have at least one person who qualifies as family to whom you don’t feel close at all. Most of us have a number of family relationships that, if stripped of the “family” title, would not be worth maintaining. An unfortunate few have nobody in their family who makes them feel anything other than judged, ridiculed, or misunderstood.
So what makes some family relationships work for reducing loneliness and others not? Before we get to that, let’s take a step back and consider the simplest of questions: Who exactly is our family? If you think that’s a silly question, you likely have a mother, father, and some siblings. But if you have two moms or two dads, you’ve probably thought about this. Or if you’ve adopted a child or been adopted yourself. Or if you’re estranged from your family.
According to Mary Jo Maynes, author of The Family, there is no natural or predetermined definition for who is and who isn’t family: “Different societies have different definitions of who counts as family members; in some societies your mother’s second cousin is a kinsman of note, while in others (such as our own) many people cannot even name their mother’s second cousins.”
We know that family is not just genetic relationships. A single parent with an adopted baby is recognized as full family under the law. And we know it’s not just legal relationships, either. A couple who’s been together for twenty years and has three kids but never filed the marriage paperwork is considered family from most modern perspectives.
So what makes a family a family?
Let’s try on a few ideas for size. Maybe a family is a group of people who form bonds because they live together — because they share a home. Cohabitation is important enough to the idea of family that Maynes includes it in her formal definition of the term: “Families are small groups of people linked by culturally recognized ties of marriage or similar forms of partnership, descent, and/or adoption, who typically share a household for some period of time.”
But according to a 2008 Pew Social & Demographic Trends survey: “Home means different things to different people. Among U.S.-born adults who have lived in more than one community, nearly four-in-ten (38%) say the place they consider home isn’t where they’re living now. . .26% say it’s where they were born or raised; 22% say it’s where they live now; 18% say it’s where they have lived the longest; 15% say it’s where their family comes from; and 4% say it’s where they went to high school.” These widely varying perceptions of home make clear that cohabitation is not fundamentally what makes family family.
Could it be that family is defined by mutual responsibilities? Parents take care of their children and, when they grow up, children take care of their parents. Maybe. But one booming industry begs to differ. In January 2014, a company called Care.com went public after raising $111 million in venture funding. As the preeminent “care marketplace,” Care.com “offers solutions to help families make informed decisions in one of the most important and highly considered aspects of their family life — finding and managing quality care for their family.”
Whatever feelings it may stir to think about hiring someone to care for your loved ones, the reality is that we now have the opportunity to outsource many of our traditional family duties. We don’t have to look out for one another in the same way we once did — there simply aren’t the same consequences there once were — and I’m convinced that simple obligation is not what makes a family a family.
My belief is that family is fundamentally a feeling . . . and that feeling is closeness. Closeness is what makes family feel like family. Without closeness, our relationships with our family members feel just as bad (or even worse, owing to our heightened expectations) as any other set of relationships that lack knowing and caring.
In the introduction, I mentioned that most people think there are many different kinds of relationships, but in fact all relationships lie somewhere on a single spectrum from distant to close. This means any relationship can be close, but it also means any relationship can be distant. Just because someone is your mother, father, sister, or brother does not mean your relationship with him or her will not be on the distant end of the spectrum.
No relationships — regardless of title — are intrinsically closer than others. All require the efforts of knowing and caring. Family members certainly can feel close, but only if they put in the effort.
That being said, family does have some unique advantages in creating closeness, particularly in the area of knowing. Your family members have the potential to know you well because of your extensive shared history and shared experiences. There are few people outside of family with whom you will spend as much time over the course of your life, especially during your formative years. This access to one another over long periods of time (and at different stages of life) is a real opportunity. If the opportunity is seized on and used in the efforts of deep knowing, family can be an excellent source of closeness.
But family also has one great disadvantage: complacency. Family members, more so than any other people in relationships, tend to think they don’t have to do anything to maintain the relationship. “Family is forever,” right? While this can be a deeply comforting thought, don’t let it become an excuse not to try. Don’t let “family is forever” get translated into “I don’t have to be nice to you because you couldn’t get rid of me even if you tried.”
Family may be forever, but the feeling of family — closeness — is not forever without active, sustained effort.
Myth 2: Some types of relationships are inherently closer than others.
Myth 2 reframed: Any relationship can be close, and any relationship can be distant.
Myth 3: If You’re Lonely, Just Be Around People
Of all the myths about what reduces loneliness, this one is the stickiest. Does it feel good to be around others when you’re lonely? The answer is a resounding sometimes. If you go to a social gathering and make a spontaneous new friend, it’s the best. If you go and feel out of place, ostracized, or just . . . awkward, it can be the worst.
So let’s just get this out of the way: the obvious reason why having people around isn’t a good solution to our contemporary loneliness is that it’s terribly, painfully unpredictable.
But why is it so unpredictable? Why is it so unlike the stale loaf of bread vs. the fresh one — both of which achieve the same goal of reducing hunger? What I’ve found is that we make a subtle but important mistake in our quest to be around people: we don’t distinguish between people who are around us for us and people who are around us because of the situation.
I use the term situational proximity to describe the experience of having people around you because of the context, not because you necessarily want to be around one another. This can mean living in an apartment with four roommates, sitting in a class of five hundred people, or working in an office of thousands. Situational proximity means there are people (often lots of people) around you physically, but they are there for reasons other than being near you.
Situational proximity is a big — and little acknowledged — part of why being around people is so unpredictable when it comes to reducing loneliness. If you and another person haven’t gotten together for the purpose of being together, it’s totally up in the air how that person will make you feel. If you start chatting with a girl in class with the goal of feeling less lonely, and she chats back with the goal of understanding the class material better, you’re likely not going to walk away with your goal met. These difference in goals — differences in intentions — can be highly discouraging for someone looking to be less lonely.
