I really don't think so! Like, I have experienced being alone in a place and thinking "I wish so-and-so were here with me" -- but because I know they would also enjoy this thing I'm doing / I would enjoy watching them enjoy it. But I don't think I've ever felt lonely in the sense of needing someone to feel... IDK, whatever it is that alleviates loneliness for people who feel loneliness?
Like, I spent a month on my own in a foreign country when I was 18, before there was internet or cell phones, so that my only contact with family was a weekly phone call and letters, and I didn't feel the least bit lonely -- actually I felt great, both being on my own and getting to know random new people.
(Although I should say, when my kids were younger and I was traveling without them, I would see families with children and feel a stab of missing my family. It was different enough from any other kind of missing people that I have experienced that it was quite memorable. There might be something hormonal/phermonal to the mother/young child bond, though.)
Or grief, because that's another one? It sounds callous, but I feel like if my spouse died, I'd be over it within a month,
Similar, I think. I've lost one very important person in my life -- my great-grandmother who was a huge part of my childhood (the one who stayed home with me when I was little), and I've definitely been AFFECTED by her death, but I'm not sure I would describe my feelings as grief. I would have liked very much for her to have lived long enough to meet my kids and watch her interact with them, and my memories of her are important things for me to preserve and pass on; she was in my mind for many years -- I kept intermittently having dreams in which she was alive -- but I don't know that I felt grief as it seems to be described in books?
I feel the same way about getting married, btw. It was never an end goal, and I never really wanted a romantic relationship and tended to feel "crowded" by the people who wanted one with me. But my husband turned out to be one of like two people whose presence doesn't eventually get "too much" for me -- one of the very few people whose company I prefer to solitude over the long term, basically. (And part of that is that he understands me well enough to know that I need that solitude and isn't offended by that.)
If I lost him, I would definitely miss our years of inside jokes and the way he understands me better than anyone else. Beyond that, I don't know, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I would be OK, or at least more OK than one should be under the circumstances.
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Date: 2019-09-16 12:00 am (UTC)I really don't think so! Like, I have experienced being alone in a place and thinking "I wish so-and-so were here with me" -- but because I know they would also enjoy this thing I'm doing / I would enjoy watching them enjoy it. But I don't think I've ever felt lonely in the sense of needing someone to feel... IDK, whatever it is that alleviates loneliness for people who feel loneliness?
Like, I spent a month on my own in a foreign country when I was 18, before there was internet or cell phones, so that my only contact with family was a weekly phone call and letters, and I didn't feel the least bit lonely -- actually I felt great, both being on my own and getting to know random new people.
(Although I should say, when my kids were younger and I was traveling without them, I would see families with children and feel a stab of missing my family. It was different enough from any other kind of missing people that I have experienced that it was quite memorable. There might be something hormonal/phermonal to the mother/young child bond, though.)
Or grief, because that's another one? It sounds callous, but I feel like if my spouse died, I'd be over it within a month,
Similar, I think. I've lost one very important person in my life -- my great-grandmother who was a huge part of my childhood (the one who stayed home with me when I was little), and I've definitely been AFFECTED by her death, but I'm not sure I would describe my feelings as grief. I would have liked very much for her to have lived long enough to meet my kids and watch her interact with them, and my memories of her are important things for me to preserve and pass on; she was in my mind for many years -- I kept intermittently having dreams in which she was alive -- but I don't know that I felt grief as it seems to be described in books?
I feel the same way about getting married, btw. It was never an end goal, and I never really wanted a romantic relationship and tended to feel "crowded" by the people who wanted one with me. But my husband turned out to be one of like two people whose presence doesn't eventually get "too much" for me -- one of the very few people whose company I prefer to solitude over the long term, basically. (And part of that is that he understands me well enough to know that I need that solitude and isn't offended by that.)
If I lost him, I would definitely miss our years of inside jokes and the way he understands me better than anyone else. Beyond that, I don't know, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I would be OK, or at least more OK than one should be under the circumstances.