Can Loneliness Open the Door to Love?

“ Everybody fundamentally wants to be loved…to feel like they belong,” says historian Fay Bound Alberti. “But many people don’t find that, or they think  about romantic love as the answer to all of their problems.” As a result, many of us end up feeling something else entirely: loneliness. Recent scientific research has described loneliness as a “modern epidemic,” an experience that can pose a threat to our health. While there is truth to these claims, they risk simplifying the complexity of this experience.

For this year’s Valentine’s Day episode of the Magazine Podcast, we speak to Professor Fay Bound Alberti, author of A Biography of Loneliness. She guides us through the history of this emotion—its roots in the modern era and the ways it has been depicted in the work of artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The podcast also revisits last year’s conversation with Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo; alongside Professor Alberti, she offers strategies for reframing our perceptions of love and loneliness.

Fay Bound Alberti: I did this thing right at the beginning of the pandemic when I asked people on Twitter, “What does loneliness sound like?”

I had so many people write to me, and some said it sounds like…a pub door when you are on the street, and it opens for a second and you hear everybody having a good time and you’re not there. And another person said to me, it sounds like when you’re alone in your apartment at night and the radiators turn on.

Rachael Schwabe: I think loneliness sounds like an emptiness, like an echoiness. Like you’re in a cave and your voice is bouncing off the walls.

Jonathan Dorado: Loneliness, to me, sounds like the coldest, deadest, darkest day in winter. When you’re coming back from a night out at the bars and you’re walking back from the train station to your apartment building. It’s like 3 a.m. and you can just hear the wind blow and feel the breeze on your face.

Sara Bodinson: Honestly, it’s the sound of my cat’s paws when he hops out of the bed onto the wooden floor and creaks his way down the hall.

Jason Persse: I think loneliness sounds like television commercials. Because whenever I’m by myself, inevitably the TV is on and inevitably I don’t care enough to change the channel or do anything.

Liz Margulies: The ticking clock in the kitchen in the house that I grew up in…. And then also, the quiet after my son told me he was lonely.

Arlette Hernandez: Welcome to MoMA’s Magazine Podcast. My name is Arlette Hernandez and today we’re celebrating Valentine’s Day—but not in the way you might expect. Instead of discussing love, we are digging into the topic of loneliness.

Through art, science, and history, we’ll explore how this feeling shapes us, why it matters, and how it’s not always a bad thing. In fact, loneliness might be the key to understanding the meaning of true connection.

FBA:  Historians argue all the time about periodization, so there’s no specific date, most people tend to use post-1850 as the modern era. The 19th century is a moment of profound change where for the first time we have a whole other way of understanding the body and how it works.  You have categorization that we’ve never seen before. We have the rise of science and scientific explanation for things. Mass industrialization that starts in the 18th century, and really, by the beginning of the 1900s, we’ve had the growth of cities.

So that drive towards an increased urbanization, increased anonymity in cities, a decline of purely religious explanations for why things are in the world—that develops a sense of questioning and a lack of purpose.

AH:  New technologies created new industries which in turn allowed and even encouraged people to move to new places, all in search of a better life. And from this shift to industrial city living came a new way of seeing ourselves and our place in the world.

FBA:  What’s quite characteristic of the modern era, is this emphasis on the individual as the most important unit. For centuries, your position in the world was guaranteed and assured by God, people knew who they were in relation to other people and barely moved very much between villages and communities. If you think about that in contrast to the 19th century, where we have industrialization and urbanization, there’s a sort of shift where you have an opening up of potential. But also an increased judgment on people for what they produced.

It’s a combination of all of these things, including the emergence of scientific rather than religious explanations of the world, that has created this sense of modern individualism.

So although they were very exciting and innovative opportunities that came about as a result of those changes, what there was too was a destabilizing of the meaning of me in the world. Who am I and why do I matter? My sense of relationship for others has shifted. 

You find that too in art, that sort of sense of  how do we place ourselves in the world, and how do we deal with these extraordinary feelings of discomfort and who am I anyway.

AH: Reflecting on the street paintings from this chapter of his life, Kirchner once wrote:

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (read by Professor Alberti): They originated in…one of the loneliest times of my life, during which an agonizing restlessness drove me out onto the streets day and night.

