Why Loneliness After 50 May Be Older Than You Think
I am currently about halfway through my second book. It is more a memoir than my first book, How Did I Get Here?, which was, part memoir and part self-help. This time I am writing a story, one based on real events, with a few names changed. And one of the threads that runs through it is loneliness. In my case, the loneliness that follows suddenly finding yourself alone after a three decade marriage.
Where I am in the book at the moment is confronting a loneliness that has followed me not only since my divorce, but way before that, as far back as childhood. Back then it was the ups and downs at home, where my parents were too busy fighting each other to be truly present with me as I grew up. I learned early on that it is you against the world, and usually without much of a net to catch you.
So what is loneliness, and why is it such a common thread in so many lives, and especially in the second half of them?
The loneliness that travels with you
I do not have a complete answer to that question. But I have a beginning of one, and it came to me, of all places, in the lounge of a Hyatt in Nepal.
I was fifty-two. I had got on a plane and travelled to the other side of the world looking for something, although if you had asked me at the time I am not sure I could have told you what. From the outside it would have looked like the beginning of an adventure. A woman in her fifties, finally free, sitting in a beautiful hotel in a city she had wanted to see for years.
Inside, something else was happening. A wave of dread moved through me, and the strange thing was that the dread was already there. It had got on the plane with me. It was waiting in the lounge when I arrived. And I remember thinking, with a clarity that surprised me, this is not about the marriage. The marriage had ended and the feeling had not gone with it. Which meant it had not been caused by the marriage in the first place.
That was the beginning of a much harder understanding.
For a long time I had assumed that the loneliness I felt in the years before the divorce was a symptom of the marriage itself, of being with someone who was no longer present in the way I needed him to be. And there was truth in that. But it was not the whole truth. Because here I was, free of all of it, sitting in a place I had chosen, doing exactly what I had told myself I wanted to do, and the loneliness had simply travelled with me.
It was older than the marriage. It had been there before I met him. It had been there, if I am honest, for as long as I could remember.
Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing
Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing. We tend to use the words as if they were, and the confusion is part of why loneliness can feel so shameful. People assume that if they are on their own, they must be lonely, and that if they are lonely, it must be because they are on their own. Neither is reliably true.
Being alone is a circumstance. It can be chosen or unchosen, welcome or unwelcome, and it can change from one to the other across a single afternoon. Some of the most contented people I know live alone and have made a real peace with it. I have written before about how to find peace in living alone in later life, because it is a particular skill, and one that nobody quite teaches us.
Loneliness is something else. It is a felt sense of not being held in anyone's attention. Of not mattering, in a particular and ongoing way, to anyone in particular. You can be alone and not lonely. You can be in a marriage, or in a busy office, or at a dinner party with twelve people, and feel it sharply. The loneliest I have ever been was not after the divorce. It was inside the last few years of the marriage, sitting across from someone who was no longer looking at me.
That is worth naming, because so much of the public conversation about loneliness assumes the answer is more company. More clubs, more activities, more people in the room. Sometimes that is the answer. Often it is not. You can add a great deal of company to a life and still feel unmet at the centre of it.
Why this stage of life surfaces loneliness
What I have come to understand is that the marriage, the career, the busyness of a full and demanding life were not causing the loneliness. They were holding it at bay. They were giving me so much to do, so many people to attend to, so much to be needed for, that the older feeling underneath did not have room to surface.
And then they fell away. The marriage ended. The children grew. The career thinned. And there it was, waiting for me in a hotel lounge in Nepal, asking to be looked at.
I do not think I am unusual in this. I think it is one of the least talked about truths of this stage of life, that the loneliness which surfaces in our fifties and sixties is rarely new. It has often been there for decades, held down by everything we were busy with, and it surfaces now because the things that were holding it down are no longer there in the same way.
The job that took up most of your week is not taking up the same space anymore. The children who needed you constantly are needing you differently, or barely at all. The marriage that absorbed years of attention may have ended, or may still be going but in a thinner version of itself. The diary that used to be full of obligations has begun to have gaps in it. And in those gaps, something old comes up to meet you.
What loneliness can feel like, and what it really is
For some people it arrives as a kind of flatness. A Tuesday evening that feels longer than it should. A weekend that stretches out in front of you with nothing in it that feels like it matters. The phone that does not ring, not because anything is wrong, but because there is no particular reason for it to.
For others it arrives as something sharper. A moment in a supermarket when you realise you have not had a real conversation with anyone in three days. A birthday that passes without the people you thought would remember. The slow understanding that you have become, without quite noticing, someone who is not held in anyone's daily attention.
Neither version is more legitimate than the other. They are different shapes of the same underlying thing.
What I have come to think is that loneliness, in this form, is not really about the absence of people. It is about the absence of a particular kind of being known. Most of us have spent our adult lives being known through our roles. We were known as the mother, the wife, the colleague, the one who organised Christmas, the one who could be relied on. When those roles thin out, we are left with the question of who we are when nobody is asking anything of us. And that question, sat with on a Tuesday evening with no diary entry to interrupt it, can feel a great deal like loneliness.
It is not, I think, exactly that. But it can wear the same clothes.
What to do with loneliness, for now
I have not, you will notice, told you what to do about any of this.
That is partly because I am still working it out myself, in the chapter I am writing this week and the ones I have not written yet. And it is partly because I think the first piece of work, with loneliness of this kind, is not to fix it but to look at it. To stop calling it by the wrong name. To stop assuming it is a problem with our circumstances when it is often a much older feeling that our circumstances have only revealed.
There is practical work to do as well, when the time is right for it. I have written separately about how to overcome loneliness after 50 and build connections, because there are things that genuinely help, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But I think they help more, and last longer, when they are built on top of an honest acknowledgement of what is actually there. Building connection from a place of self knowledge is a different thing from building it as a way of running from yourself.
What I know is that the loneliness I sat with in a hotel lounge in Nepal at fifty-two is not the same loneliness I sit with now. Something has shifted. I am not yet ready to write about what, because that is what the book is for, and because I am still inside it. But I can tell you that the looking at it, the refusing to call it by the wrong name, was where the shift began.
One of the reasons I write is to clear through the cobwebs of my life, with the hope that something here lands in someone else's at the right moment, with words that help them in some small way. If you are sitting with a version of this, on a Tuesday evening, in a hotel lounge, in a marriage, in a life that looks from the outside like it ought to be enough, you are not the only one. That is not nothing.
If you have read this far, the books that helped me sit with questions like these may be of use to you too. I have put together a list of ten of them, free, when you sign up to my newsletter.
