No loneliness is worse than being with people, but not a specific one

By David McElroy · February 27, 2019

This has happened to me before. It will happen again. Maybe it’s happened to you.

I got into my car Wednesday evening after a long day at work. Nothing earth-shattering happened, but it was busy. Interesting things happened. OK, more like “mildly interesting” things. But as I absentmindedly left the I-65 ramp to merge onto I-459 heading home, I picked up my iPhone to make a call. And then I stopped.

What was I doing? Oh, yeah. I picked up the phone to call her.

It wasn’t a conscious impulse. Nothing in me decided it was finally time to call her out of the blue. It was just an automatic reflex of my body to a yearning that I’m accustomed to squelching all the time.

Oh, yeah. We don’t talk anymore. I can’t call her. I can’t tell her what happened today. And I felt it again — that painful jolt that hits my nervous system every time this happens — as though something inside dies once more to realize how things really are.

I’ve started to realize lately just how many people experience something similar. One of the most-read articles every day on my site for the last year or so has been something I wrote about three years ago called “Missing someone creates incredibly intense physical sensations in heart.”

I wasn’t clueless enough when I wrote it to think that nobody else experienced such things, but because people frequently write me after reading that article, I’ve become aware of just how devastating it is for others.

I can’t tell you everybody else’s stories, but I hear a lot of them. I hear about people who can’t be with someone they love because their families keep them apart. I hear about unrequited love. Some of them know they’ll never be loved in return. Others hold out hope. I hear from those who are kept from another person — the one to whom they’ve given their hearts — for all sorts of reasons.

And they all hurt.

I recently discovered that the kind of loneliness experienced by these people — and by me — really does create a physical reaction in the brain. The feeling of loneliness is processed by the same part of the brain as the area in which physical pain is processed. It’s called the anterior cingulate cortex. So when you feel that jolt of emptiness — such as what I felt in the car Wednesday evening — it’s not just your imagination. You’re feeling real, physical pain.

A lot of people misunderstand this sort of loneliness. They say, “Well, here’s how you can meet someone.” But just “meeting someone” isn’t the issue.

When I’ve gone through times in my life when I loved nobody — and I simply wanted someone to whom I could give my love — I’ve experienced that need to just “meet someone.” But this is different.

This is the desire — more like a need, according to my gut — for a particular other. A particular mind. A certain soul. A loving heart. A beautiful voice. Everything.

It’s not just a need for human companionship. The people who write to me aren’t saying, “Hey, I don’t know how to meet people.” They always have somebody in particular who they love and don’t want to live without.

I’m sure this story is as old as humanity itself. Our literature is full of stories of broken-hearted people missing those they can’t have. It’s the stuff of popular movies. And popular music frequently explores the theme.

There’s not much to say about it that’s new. I can never give good advice to those who write me about it. I can’t even change my own stubborn certainty about how my life ought to be.

I can only offer love and support to those who are hurting. For those who can end up with the object of their desire, I can only wish the unification to come soon. And for those who can’t end up with the object of their love, I can only wish they can find a greater love — a new love — which can take its place.

Every time I’ve loved — not that many times in my life — I’ve thought she was the only woman in the world. But in each case, someone has come along and made me feel that someone even better loves me and wants me and chooses me.

That’s what I wait for, but it’s hard to know whether this time might be different — whether this time might be the one who can’t be replaced. It’s a heartbreaking way to live, but some of us have no choice.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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