Loneliness: the secret circle of hell
Picture: The lonely runner, by Nick Kenrick on Flickr
“We cannot cope alone,” wrote George Monbiot in his essay on the age of loneliness, published in The Guardian two years ago. Human beings are social animals: we crave the support, approval and love of like-minded individuals. But society in the last 50 years has become steadily more atomised, with a relentless focus on individual success. The Olympics have been reduced to the singularity of winning – silver medallists cry tears of rage and act as if a close relative has died, just because one person out of thousands performed slightly better than them at an arbitrary task. We commiserate with losers rather than celebrate their contribution to the spectacle. There is no solidarity with, or appreciation for, a worthy adversary. And so it is in society: performance is paramount, failure is shameful and social status depends on meeting somebody else’s measure of success, rather than the intrinsic worth of your endeavours.
The greatest failure, the biggest shame of all, is to be lonely. Stress, depression, anxiety, burnout: all these are recognised conditions nowadays and good therapeutic treatments have emerged to help people cope with them. But loneliness? Get a grip. What do you want, a prescription to take down to Aldi so you can stock up on white wine and multipacks? Lonely people are losers, sad sacks, easy prey for spurious dating websites and cowboy builders, and they only have themselves to blame. Who can fail to have a social life in a world where we are constantly being nagged to connect? We can strike up friendships with strangers on the other side of the world, have Twitter chats with our favourite celebrities and find partners online (we can even vet their social media profiles before the first date). We follow our friends on their holidays, cheer their achievements on Facebook and read their blogs. And yet many of us are lonely – profoundly lonely. We don’t want to admit it, because we are under pressure to project idealised versions of ourselves. Social media amplifies this: we are on permanent display. We must be sharp, witty, insightful, passionate and provocative, keep pace with the latest news, surf the waves of outrage and wish everybody a happy birthday.
Often we don’t see loneliness because it is camouflaged in the jungle of self-promotion that is social media. Recently a young woman called Louise Delage exploded onto Instagram as she toured Europe’s party capitals, seemingly having the time of her life, leaving a trail of selfies emblazoned with happy hashtags in her wake. After two months, during which she had accumulated 16,000 followers, came the sting: ‘Louise’ had been created by an advertising agency for an addiction awareness campaign. Few of those who had been sucked into her lifestyle noticed that she had a drink in her hand in every shot, a tell-tale sign of alcoholism. But even when the secret was out, hardly anybody remarked on the other common thread running through the pictures: in the vast majority of them, as she cradles her half-empty glass, Louise is alone.
Since being widowed two years ago I have struggled to get out of the house. I am occupied with my two children from 7am until 10pm, I can’t commit to any kind of regular social activity, like joining a sports club, and dating is off-limits for both emotional and logistical reasons. If I massage my schedule I can squeeze in a Skype call with an old friend (being a recent immigrant makes it extra challenging). The theatre, the cinema, the concert hall, festivals, restaurants, even the shops (apart from the local supermarket) exist in a parallel dimension. There is occasional respite when the children’s grandparents come and look after them every few months. But it is hard to nourish and sustain friendships on such meagre rations of time, and impossible to strike up new ones, in a new country where I have a permanent deficit in terms of language, culture and social networks.
The depth of my social ostracism only hit home the other week when I went for lunch with a friend – not even a close friend, but somebody who’d been very generous with their time over the last two years, offered a listening ear and given some friendly advice. When I got home I was afflicted by a horrible sense of emptiness, a bitter mixture of anxiety, loss and regret. In the next few days I twice went out shopping without my wallet, locked myself out of the house and neglected to pack the mid-morning snack in one of my children’s school bags. Any of these incidents on its own I would have dismissed as a minor lapse of concentration, but taken together they were evidence of a looming crisis. I spent the week moping, exhausted and irritable. On looking back it dawned on me that that lunch date in mid-September was only the second time this year that I’d sat down to eat with another adult who wasn’t related to my children.