That being said, there is always a chance that meeting up with someone who is there to meet up with you won’t make you feel all that great either. But it’s much more likely that the other person will try. At the very least, your intentions are aligned. It’s much more likely she’ll put in the effort and be engaged with you — usually making for a much more satisfying interaction.
And it’s that feeling — the satisfying feeling of being with someone who wants to know you and who cares to engage — that alleviates loneliness. As you’ve probably guessed, the feeling that makes being around people pay off is closeness.
This difference between situational proximity and the experience of closeness can be seen most clearly in working environments. Working environments are inherently situational — everyone is really there to work (and to get paid, of course), not because they like everyone around them. This begs the question “Does having people around at work generally make someone who struggles with loneliness more or less lonely?”
It would stand to reason that a larger work team would mean more opportunities to create closeness. There would be more people to try on for size and see whom you’re drawn to as a potential closeness partner. But does this actually pan out?
I was particularly curious about this question because Silicon Valley has a very strong inclination toward keeping work teams small. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, famously said that when you can no longer feed a team with two pizzas, it has gotten too big. I wondered if this was simply the technology mind-set coming into play, since smaller teams are often more efficient. But this bias toward smaller teams seems to be about more than just efficiency. Research supports the idea that larger teams make people feel worse — specifically, more alienated from one another.
Psychologist Jennifer Mueller coined the term relational loss to describe the experience of feeling lonelier the more people you work with. Based on her 2012 study, which examined 212 employees in twenty-six teams, ranging from three to nineteen members, Mueller discovered that each employee becomes less engaged at work as team size increases. She theorized that this occurs because as team size gets bigger, each individual perceives that less support is available.
Support in this context may mean practical support, that is, training and feedback. But it surely also means the other kind of support as well — the emotional and psychological awareness that others around you care.
As Mueller put it: “[I]n these larger teams, people were lost. They didn’t know who to call for help because they didn’t know the other members well enough. Even if they did reach out, they didn’t feel the other members were as committed to helping or had the time to help. And they couldn’t tell their team leader because [it would look like] they had failed.” If this doesn’t describe distance caused by a lack of knowing and caring, I don’t know what does.
Moreover, when a team suffers a knowing and caring deficit, it appears that employees don’t just become more distant from one other; they also become more distant from the work itself. A survey published by Gallup showed that “employee engagement is broken down by company size, the smallest companies have the most engaged employees — and it [isn’t] even close. 42% of employees working at small companies of ten and fewer reported that they were engaged at work, a huge increase over the 27% to 30% of engaged people at larger companies.”
This disconnect between having people around and still feeling isolated is all about perceptions. It’s not a physical loneliness, but a loneliness of the heart and mind. It’s the new kind of loneliness creeping in. If you perceive that most of your coworkers know you and care about you, it may not matter how big your team is. But the smaller your team, the more likely it is that your colleagues will know you and care about you.
In other words, it’s not the number of hours you spend working on a project together. It’s not the number of emails you exchange or the number of meetings you attend together. Feeling integrated with those around you is really all about closeness — even at the workplace.
To start reducing loneliness in situational contexts like work, I recommend using proximity to others in service of creating closeness. Here’s one way to do that: use the recurring nature of work — seeing the same people every day — to get to know others gradually. Work is a low-pressure environment in terms of creating closeness (as opposed to a date, for example, where there’s more pressure to decide quickly if you like each other) and gives you the benefit of time. Feel people out, pick those you feel drawn to, and build closeness at a comfortable pace. Start with a chat in passing, and work up to getting coffee together before a meeting, for example. This process can, over time, make your office one of your favorite places to be!
Myth 3: If you’re lonely, just be around people.
Myth 3 reframed: Being around people can reduce or increase loneliness, depending on how those people make you feel — close to them, or distant.
Questions for Reflection
• How have your love relationships affected how lonely you feel? Have they made you feel more or less lonely?
• Which member of your family would you like to get closer to? Who would you like to let go of?
• Are there other relationship myths you would like to reexamine through the lens of closeness? What might they look like?
An Exercise to Challenge Yourself
Which type of relationship do you tend to look toward to feel less lonely? Do you call your parents when you feel lonely? Do you go on dates looking for love? For two weeks, put this habit aside and turn your efforts toward creating closeness in another area of your life. Instead of calling on family members, cultivate some work relationships. Instead of going on dates, put more energy into your friendships.
Chapter Summary
Of all the myths about what “solves” loneliness, the three most problematic ones are:
1. Love is a reliable solution to loneliness. Love certainly reduces loneliness, given the right circumstances, but it can also increase loneliness. Closeness, unlike love, always works toward reducing loneliness. Closeness is useful in a way that love is not. Myth 1 reframed: Love is a mystery; closeness is not.
2. Some types of relationships are inherently closer than others. In fact, where a relationship falls on the spectrum from distant to close is a product of the mutual efforts of knowing and caring. No relationship (or type of relationship) is “supposed” to reduce loneliness. Myth 2 reframed: Any relationship can be close, and any relationship can be distant.
3. If you’re lonely, just be around people. Having people around does not in and of itself solve loneliness. What fills an interaction with a sense of satisfaction and happiness is how you make each other feel. Myth 3 reframed: Being around people can reduce or increase loneliness, depending on how those people make you feel — close or distant.
Try to relinquish these outdated notions about what “should” reduce loneliness. These myths will trip you up if you don’t put them to the side.
