Loneliness

As soon as my brother-in-law learned that my mother's health was declining, Don responded by putting her on his Saturday morning "call list." Every weekend, Don places calls to a growing list of friends and relatives who are housebound, lonely, and/or ill. His uplifting phone calls aren't obligatory. He calls because he cares and is genuinely interested in listening to people and helping them solve or better cope with their problems.

 

Some people live very lonely lives. Last week a 78-year-old retired New York City schoolteacher, named Jane Wild, who lived in a white Cape Cod in my own hamlet (Chappaqua, New York) was found dead in her second-floor bathroom. The local newspaper reported that Wild was a recluse with few friends and no family except for a sister who lived with her, until she died in 1985. Since then, Jane was only known to have received occasional visits from a male friend, who died last summer. What made the story all the more remarkable was that Jane Wild had been dead for at least six months before anyone even noticed---this, despite the fact that her utilities had been turned off and mail had accumulated to the point where her mailbox was so stuffed that the mailman stopped delivering. No neighbors had thought to check on her.

 

Like hand-penned letters, the number of phone calls being made is decreasing relative to other types of electronic communications. There was a time---before email and faxes---when many workers had long "call lists" on their desks with the names of colleagues they planned to contact the next morning. Now people are more likely to text, IM, tweet, or use email, depending on their age and personal preference. The contact may take place while they are walking down a city street, or riding in a car or train. People tend to multi-task rather than listen to the person at the other end of the phone with full attention.

 

Phone calls, even perfunctory ones, may have already become altogether passé. My twenty-something son, like a growing number of Americans doesn't own a landline. He recently told me that he rarely initiates cell phone calls (yes, he still gets them from me!) except when there's a problem with his bank account or cable TV.

 

Yet a simple phone call with a warm voice at the other hand can change a person's day. I'm amazed at how Don's phone calls can perk up my mom's spirits, albeit for a short time. It makes you wonder if each of us should have a Saturday morning "call list" to express our affection for the people we truly care about.

Whether it's an ex-girlfriend, ex-wife, or ex-lover, most women would immediately dismiss the possibility of negotiating a real friendship with a living apparition from their partner's past. Admittedly, these relationships are thorny but they can have some upsides. My friend, life coach Lauree Ostrofsky of the Washington, DC area, offered to pen (keyboard) a guest post on the topic of befriending an ex- and here it is:

 

Not a topic often discussed, being friends with your partner's ex. But I am. She's really nice. The X factor is a challenge to navigate in any relationship. Most people I spoke to have a strict policy on the subject. "I never speak to ex's" was the most common. Followed by: "We're amicable and that's it."

 

So how did I get myself into this? Well for one, I'm new in town having just moved to Washington, DC from Manhattan six months ago. I was looking for female friends who like things I do -- art, eating out, talking about life. The guy I'm dating knew just the person: his ex-girlfriend.

 

Hold on, I thought, this can't be good. Love me, love my ex? None of my friends were keen on it either. But I figured, I should at least meet her before making a judgment...Right? I'm glad I did. She does like many of the same things I do. She has a boyfriend, and we've even double-dated.

 

Sometimes though, if I'm being completely truthful, it also feels really weird. For one, my relationship is still new. These two have known each other for a decade, share private jokes, and, I'll say it, have seen each other naked. I'd be lying if I said I didn't once in awhile feel like this was a contest I might lose.

 

I don't normally shy away from tough topics as readers of my blog know well - surgery and divorce are just two examples - but this one has nearly got me beat. I think it's hard to write about it because I'm owning up to a weakness of mine. For all my life coach-y ways, I'm human after all and it is maddening.

 

To get out of my own head I spoke to another friend, Linda, who has some wisdom on the subject. She is friendly with her ex-husband's new wife. Her thoughts helped me see the following options:

 

* Separate your feelings

Whether it is your ex's new wife, or your partner's ex, it helps to separate your feelings for one person from your possible feelings for this new person. In my case, I'm glad I did because I gained a good friend out of it.

 

* Get to know this person directly

My first conversation with my partner's ex was alone at an art festival. We met each other in the lobby having never seen one another before. Talk about a "first date"!

 

* Be inclusive

This is especially important where, in Linda's case, there are children or pets involved. If she hosts a birthday party, for example, they get an invite and they do the same in return. She said it's helped everyone feel more comfortable.

 

* Focus on what really matters

Like the previous point, with children or pets in the picture it's about priorities. Those aren't factors for me, but my feelings are just as important. It means doing what feels right instead of being a martyr about it.

 

Am I missing other options for navigating these X-factor relationships? Or, do you have your own experiences to share? I'm all ears (and eyes)!