‘I have binged on solitude like a seasoned drinker who discovers in his mid-fifties that he has type 2 diabetes’
It was a shock to realise how hard I found it to be alone, because growing up as an only child taught me to appreciate my own company. My mother complimented me on my ability to entertain myself, which may not have been entirely altruistic. But there is difference between solitude and loneliness. Being alone once in a while, in the context of a stimulating social life, can be refreshing and vital, an opportunity to step off the treadmill and let your mind breathe. A day spent alone at the end of a busy week is as relaxing as a glass of wine, and combining the two is possibly the best relief of all. But prolonged periods of isolation corrode the soul. I thought, having spent regular spells by myself, that I was immune to the disease of loneliness. But I have binged on solitude for too long, like the seasoned drinker who champions his ability to turn up to work the morning after a heavy session, year after year, only to be shocked in his mid-fifties by the discovery that he has developed type 2 diabetes.
Loneliness is a dim fetid corridor that deafens you with the echo of your own footsteps. Profound loneliness feels like walking around inside a plastic bubble. The difficult times aren’t when you are away from people, but when you are among them and it feels as if life is going on around you but separate from you. Sometimes people come up close to the bubble; sometimes they even press their faces right into it and see you, but there is no real connection beyond than the formal interactions of shop assistants requesting and receiving money, or neighbours stopping for a 30-second chat before heading off to a proper social engagement. Their fingers prod the bubble but they cannot step inside it and you see, but do not feel, their prodding attempts at contact. And another potential connection fizzles and dies.
I know what you’re thinking: there are worse diseases out there than feeling a bit isolated. But loneliness is physically as well as mentally inhibiting. In a study that followed 2000 people aged over 50 conducted over six years, those who reported being lonely had a 14% higher risk of dying. That was twice the risk for obesity. The Lonely Society, a report by the Mental Health Foundation published in 2010, said the “individualistic society” was responsible both for increased loneliness and an increase in common mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety over the last 50 years. John Carpioccio, a social neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, has gathered scientific evidence of the physiological impact of loneliness: stress hormones, a weakened immune system and lower cardiovascular function, equivalent to the damage done by smoking.
The perniciousness of loneliness is a downward spiral. You don’t bother your friends with it because you don’t want to be bad company. You feel everybody else is doing OK, they’ve got their own worries to deal with and you just need to get over yourself. If you do raise the subject, most people prefer to give superficial advice, such as taking up a new hobby, rather than getting into a situation that can be confusing, tiring and energy-sapping. And if you do find that rare person who can understands, you are terrified of leaning on them too hard and alienating them. In the end you are left with nowhere to go but inwards, into the secret circle of hell, the cold cell in the hive, that is your own diminished company.
Whether loneliness is an epidemic is a matter for the experts. Certainly it is a pervasive condition. The permanent fog of anger on Twitter, notably, gives voice to a widely-felt sense of disappointment and disaffectation. It is tied with low empathy – angry Tweeters scramble to judge anyone who makes a mistake or shows a personal weakness, and compete to see who can ascribe the most malicious motives to a simple misjudgment. They wallow in paranoia, feel quickly threatened and revel in the misfortunes of others. These are all characteristics of lonely people. But how do you fix people who are so entrenched in their unhappiness that they shun all efforts to help them?
There seems to be a tipping point with loneliness where it becomes a one-way plunge into the abyss. I have seen elderly relatives, weakened by grief, gradually withdraw from society in a ghastly pas-de-deux, as their social skills fade and those who were once close to them feel their compassion ebb and drift away. Somehow I have to keep on, for the sake of my children, and try not to think about what happens when they leave home. I don’t fear death so much as the emptiness in between. So I don’t want to succumb to loneliness or stay silent about it. I want to fight it the way other people fight cancer. I want my part in the drama of life to be acknowledged. I’ve always got by with a small social circle and thought I would be strong enough to manage on my own, but the past two years have forced me to accept that George Monbiot is right: we cannot cope alone. Without connections we wither.
Chippings from the quarry #4: Stood up
It seems ridiculous now, but there was a time when every date you went on carried the risk of the other person not showing up. In other words, you’d be stood up. Nowadays when your date doesn’t appear you summon your pocket djinn, dispatch a message demanding to know where the hell they are, and it flies to their phone like a cupid’s arrow dipped in poison. Either they have a good excuse, like they’ve just pulled over by the side of the road to administer the kiss of life to an accident victim, or they have to lie nimbly, or admit to being an inadequate person. Either way, you don’t leave before you’ve had an explanation, and in many ways this feels like progress.
