I was fifteen when my secondary school classmate and I played a game of truths. He asked me to tell him something I’d never told anyone, and I remember telling him that marriage did not interest me at all. He paused for a while and then said, “You’ll be very lonely.” He said that with such graveness, as though it was the worst possible thing that could ever befall any human being. That was the first time someone promised me loneliness for being non-conforming. As I grew, I found that it was not unusual for people to promise women a lifetime of loneliness as a consequence of not making themselves “marriageable,” holding unconventional opinions, or expressing their lack of interest in getting married or having children. In recent times especially, the world seems to be heavily invested in insisting that modern women are doomed to long, miserable, and lonely lives because we are more interested in seeking happiness and fulfillment in places outside of marriage and children, the traditional places where women are supposed to find those.

There are numerous articles, podcasts, and a thesis out there, all swearing by the gods that modern women are doomed to a lifetime of misery and loneliness. 

What does it mean to be lonely?

I define loneliness as being alone and having a strong distressful awareness of it. Loneliness is not just feeling alone when one is by themselves, but also feeling alone in one’s own experiences. This means that one can not just feel lonely when they are physically isolated, but may also feel that way if no one around them can relate to or identify with their personal experiences or share their thoughts and opinions. A person may well be surrounded by people but may have feelings of loneliness if these people are not relatable. In writing this article, I spoke to a total of twelve women of different ages, mothers and child-free women, married and unmarried women, and one of them, Oge, admitted to feeling lonely even when hanging out with her friends, not because they weren’t good friends but because they were all married and had kids. “I can’t relate to many of the conversations, especially the ones about children so I feel lonely around them sometimes,” she said.

Why does my loneliness upset you?

In every patriarchal society, women need to depend on men for validation to accept their leadership, and fear is one of the tools employed to keep women in check. One of those fears and perhaps the strongest of all, is the fear of being lonely. People often advise women to marry and do all that they can to stay married to avoid feeling lonely. In many Nigerian cultures, for instance, women are encouraged to marry and to do so as early as possible, women are also advised to stay in their marriages even when they are unhappy in those marriages. They make examples of divorced women and point out that these women are very lonely. Ironically when these women grow older and are widowed, they are discouraged from getting married. Widows who consider remarrying are asked what they need marriage for. These questions come from the same people who pester younger women to marry and stay married to avoid loneliness in old age, but suddenly find it repulsive that a woman who is now in her old age desires companionship to avoid feeling lonely. 

That is proof that nobody really cares that much about preventing loneliness for women. None of the pestering and badgering was because they care so much about women and do not want us to feel lonely.

We can all be lonely.

People hardly issue threats of loneliness to men or randomly insinuate that they are lonely because they are unmarried or do not have children, but men, just as much as women, experience loneliness. One may even argue that the reason many men are starting podcasts and spaces simply to discuss women and how lonely we may feel or are doomed to feel is because they fear that they might be lonely in their old age and are projecting these fears onto women. 

When people talk about loneliness, they describe it as a feeling that is experienced only by older, unmarried, and child-free women. Younger women who are threatened with loneliness are told that it is a feeling that they’ll experience later in their lives as though they will never get to experience it in their twenties or as adult teenagers. My interviewees squashed this narrative as they all admitted that they were children the first time they felt lonely. This puts a rest to the stubbornly perpetuated idea that loneliness is a tumultuous feeling reserved for “older” unmarried women who do not have children. Children feel lonely and so do teenage girls, married women, and mothers. Six of the twelve women I spoke to are married or have been married and they all admitted that they felt lonely even while they were married and are still married to their partners. 

Also, no one is above feeling lonely. It is not a feeling that is reserved for unenlightened people or women who desire marriage and are unmarried, or people who are not emotionally mature or aware. While interviewing her, 25-year-old Priscilla said that she often felt guilty and stupid for feeling lonely. 

“I just thought I was too big to feel that way.”

Is marriage and children loneliness-repellant?

It is often suggested to women that the permanent solution to loneliness is a husband and a child. There are many occasions however that married people and parents experience loneliness. One of the women I spoke to, Blessing, admitted that despite being in a happy marriage, she has felt lonely on different occasions. 

“I felt most lonely when we moved from Nigeria to the UK. I had my husband, and my son, and we lived close to my in-laws, but I didn’t have any friends.”

 The other interviewees admitted to feeling lonely at different points even when they were in

romantic relationships. Getting married and being in a romantic partnership does not guarantee complete freedom from ever feeling lonely. Not only is it common for people in unhappy marriages to feel lonely, but it is also possible to feel lonely even in a healthy romantic relationship for reasons unrelated to the marriage.

Having children also does not spare one from feeling lonely because not only is it possible to feel that way even with the children around, children eventually become adults and leave to lead their own lives. 