 
Lauree Ostrofsky helps clients get clear and creative about they really want and how to go after it --- whether it's launching a new business; improving their relationships; or living each day more fully awake. Check out Lauree's website, and follow her on Twitter @simplyleapcoach.

 

QUESTION

Irene,

I wonder if you would ever post anything about the effect that socially withdrawn mothers have on their daughters' later friendship lives. My mother didn't have any close friends at all (just a cousin she hung around with and still does) and, in fact, disdains friendship even though she is into her 60s.

 

I never had any close friends either. I can't seem to connect with anyone, preferring to spend time alone, but I would like to be better balanced and, of course, have some decent relationships.

 

I can't help feeling like my mother set a poor example and that I was "raised by wolves" because my father also only has a couple close friends (he's down to one close friend, and this point).

 

Life without friends is HARD and yet I have spent so much time alone pursuing my own thing, by necessity. I feel like I have little in common with most women I meet; I spent my whole life reading books and doing creative things. The more time I spend alone, enriching myself, the harder it is to relate to others in a way that fosters friendship.

 

I also feel like no women would want to be friends with me because I don't have a circle of friends that they can network with. I sense that it's all about this big square dance of friendship networks and that if I don't "bring anything to the table" socially, other women won't want to have much to do with me when they find out who I really am - a solitary woman who doesn't want to be a full-time loner.

 

I don't want to live my mother's life yet I don't have any female role models who are into friendship (even my only aunt, my mother's sister, is a spinster loner, and my only sibling, a sister, also prefers to keep to herself). How does one break out of a family pattern of isolation?

 

Signed,
Lucia

 

ANSWER

Dear Lucia,

People differ along a variety of dimensions, including their interest in and ability to make friends. For some, connecting with others feels absolutely natural and comes easily; others find it difficult, if not painful. Some people are content to be left alone; others crave constant contact. Most people would agree that these differences among people, sometimes even between twins, are due to some combination of nature (genetic traits) and nurture (upbringing).

 

It sounds like you are shy and introverted, yet you are interested in making some friends. Your biggest roadblock may be your lack of self-confidence. The fact that you "spent your whole life" reading books and doing creative things doesn't diminish your desirability as a friend; rather, it should enhance it making you a more interesting person.

 

Maybe you could find a book, arts, or crafts group in your community that you could use as a training ground to practice your social skills. Participating in a small group, as opposed to one-on-one, will give you the opportunity to meet people in a safe setting to see if you "click" with anyone in the group.

 

In my book, Best Friends Forever: Surviving a Breakup with Your Best Friend, I describe some of the basic techniques for making new friends. As hokey as it sounds, a smile and sincere expression of interest in another person are the first small steps towards making a new friend.

 

Meetup groups are good places to find other people who are interested in the same things as you and who want to affiliate with other people. You could also try signing up for an adult continuing education class at your local high school of community college.

 

You may feel like you were "raised by wolves" but it doesn't matter now. You're an intelligent adult who is responsible for your own happiness. You need to step up to the plate and begin making friends regardless of your family history.

 

I hope this is helpful.

Best, Irene

 

 

I rarely post a link to someone else's article on my blog but I absolutely loved this essay by Walter Kirn that touches on  friendship, loneliness and Facebook.

 

A Facebook Christmas Love Story (subtitle: How Facebook cured my holiday loneliness) was published in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, December 20th. While a widely reported study co-authored by Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School (published in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) suggests that loneliness is contagious, this essay suggests that when a lonely person reaches out, even digitally, they may find a satisfying connection.

 

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

 

P.S. Kirn is the author of Up in the Air~

 

“There’s just something about getting together with people who have always known you,” remarks Olivia, one of the thirty-something characters in Second Chance by Jane Green (Viking, 2007).

With a storyline that is somewhat reminiscent of the 1983 move, The Big Chill, when a childhood friend (Tom) dies tragically, it sets the stage for four friends to come together at midlife and examine their lives and loves. This novel, by the prolific, New York Times best-selling chick-lit author Green, highlights the role that shared history plays in friendships.

Although their lives have followed very different paths, the four childhood friends reconnect instantaneously. The author describes how that feels for Holly Mac, another of the protagonists: “With friends that feel more like family, not because of …closeness to them now, but because of the strength of a shared history,” writes Green. “They know her mother, she knows theirs. She knows their brothers and sisters, who they were before they adopted the mantle of adulthood…”

The protagonists realize that friendships of our youth remind us not only of our past but also of the person we had always hoped to become. What I enjoyed most was the book’s treatment of weighty issues---like infertility, divorce, betrayal, loneliness, alcoholism, and maintaining one’s sense of self in a marriage---and their bearing on female friendships.