A tangled ivy of etiquette grew up around the unsavoury business of being stood up. The main scruple was how long you should wait before you abandoned hope and shuffled off. You would fidget, push the empty glassware round the table as if re-enacting a battle scene, check your watch too often and try to dodge the barman’s doom-laden gaze. Your second concern was to salvage your dignity as you left, alone, humiliated and betrayed by someone who had fallen so fast in your affections that they left scorch marks on your soul. They didn’t even have the basic decency to be there to absorb your wrath.
Sometimes you stayed in the bar and took a drink to console yourself, and while you were drowning your despair someone else came and sat with you, and you were so grateful for their company and their laughter and the way they swept away your disappointment that you ended up going home with them instead, and by the close of the weekend you had fallen helplessly in love like a leaf tumbling from a tree.
And then on the Monday morning your first date called your office (these being the days when speaking to people was conditional on knowing where they were, in contrast to today when our voices float in the ether) with an effusive apology and an account of whatever act of minor heroism had kept them from you, but you felt awkward and rang off the call, because while they were out saving lives the world had turned and they had fallen out of it. But they persisted, and eventually you agreed to meet for a drink on Friday after work, as friends, so you could explain how your love life had gone ex-directory. But when you saw the vulnerability in their eyes you remembered why you found them so darned attractive in the first place, and you felt your resolve washing away like sand in the morning rain.
And so you began an affair with the person you’d ditched, behind the back of the one fate had thrust on you in his place, and for a few years you faithfully tended this faithless arrangement, soaking up your friends’ compliments about your successfully manicured life of marital bliss, even as you dipped out of sight to engage in hot urgent sex with your paramour. Until one day your lover died in a car accident, and you gnashed your teeth in silent mourning, and in your secret anguish you accepted your surviving partner’s marriage proposal, believing it would absolve you from your grievous shame. And you lived the rest of your life in a balm of muted happiness tinged with the bitter flavour of regret, as all good marriages are.
Nowadays technological advancement has deprived us of these opportunities. If our dates don’t appear we send them a snarky text message, slip out of the bar, go home and cry in the dark.
Above and beyond
Have two years really gone by, my love? When I think of us together it seems like five minutes ago and another time zone at once, as if I’m watching a live television broadcast from the medieval era.
I look through a telescope in search of you, but all I see is flickering lights. Are they anomalies of bitter heat in the cold, or is the night sky a cloak for the terrible brightness? Is it love distorting the view, or madness? Is there any discernible difference?
There is a school of thought that says that once you’ve taken your last breath and your consciousness fizzles out, it’s as if you never existed.
I have an infinitesimal problem with that.
Birthdays
Magteld with the cake for Adam’s sixth birthday.
In one of my first letters from Magteld, a couple of months after we met, she asked when my birthday was. The missive arrived on August 31st, the morning after my 19th birthday, so I was recovering from a late night in a campsite bar swilling cheap Italian lager by the bottle. She told me hers was March 5th, and I realised that we were separated by almost exactly six months. Every horoscope I ever glanced at on the train warned me that our two star signs were cosmically mismatched, but I relished the strict rhythm our dates bestowed on the yearly cycle, like an army marching in step.
In those early years birthdays were among the few occasions when we permitted ourselves a phone call, in that not so distant time when talking across borders was prohibitively expensive. Mostly we made do with handwritten letters, so her voice on the phone took on a decadent and exotic timbre. For her 20th she visited me in Edinburgh, where we were already making plans to live together the following year. It was inconceivable then, but she was already into the second half of her life. Her 21st was an impromptu night out at the Filling Station, rustled up by her friends the day before after she let slip that her birthday was looming. Magteld was not the ceremonial type: as a child she had a reputation for drifting away from her own birthday parties. For her thirtieth I told her we were spending a quiet weekend in a B&B in Edinburgh. I drove along the M8 motorway, strained with nerves, fighting through roadworks to meet the agreed rendezvous time of two o’clock. When we got to the house asked her to knock on the door while I got the children out of the car. For a moment I feared she would refuse, but eventually she consented, with a bewildered shake of the head, and a moment later I heard a squeal as her father opened the door from the inside. It had taken months of scheming, enforced silence and under-the-radar emails to fly her whole family over for the surprise weekend. Weeks of tension evaporated in the blast of joy as she stepped into the hallway.