My mom recently met my friend who told her that she is uninterested in getting married or having kids. She asked how my friend planned to handle returning from work and being all alone in her home. I pointed out to my mom that my friend was going to handle it the same way she (my mom) does it. My siblings and I no longer live with my mom and because her marriage is a long-distance one, she often returns home and is by herself.

I hear people encourage unmarried women to have children by themselves to “kill” loneliness, and while having children by oneself and not waiting for a man to come along may be a great idea, children do not in fact “kill” loneliness. They may indeed distract you from feeling lonely for a while but what happens when these children become teenagers and would rather spend more of their time with their friends? 

Living in fear of loneliness is as gut-wrenching as feeling lonely.

Loneliness may be a painful, empty feeling, but living in the constant dread of loneliness can be just as bad as the feeling itself. As one of the women puts it, “just the thought of being lonely is very terrifying.”

Decisions that are made with the dread of loneliness are often just as bad as decisions made when one is feeling lonely. When asked whether the fear of being lonely has pushed her to make unwholesome decisions, one of the women, Esther admits that it has. “Had I not been worried about feeling lonely, I’d have left my boyfriend last year,” she tells me. Another interviewee mentions that whenever she feels lonely, she reaches out to people she knows she has no business contacting. “I call stupid people,” she admits. One of the women during my conversations with her mentions that she stayed for so long in her abusive marriage because she was terrified of feeling lonely after she left. When I pointed out that she felt lonely in the marriage anyway, she agreed. Women often stay in abusive or unfulfilling relationships or marriages because they worry about the loneliness that they may experience when they leave that marriage but many times, they already have the experience that they fear they are going to have.

It is not uncommon for single women to accept or propose marriage to any man even if he’s not the kind of man they’d choose under a normal circumstance or is evidently a bad choice. Women make other decisions that may cause them harm out of fear of being lonely or from feeling lonely such as returning to an abuser who then causes them more harm, keeping unplanned pregnancies, and sometimes befriending or remaining friends with people who are bad for them.

Demystifying loneliness is how you stop dreading it.

Loneliness might just be a rite of passage, nearly everyone has felt and will feel lonely at some point in their lives and for different reasons too. One of the interviewees, O, stated that she felt lonely as a child being the only child of her mother in a polygamous family, another interviewee said she felt lonely as a child because she was the only daughter of her parents and the boys excluded her from their games, Blessing, the interviewee mentioned above blames her longest streak of loneliness on moving to a foreign country where she had no friends, and for another interviewee, it was being the only child-free person in her friendship circle.  The common denominator is that many of these women feel lonely either when they are physically alone or isolated from others by their experiences. Since being in any of these shoes is nearly unavoidable, it is better to learn to see loneliness as a phase that must surely come and pass than to live in constant dread of it and to make decisions that may alter our lives badly because of it.

We are all together yet so alone.

At different points in our lives, we will feel alone and isolated from our loved ones by death or certain experiences, secrets, or changes in our health, bodies, locations, or mindsets. It is nearly impossible to never feel alone. 

We must learn to sit with loneliness.

Loneliness doesn’t have to be such a dreadful feeling. Sometimes, loneliness points us in the right direction. Loneliness may be a sign, a sign that we have outgrown our immediate environment, that we are unhappy with the presence and absence of something or someone in our lives, or that we are disconnected from our gifts or creativity. 

At some point in my life, I felt very lonely because I was disconnected from my creative side and was forcing myself to do stuff that didn’t quite resonate with my personality.

One of my interviewees shared that feeling lonely in her marriage to an emotionally and physically absent husband helped her decide that it was time to leave. Loneliness can be used as a great tool but we must first refuse to demonize it and simply sit with it. We do not have to resign ourselves to feeling lonely and surrender or sink deeply in it but we must accept that there are times in our lives when we would, for varying reasons feel alone and rather than demonize it or let it control our behavior, we can try to figure out why and fix it, or stay in the realization that it is a phase that will surely pass.

Loneliness, like most emotions, should be understood not feared or demonized. Rather than live in fear of it or allow the feeling of it to overwhelm us, we must learn to sit with it and let it pass through us. That way, the feeling is demystified and we understand that it is not so bad.

Not living in fear of loneliness or loneliness helps protect women from being vulnerable to abuse and will help us make decisions on love and relationships from an empowered rather than a needy place.

Few tips that may help you get out of the loneliness fog

• Form a good relationship with yourself, figure out great activities to do alone, and try different things until you find something or many things that you genuinely enjoy doing alone. 
• Have and maintain great, healthy friendships with like-minded people.
• Start or join a support group for people like you if you find that you are different in any way or part of a minority group. 
• Be very aware of how you feel without judging yourself or panicking.
• Understand that most times, it is a phase and will pass with time. 
• Seek professional help if you find that the feeling has lingered for a long time.