AH: In a different letter, Kirchner also wrote:

ELK: Completely strange faces pop up as interesting points through the crowd. I am carried along with the current, lacking will. To move becomes an unacceptable effort.

AH: Agony, restlessness, strangeness—there’s a reason Kirchner uses these different words to discuss his experience.

FBA: Loneliness is made up of lots of different emotions depending on our view of the world and our experience. So for example, if you’re a widow who’s lost your life partner, your loneliness will be about a particular kind of longing for a particular person. There’ll be grief and sadness, sure, and there may be depression. But that’s going to be different to, if you’re somebody who is maybe a young boy who’s playing a lot of computer games, doesn’t have friends, and there can often be a kind of resentment and a sense of shame.

We have to address where people are, because often it’s about the search for meaning, and the search for meaning is going to look very different throughout our lifespan and based on our experiences.

There are definite moments in our lives when we’re going to feel lonely, and those are opportunistic moments of loneliness, which is very different from the chronic loneliness that some people get when they are unable to engage with others because they’re inhibited by health or poverty or in some way disconnected from social life.

FBA: If we say that loneliness is a pandemic, we do a number of things quite subtly. One, we make it a medical thing, which means maybe it needs a pill. But what we’re doing when we describe something as a pandemic of loneliness too is we are suggesting that there’s something universal and inevitable about it, rather than something that arises in distinct moments in people’s lives for distinct reasons. And I worry a little bit about the jettisoning of responsibility for that, because I think that governments and systems have responsibility in making people feel included and making people feel welcome.

AH: And if we treat loneliness like an illness, we also risk overlooking an important distinction: the difference between feeling alone and being alone.

FBA: I think there’s a very big difference between loneliness and solitude, because when I think about my own personal experience, I love solitude. I love being alone. When I’m alone, I feel like I want to write, I want to do creative things. I want to be able to zone out and into the clutter of my own mind, which we can’t do when we’re surrounded by other people.

I have found that women writers in particular—people like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath—have talked not only about their experiences of loneliness, but of actually needing to be in a state of loneliness, not just solitude, but a state of loneliness so that they can see the world differently and feel more detached from the world.

Art often happens in solitude. So as long as it’s possible to be playful around that and to think about it in those terms, it can be beneficial. That’s different from loneliness or solitude that’s imposed, and a form of punishment.

The issue is always one about choice. If we know that it’s a choice to be lonely or to be alone, it feels rather different than if it’s imposed on us. That reframing is critical.

FBA: Everybody fundamentally wants to be loved, and feel like they belong, they’re seen, they have a place. Many people they don’t find that, or they think that it is realized through connections that aren’t necessarily healthy, or through acquisition of things that make them more attractive to others.

We have a tendency to think about romantic love as the answer to all of our problems. We have this sense that if we meet a person, then that person is going to fill up all of our needs, and we won’t have any more needs ever again, and then we get frustrated that it doesn’t work like that.

 A more expansive understanding of love being about human connection and honesty and growth can result in a more harmonious feeling or a better balance between ourselves and other people. What I have noticed as I’m getting older is just how much love there is around me in terms of my friendships with others, the desire to do good in the world. There are many different types of love to go around. One gets the same when you read a piece of prose or a piece of poetry and it’s like, “Ah, I get it.” It’s a sense of connectedness, a kind of oneness that touches some sort of sense of universal feeling.

SC: In this time of social flux where more and more people feel lonely, I’m here to make the case that if you feel lonely, you are not alone. Together, we can feel better. Together, we can feel more connected through our common passions, for our common love of others and common love of art.

The world is changing, yes. But love is also changing with it. Love continuously evolves, and this is one of love’s best features: its adaptability. The cure to loneliness is our social connections. The more we feel connected, the less we can feel lonely.

AH: So on this Valentine’s Day, we encourage you to reframe loneliness. Instead of seeing it as a lack of connection, consider it an opportunity to seek out new ways to connect. Whether it’s reaching out to old friends, starting a new book, or roaming a museum and exploring the art of others—there are so many ways we can feel connected and understood. Recognizing loneliness as a signal—as opposed to a perpetual state—can truly open the door to love, in all its forms.