Early March is a capricious time, especially in Scotland, and that weekend in Edinburgh saw a late flurry of snow. We flung snowballs in the Meadows and watched Euan, less than three years old, totter excitedly across the crispy white grass. The year before we had gone to Ardaneiseig, a stubbornly hard to reach but beautiful spot by a Highland lake, and drove between snowbound peaks on a freakishly still day, when the sky was so piercingly blue it looked as if it might shatter. We had left Euan behind with his grandmother; when I came home and took the bins outside he followed me in a frenzy, terrifed I was about to vanish from his life again. It was one of the last times we went away with the two of us, but in fact we weren’t alone, because Adam arrived around seven months later. As Magteld stepped out on that bright morning and breathed in the sharp air, did she felt the first twinge of life inside her?
Two years ago we were back in Edinburgh for what we knew by then would be, in the absence of miracles, her last birthday. We booked a night in a five-star hotel, wandered down to the Grassmarket and had lunch in The Last Drop, a staple of our student days, and basked in the serenity of the National Galleries. We were living ghosts passing through all the places we were about to quit, indulging ourselves in a farewell tour of the city where our lives had fused. When we returned to Glasgow our nephew had been born, exactly thirty-eight years later than Magteld. Thirty-eight years, an entire life. She got to hold him once, in her prematurely frail arms, in the hospice, and in the photograph I have they both look so vibrant and alert that it’s almost obscene to think that each of them was just over a month removed from non-existence.
She should have been forty today. It’s meant to be the halfway point of your life, when the sun is still high in the sky but the shadows are starting to lengthen, when you look back and reflect on how you got here, and feel the hot breath of time on your neck. There is still enough light for a few more dances and adventures, but your step is heavier and it’s becoming harder to get up again when you fall.
There are still a handful of people alive who marked their fortieth birthday in wartime; plenty more who saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in their forties and are boldly prevailing in their eighties or nineties. Magteld left behind not just two children, but two grandmothers, in a violation of the laws of time. You’re as old as you feel, they say, but my sense of age has gone numb; it feels as if I’ve skipped my forties and am in a kind of limbo, waiting for the clocks to restart somewhere in my mid-fifties when the children have released me back into whatever remains of civilisation. There are days when I feel like an intruder in everyday life, snatching what provisions I need before retreating to the desert of widowhood, that cold dark comforting place where no-one can follow you.
Forty is a curious age. It’s an age people dread when they’re young, but often look back on fondly as the high point of their capacity: the energy of youth combined with the wisdom of knowing how to use it. Look closely at a forty-year-old’s face and you can still see traces of their twenty-year-old self, but also the first hints of what they might look like at sixty.
A strange time to be alive. But the alternative is absurd.
Bowie
Poster for the David Bowie touring exhibition on show in Groningen (NL)
It took me several years to get David Bowie. Even now I’m not sure I do. Perhaps because my teenage years in the late eighties coincided with a lean period in his career (between China Girl and Tin Machine), or because the gaudy otherworldliness of Ziggy Stardust seemed almost calculated to alienate an achingly self-conscious teenager who sought solace in the grinding industrial chords of New Order’s Substance 1987 album. The darkness in the cartoonish imagery and the richness of his imagination occurred to me later. He made connections that others couldn’t see, like a chess player spotting the possible mate 12 moves ahead. He linked Earth to Mars, Ground Control to Major Tom and Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads. He tracked the changes, and wrought them. He blazed trails few people could trace, let alone follow.
Many of the tributes focused on his experimentation and ceaseless reinvention, but despite the range of his career the songs are instantly recognisable as Bowie. Nobody else could have recorded them: they were rooted in that distinctive voice, a melodious croak that trembled like a flower. His face, too, changed little beneath the make-up. It had a kind of timeless beauty, the face of a visitor from another planet; only the final photographs betray any trace of the illness that was killing him.
