10 Things A Lonely Person Goes Through

You may be having 1000 contacts on your Facebook account. You may be meeting 50 new people at work each day. You may be having a complete family. But still you may feel emptiness inside you. For you are not emotionally connected to them. This is loneliness that a person can feel either temporarily or for a prolonged time. A lonely person goes through emotional and behavioral changes from time to time.

Loneliness is modern day epidemic despite more means of communication. The lonely feeling is masked by people because of the fear of being judged as unlikeable, a loser or weird by others that makes them hide their sense of aloneness, alienation or exclusion. It’s like being without aid and protection of others. It can hit anyone. Talent, financial success, fame, adoration offers no protection towards things a lonely person goes through.

Abraham Maslow in his five stages of human needs has placed the need for social relatedness or love and belongingness that motivates human behavior at third place. All want to be accepted and supported by others but if this very feeling is missing from a person’s life then it can result in loneliness and lonely people may turn to other means to fill their void and become a victim to many disorders.

1Dating Apps

An airhostess mentioned in her blog, ‘the dating apps-I hate them and yet I find myself falling into a pattern. There is an intense loneliness that settles in when I open a dating App. I keep asking myself ‘Why are you here?’. I delete the app and a day rolls by when I again fear my person does not exist in day-to-day activities and will only manifest his presence through my phone. So its swipe-swipe-swipe-match-look-contemplate-exit-think. This is lonely desperation’. Lonely people turn to dating apps for the feeling that someone likes and wants to talk to them that gives them a sense of belonging. 

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2Addictions

“If we cannot connect with each other we will connect with anything we find”, said a heroin addict. He bonded with heroin as he could not bond as fully with anything else. Lonely people are more likely to get hooked to a drug or alcohol as they feel these are their best friends. They do this to avoid the reality that is filled with fear, denial and guilt. Lonely people may turn to substance abuse because they are lonely and they remain lonely because they are addicts. It’s a vicious cycle. 

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3Start Fearing Relationship

Things lonely people go through are psychological too. Lonely people are not lonely because they do not know how to talk to people but because they are scared of messing up relationships. They feel they are unlikeable and unworthy of good relationships causing fear and anxiety about the process of forming them. They dread bad social experiences and lose faith that it is possible to enjoy good company. This results in more loneliness. The social interactions that lonely people have are not as positive as others hence the relationships they have do not help them to cope up with stress as relationships normally do. 

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