'Friendship by the Book' is an occasional series of posts on this blog about books that offer friendship lessons. To read other posts in the series, use the search function on the right side of the page.

A reader of my blog is living overseas with several young children and is married to a man who routinely works long hours. Another woman I know is single; she recently moved to a new town to begin a demanding job that entails frequent travel. My own elderly mother has become frail with fewer and fewer opportunities to get out and mingle with her peers. What do these three women-at different stages of life-have in common? For various reasons, each is in the midst of a friendship drought.

There are times when, for various situational reasons, we simply don't have enough friends-or enough of the right kind of friends. We feel isolated and alone. Other times, people experience persistent friendship deficits because they are very shy, lack social skills, or just have a hard time befriending others. A new study published in Psychological Science (November 2008) suggests one instinctive antidote to feelings of loneliness and isolation: nostalgia.

In four different studies, psychologists at the University of Southampton and Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangshou, China looked at people from various walks of life, including schoolchildren, college students, and factory workers. They found that lonely people used nostalgia as a coping mechanism, drawing upon their sentimental memories of the past. The more lonely people were, the more nostalgic they tended to become as a way of increasing their self-perceived feeling of social support.

 

"Our findings show that nostalgia is a psychological resource that protects and fosters mental health," says Dr. Tim Wildschut of the University of Southampton. "It strengthens feelings of social connectedness and belongingness, partially improving the harmful repercussions of loneliness. The past, when appropriately harnessed, can strengthen psychological resistance to the vicissitudes of life."

One implication of these research findings: If your current situation doesn't lend itself to making new friends or connecting with the ones you already have, take a brief trip down memory lane and re-live the peaks of your past friendships.

 

My thoughts: While this coping mechanism might temporarily help you get over a friendship drought, the real fix is to find ways to more fully integrate friendship into the fiber of your life. The isolated mom may need to call upon a babysitter, the nomadic woman may need to use her cell phone more, and my elderly mother may need to connect with other women her age at a senior center.

 

Source: Press Release, University of Southampton, November 18, 2008, Nostalgic thoughts of happier times can help overcome loneliness.

Time of Your Life (Random House, October 2008) is Allison Winn Scotch's second novel. It tells the story of Jillian, a thirty-something, married, suburban mother in Westchester County, New York, who suddenly sees her life playing out a different way than it did seven years ago, and takes the reader along for the ride.

 

This engaging story raises provocative questions about love, marriage, family, friendship, and motherhood. It will grab anyone who has ever had second thoughts about the road not followed. The film rights to the story have already been purchased by the Weinstein Company so watch for it to come to your local theatres!

 

Allison graciously agreed to answer my questions about the role of friendship in Jillian's story:

 

Question:
You did a lovely job portraying Jillian as a woman juggling multiple roles: wife, worker, mother, and friend. What roles did her friends, Megan and Ainsley, play in Jillian's life (lives)?

Answer:
They were really her foundation, her barometers, in both her present and her past. Whatever her crisis, her friends were stable for her - and she tried to do the same for them. I've found this to be true in my own life too: through every various incarnation of myself and my relationships and my careers, my friends have held steady, and in fact, I thank many of my dearest friends in my acknowledgments, saying, "Thank you for reminding me that where we come from is just as important as where we're going." And this pretty much sums up Jill's friendships - they carry her through wherever she might be headed. That, really, to me, is what the best of friendships can do.

 

Question:
Did you derive inspiration for those characters from your own friendships? If so, explain.

Answer:
Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that I have a few very, very close friends whom I value like family. Second to my husband (and maybe my parents), they get the phone call with any good news that I want to share. So I understood how necessary and invaluable these women were for Jillian. I also understood that there are certain things - secrets, for lack of a better word - that you can share only with these women. In fact, the inspiration for the book came from a conversation I had with my dearest friend - she was having one of those "what if" moments, and we were discussing the paths she could have taken, and I was reassuring her that these questions were entirely normal...we just don't share them publicly too often. Really, only with our most trusted confidantes. So, in that sense, yes, I derived inspiration from my friendships. But neither Megan nor Ainsley are based on my friends or literally inspired by them. But it would certainly be fair to say that my love and appreciation for them is perhaps reflected in Jillian's love and appreciation for her friends and how they help her wade through the muck of her situation.

 

Question:
Your handling of infertility was particularly sensitive. How did it become a dominant theme in the book?