My first reaction when I learned of his death was to wonder why he had kept his cancer so fiercely private. It was his business who he told, of course, but contemplating the question might help us reflect on how we deal with disease and death. Bowie was an artist who spoke through his work, so I can well imagine that he had no wish to have it overshadowed by a public dissection of his health. He would be judged by his records, not the response of his body to a chemical onslaught. He didn’t live to be consumed by disease: it would do its work in its own time. He gave the lie to the old cliché about living every day as if it’s your last: such a miserable concession to fate was not for him. His colleague in New York, the Belgian theatre director, Ivo van Hove, said he fought and worked like a lion. The fight was not against cancer, but for his work. To a true artist that’s all that counts, in the end.
Retrospective
A year ago I welcomed 2014, with a mix of hope and trepidation, at our home in Glasgow. We had returned the day before from spending Christmas in Norfolk with my parents and our attention now turned to our prospects for the impending year. On Hogmanay a young couple came to view our house, which had been on the market for more than four months and was now the main obstacle to our long-held ambition of moving to the Netherlands. With a fair wind, we would be celebrating the next New Year in our new house in The Hague.
Magteld had developed a troubling, nagging cough that, but for her medical history, would probably have been dismissed as a mild flu. On Hallowe’en she had been to hospital for her six-month check-up and been told there was no sign of her cancer having returned. Early in December she had taken a card and chocolates to the staff on the chemotherapy wing who had nursed her through her treatment just 12 months earlier. She was saying her goodbyes to her friends and colleagues in Glasgow, in preparation for the anticipated move. Remembering how she was then, so vibrant, considerate and full of hope, it seems unthinkable that she would live just five more months.
Her cough grew worse during our stay in Norfolk. Occasionally Magteld would retch up speckles of blood. She blamed the draughtiness of my parents’ house, the winter colds that thrived in the damp west of Scotland climate, the stress of being told again and again that our house was “in the wrong area”. Once it was gone, she could look forward again. Sometimes it subsided for a few hours and she would sit in a chair and declare defiantly: “My cough is gone.” But never for long, and it became harder to banish the thought that there was something more sinister at work. It’s easy to wonder why, when she saw the doctor in early December, she didn’t press harder for a scan. At the same time I can understand Magteld’s reluctance to have her worst fears confirmed. Who desires to peek into the abyss when a new branch of life is dangling tantalisingly overhead, drenched in sunlight?
The young couple who visited on Hogmanay came back a week later, and shortly afterwards we’d agreed a price for the house. In the meantime Magteld went back to the doctor and had the scan. On a Monday morning in late January we were in an estate agent’s office celebrating the sale, which finally cleared the way for our epic voyage. Things started to move rapidly now: she would go to The Hague on a house-hunting mission in February, I would organise the removal van and ferry journey, and on April 25th – less than three months away – we would be on deck toasting our new life.
But we couldn’t move as fast as the cancer. Magteld would not catch that ferry, and by the time April 25th came by she would be living in a hospice and confined to a wheelchair, having undergone an emergency course of radiotherapy to stave off the tumours that were erupting up and down her spine. The day after we sold the house, her doctor told her that the scan had revealed ‘quite a few lesions’. Within a few weeks, the bad news was confirmed: her cancer was back, and would kill her, probably within a year. Her oncologist took me to one side and warned me that our life together in The Hague, which we had been planning for months and thinking about for years, may only extend to a few weeks. And so it proved.
I was warned that the first Christmas spent without Magteld would be tough. In the event I celebrated it warmly among her wider family: her parents, two sisters, their husbands and six children running the place ragged. Thirteen of us in total, and though the absence of the fourteenth cast a shadow, the house was full of life. Compared to that, the end of the year is a far more brutal milestone. The topography of our lives 12 months ago is unrecognisable now. Magteld’s health deteriorated with bewildering speed in her last five months. She submitted herself to two courses of radiotherapy and a new round of chemotherapy – which, cruelly, alleviated the symptoms of her cancer by reducing the inflammation in her lungs, but couldn’t tackle the cause. In every purported dawn was the glow of a nuclear explosion. Yet the more she went backwards, the more determined she was to look forwards. Right up until the final week of her life, when she was trying to walk again with the support of a zimmer frame. I’ve drawn on that spirit in the seven months since in tacking the challenges of living in a strange city, in a foreign country, where the children and I have both had to settle into new routines of life, school, and work. And it’s an attitude that will, I hope, continue to guide us and give us strength through 2015.
