My husband is lonely.
I find this sentence the hardest sentence to write, because it forces me to engage, again, with something that makes my husband sadder than he needs to be. In some ways, I worry that it is my fault. Perhaps it is.
I don't get lonely. Like my mother, I fulfil my human need for connection with random conversations with people. I can talk the ear off the cashier in the supermarket or someone I've just met at the beach. Failing that, I can talk with my parents for hours about all kinds of things and then, et voila, my need for connection is totally met.
Most of the time I'm trying to escape people - I feel less safe around them emotionally, likely beccause I was bullied as a teenager, and my amygdala starts to warn me that people are threats more than anything. I love being alone, and of course, if I want a connection, I just jump online. Social media like Hive and Threads helps me express myself and feel understood.
But this post isn't about me.
It's about my husband, and how much he longs to have friends. It sounds so lame, but I'm not being critical - I understand it's a driving force of his being. Having moved to Australia he has lost all the connections with friends in England, although those friendships would have passed away due to time and distance anyway, and men aren't so good at connecting. And he hasn't found close friends here. He has work colleagues and a couple of Landrover mates but not real, genuine connections.
Why?
This is a theme that Ladies of Hive asks us to focus on this week. Why are there so many people who are lonely? Why is it so hard for people to make real connections when almost everyone wants to make real connections?
We must remember that we are actually hardwired for connection - face to face interaction with others actually affects the vagus nerve, which regulates our breathing, which affects our gut too. It helps us be calmer (or it should) and thus affects our stress levels. No wonder lack of connection makes us ill. It makes sense - if we didn't feel good around people, we wouldn't be able to band together to increase chances of survival. Without the tribe, we are left alone in the wilderness to die. The TV series Alone shows just how traumatic it can be to be alone in the wilderness. It's easy enough to hunt bears and snow rabbits, but being alone can break people.
These days, we are focussed far more on individualism. People move around a lot more too, disconnecting from the villages they grew up in and finding themselves alone in foreign countries or different cities. Social media creates further divisions so we walk out into the world wary and guarded. People get so busy trying to survive that they lose touch with the people who will catch them when they fall.
Take the local book club for example. They meet every Tuesday at the top pub. I was going to go, but remember I'm one of those unusual people that feel edgy if I'm around others too much, so I'm pretty cautious about social situations and if I'm feeling frayed, company is the last thing I want. Anyway, they've had only a handful of attendees, so they asked why in the Facebook group. What was stopping people from hanging out with this local book tribe?
'I'm flat out running the kids around'
'I've been working too much that I've barely had time to breathe'
'I haven't had time to read'
No one has time to be with the tribe anymore, from family to friends to local interest groups. This is the same for Jamie - any opportunities that might come up to hang with a tribe he's interested in are often missed because he's working, or too tired. How can one even seek out a tribe if one is always over worked and over tired? Treadmill life is real. The bills must be paid. Food must be put on the table. We can only dream about the days of old when the tribe would sit down to eat together, looking after the littlest to the oldest.
Social media makes us wary. We're manipulated by mainstream media too, telling us to be wary of the migrants, the thieves, the scammers, the leftists, the right wing. No one thinks to think we have more in common than we have as a difference. You can believe in climate change and someone else can believe it's a hoax yet you might still enjoy cycling, your children, growing mushrooms, healthy eating, and so on. Yet we are led to believe that certain beliefs are the singlemost defining thing about a particular person, and thus they must be avoided, or even hated, at all costs.
That still doesn't solve the problem of my darling. I'm hoping he will find his tribe, because I know how much it's important to him. I only need him, my family, and the cashiers at the supermarkets.
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