Answer:
Well, the book wrestles with a variety of issues that deal with motherhood, and I wanted to explore what it might be like to want that motherhood so badly - something that Jillian is mildly blasé about - and not be able to achieve it. How would that mold you? How would you cope with it? Increasingly, as my friends and I get older, I hear of friends who struggle with fertility, and my heart breaks for them because, it's the great unknown really: who knows if you're going to get pregnant, and it can really feel like a crapshoot. But what if this was all you wanted in the world for yourself? How do you overcome that? How do you grieve? How do you move forward? Megan's experience and views really stood in contrast to Jillian's, and I thought it was a nice counter-balance and a good way to explore how much motherhood can (or can't) define you.

 

Question:
How did Jillian friendships change with marriage and motherhood? What has been your own experience?

Answer:
Jillian became more isolated, both literally and emotionally, when she married. She left so much of what she was familiar with: her job, her city, her apartment, and headed to the suburbs, and I think this was really disorienting for her, as I know it can be for many women. And then there's the whole motherhood factor: the fact that after we have kids, we might feel less connected with our single or childless friends, or they might feel less connected to us. Not that this always happens. Certainly, there are plenty of times when it doesn't happen. But, and many moms will quickly admit to this, when you have kids it becomes so, so easy to lose yourself in them, and what happens when you meet up with your single friends and all you want to do is talk about potty training or pre-school applications? It's not fair to them, and I guess it's not fair to you either. But the key, for me, has been finding common ground. In my own experience, sure, I've drifted in some friendships (or they've drifted from me) once I got married and had kids - simply because we didn't share the same common ground anymore- but the ones that were most dear, of course we made them work. We go out for dinner, and they listen to me talk about my kids, and I listen to their dating horror stories...and then we move on to gossip, careers, old friends, whatever. I think it's important that everyone make a little effort to find that middle ground - it's not hard to do in solid relationships.

 

Question:
On page 63, you mention how friends can get lost in the shuffle of life. Can you explain how or why this happens based on your own experiences?

Answer:
Sure, I alluded to it a bit above. Sometimes, when friendships are so constant in your life, you almost forget that they're there...it's like you take them for granted. "Oh, I can call her tomorrow because I have to deal with XYZ today." That sort of thing. I know that I'm totally guilty of this. Right now, for example, my best friend and I have been playing phone tag for over three weeks: she moved, I went on vacation, she got wrapped up in her son's new school, I got wrapped up in work, etc. But I've also been lucky. I've surrounded myself with women who don't need daily check-ins - we're always happy to hear from each other whenever the other has the time. I understand that my friends value me, and I also understand that they have a whole set of responsibilities that have nothing to do with me. And that's totally okay. What matters most to me is that when I really need them - with good news or with bad news - they answer the phone and listen.

Question:
Writing a novel can be pretty lonely. How do you handle your own friendships as a novelist?

Answer:
A couple of different ways: One, I have a lot of "virtual" friends! Which sounds crazy, but my writer friends whom I know from various online groups keep me company during the day when I need to connect with someone or need a break. I just head to the forums of these sites and chime in. Two, I make a point to have a girls' night at least once a month. This keeps me in touch with my college friends who have known me for almost two decades. You can't replace that kind of camaraderie, and even when I'm soooo tired and don't feel like going, I'm always so glad that I did afterward: I feel rejuvenated. And three, as I've said above, I have a short list of my closest friends who I call when I have the time...usually this is while I'm walking the dog! But after catching up for 30 minutes or so, I feel like all is well in my world...and in theirs. And that's enough to fuel me over the next few days (or weeks) when we might not have a chance to reconnect.

What do lonely people do when they need friends but have none? According to new research, they tend to anthropomorphize: They attribute human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.

“When people lack a sense of connection with other people, they are more likely to see their pets, gadgets or gods as human-like,” says psychologist Nicholas Epley, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, in a press release.

The loneliness of having too few friends or being totally bereft of friends can be excruciatingly painful. In fact, Epley suggests that it can even be deadly. “It’s actually a greater risk for morbidity or mortality than cigarette smoking is. Being lonely is a bad thing for you,” he says.

The researchers suggest that humanizing the inhuman may confer some of the same benefits that people derive from friends and other social relationships. The bottom Line: If you find yourself talking to your cat, you may want to think about whether you have a friendship deficit that needs to be addressed.

 

The study will appear in the February issue of Psychological Science. Also contributing to the research were Scott Akalis of Harvard University and the University of Chicago’s Adam Waytz and John Cacioppo.

It has been well-established that loneliness and lack of social supports are linked to an increased risk of heart disease, viral infections, and cancer as well as higher mortality rates. Now for the first time, a research team at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has found evidence suggesting that social isolation is linked to alterations of the genes that drive inflammation, the first response of the immune system...