Intimacy
I came across this summary of grief recently in an interview with the Dutch poet Pieter Boskma: “Immediately after the death of a loved one, grief is a kind of friend: so long as the grief is there, the departed is still close by. Your grief connects you with him or her. Later on grief becomes an enemy that forms an obstacle to new happiness and a new life. Until one morning you have to say to yourself: it’s over now, it’s time to make a new start. It’s an illness that you can only cure yourself.”
Boskma covered the terrain of grief meticulously in his 2010 collection Doodsbloei (Death’s Bloom), which followed the death of his wife two years earlier, when Boskma was 52 and his wife 50. Fifty-two is a young age to be widowed (not as absurdly young as 39, but still a good few decades ahead of schedule), and Boskma’s description of the shock and aftermath seems pretty much spot-on. By my reckoning I’m still in the second stage, when the light from behind is fading but the light ahead is still distant and vague. It’s an unforgiving, barren stage, when the loss starts to gnaw at the heart and a sense of limbo takes hold: one chapter of your life is over but there is no sign of the next one beginning.
Occasionally I’ve thought about trying to date again, but the idea gives me the jitters. I don’t want to meet the kind of woman who unabashedly asks why there’s a ring on my third finger. But the alternative is even more dreadful: someone who sees the ring and blanks it. Because then we’re locked into a cat-and-mouse game in which she’s wondering why I’m dating with a wedding ring on, and I’m wondering why she hasn’t remarked on it, because she can’t possibly have overlooked it. I’m not ready to have either of those conversations, because both of them orbit the pitiful truth that I’m still in love with my dead wife.
I don’t know what I want from a relationship anyway. First I’d have to find someone with space in their lives for me and my two demanding children. That whittles down the field somewhat. I’m in no rush to marry again, but equally I don’t fancy 40 years in the wilderness. I could pretend I don’t miss sex, but I’d be a rotten liar. (Though if that was the only problem it wouldn’t be hard to fix, living as I do in a well-serviced city in the Netherlands.) I remember the last time with Magteld with needle-sharp precision: where we were, how we lay, what time of the morning it was, the weather outside as we held each other in the rain-scarred moonlight. But even when sex was too awkward and painful for Magteld, we still found ways to share intimate moments. And it’s the intimacy I miss, really. Waking at three in the morning and feeling an empty space where your beloved is meant to be. A warm and gently breathing presence in the darkness, or a soothing face in the dawn light. I realised recently that I still change the pillows on both sides when I make the bed up and put both cases in the washing machine, even the clean one. I can sleep beside an empty space, but not a void.
What is intimacy, really? I’d define it as the capacity to share the things we’d normally hide. The internet has created all kinds of new ways to connect with strangers from all over the world. I’ve known people online – other writers, in the main – for years without ever meeting them. We share a common interest, laugh and commiserate together, have long, probing conversations – sometimes over the course of several days – and occasionally fall out bitterly. It’s hard to distinguish from friendship, but is it the real thing? The sociologist Sherry Turkle warned in her TED talk ‘Connected, But Alone?’ of the danger of technology ‘cleaning up’ our relationships and dictating how we interact: “Technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable. And we are vulnerable. We’re lonely, but we’re afraid of intimacy. And so from social networks to sociable robots, we’re designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.”
There is certainly a danger that real, awkward, messy relationships are being squeezed out by sanitised ‘virtual’ ones. Everyone has a perfect family life on Facebook; everyone’s Twitter feed is garnished with witty barbs; everyone on LinkedIn is teetering on the precipice of a career breakthrough. But that’s only part of the story. The internet has made it possible for communities of real people to form in virtual space, unencumbered by geographical distance. When Magteld was sick with cancer she started blogging about it. And by blogging, she opened herself up to a wide, disparate community of cancer patients both close by and further afield. The internet allowed these people to share their experiences – which were sometimes not just messy, but downright brutal and horrific – unmediated, in a way that would have been impossible before social media came along. When she moved to The Hague in April she already knew people in her new city that she shared a close bond with: one of them even visited her in the hospice. This was very far from the experience of someone living in an isolated ‘virtual bubble’ or being starved of intimacy or friendship.
The internet hasn’t made us frightened of intimacy: we always were. It’s just given us new places to hide. We’re legitimately wary of investing the kind of trust needed to build a lasting, mutually nourishing relationship because of the potential for things to go wrong. I fear intimacy far less than I fear loss, but intimacy carries with it the risk of loss and pain. And so we have constructed a ziggurat of ostensibly safer alternatives. After I turned 30 I realised that at some point I’d stopped making friends and started networking. Instead of hanging out in bars and typing numbers into my mobile phone, I frequented the kind of events where everyone leaves with a clutch of business cards stuffed into their wallet. People don’t meet at these events for love or friendship – though that’s sometimes a side-effect – but to find people they can do business with. It’s an altogether less intimate arena. At the same time, the process of meeting people recreationally becomes increasingly formalised: if you haven’t found love yet, you’re encouraged to join a dating site or go to ‘speed dating’ evenings, so that your recalcitrant love life is cordoned off in a ‘safe zone’ and doesn’t impinge on more serious matters, like your career.
I don’t have any personal experience of speed dating, but it seems to be at one end of a spectrum of technologies that has accelerated and institutionalised the ways we form relationships. Dating websites are driven by algorithms that try to match people, on the same principle by which Amazon tries to identify the right food processor for your kitchen. The same trend is visible offline: an advert in a newspaper magazine for a matching service pledges a “guaranteed number of contacts” and an intakegesprek (introductory interview), reducing the business of finding love to a jobs fair. The internet, however, has created all kinds of new possibilities in the realm of human interaction, from Craigslist ads to bloggers’ conferences. It has made it easier to share private information publicly, reflecting and shaping the confessional age we live in (which is far from a bad thing, incidentally, if you compare, for example, how rape victims were expected to respond to their ordeal 50 years ago with today). The challenge is to distinguish the genuine, lasting and substantial friendships from the fake, fleeting and superficial.
Often when we’re burdened by stress we mistake it for hunger and end up bingeing on the wrong foods – craving a short, sharp energy rush rather than healthy, slow-burning nutrition. Similarly, when we’re feeling lonely and isolated we’re drawn towards easy-access, superficial relationships when what we really need is intimacy. It’s not a phenomenon that arrived with the internet: soap actors talk of receiving long, heartfelt letters from fans about their personal crises, presumably because there’s nobody in their close circles they can engage with. Anyone who’s spent serious amounts of time on Twitter will know how easy it is to become obsessed with increasing your number of followers, retweets or replies. There is the danger of being sucked into a kind of relationship pornography that provides relief, but no satisfaction. But at the same time the internet offers private spaces – email, chatrooms, direct messaging – where more intimate and sincere friendships can be cultivated away from the spotlight. Magteld found people through her blogging who would otherwise have been invisible to her. Technology doesn’t have to be oppressive: we just have to become smarter at using it and develop more sophisticated forms of human interaction rather than constantly succumb to the pull of the ‘like’ button.
Not long after Magteld died a friend observed that I was lucky to have experienced true love, even if only for a short time. Our marriage wasn’t idyllic and went through several difficult phases, but we were lucky enough to enjoy times of real love and intimacy, even when confronted with the worst possible scenario. Looking back, I can draw a lot of comfort from that. Grief can be an obstacle, as Pieter Boskma puts it, but it can also be a corrective to the urge to restore what has been lost too hastily. An obstacle is a place to stop, think and negotiate the next stage of the journey. I’m in no hurry to make a new start: I don’t want to accept the kind of fast-track companionship that douses the loneliness but doesn’t nourish the heart. Frankly, I’d rather hang out on Facebook with people I know I have something in common with. Meantime, I’ll continue to value my friends, online and offline, for who they are: people I can connect with, even across a raging sea, sometimes superficially, sometimes more intimately. With one caveat: you can get pretty close to people on the internet, but you can’t fall in love. Not properly. For that you have to engage with the real world. And I can’t put it off for ever.
