How to un-lonely

The opposite of loneliness

I’m back from Wyoming and remembering it in glimmers…

A razor blue clear sky that stretches between red canyons that look like popsicles melting into grass, a horse with two different colored eyes, a campfire swallowing twigs whole, and town names on signs with punchline population numbers…

Basin, Wyoming: Population 1,311

Otto, Wyoming: Population 50

Manderson, Wyoming: Population 88

As the cab from Cody (population 10,224) drove me to Hyattville (population 46), I collected these town names in memory so I could look them up later, but their digital footprints led to little more than census facts.

I wanted to know what it’s like to go to school for twelve years with the same dozen kids, and how the broad landscape expands one’s internal world, and where’s the grocery store, and whether people choose to stay.

Alas, I’ll just have to do what we did before the internet: wonder.

I’ve been wondering a lot about small towns lately as my interest in inter-ideological dialogue (i.e. talking to people I don’t agree with!) increases by day.

And I’ve been wondering if, maaaaaybe?…they have a key to the opposite of loneliness.

Presumably (with full acknowledgement of how easy it is for me to romanticize), lifetime dwellers in a small town need to somehow figure out their conflicts over the years. In a town of 46, there aren’t too many places to avoid your neighbors, even if there are no fewer than three taxidermy shops in the area.

Heck, even in a town of 10,224.

Before heading out to Paintrock Canyon, I stayed a night in Cody, which has its own airport and farm-to-table Lebanese food.

It also has a tight-knit community of people who love the outdoors, and that spans from proud NRA members to vegans with wildcrafted tincture stands: hunters meet hippies.

Both share appreciation for the land, skepticism of government, comfort in the forest, and a proclivity for window decals:

They’re all advocates for life, whether unborn fetuses or free-roaming antelope.

You’d think they could work something out together.

And, they probably do.

People of vastly different political and social leanings have to hang out together (or at least side by side) in Cody, unless I’m grossly underestimating a person’s ability to frequent only one restaurant for their entire lives.

In big cities, we can be a lot more selective about who we interact with on a given day. And I’m curious if that’s contributing to our international epidemic of loneliness.

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I had the most fascinating conversation with Her Highness Amanda Munroe (close friend, wedding officiant, and otherworldly being) about this before I left.

Amanda’s been working in peace education at Vassar after years of studying social change and reconciliation, and she’s an essential sounding board for all my questions about cancel culture and political ambivalence.

She pondered via voice note:

‘One thing I was wondering about today is how the world is exponentially increasing in people, and we also have these devices now that give us infinite access to infinite amounts of individuals, and we also are more mobile than we’ve ever been in history, and the globalization of the economy means that our jobs move around…

Yet we are in a loneliness epidemic. It’s so interesting as a person who studies relationships, bonds, forgiveness, reconciliation…that we struggle so much.

And I sometimes wonder if it’s because of the illusion of infinite options—always other fish in the sea—and this idea of, “I could always go somewhere else. I could always meet other people. I can just stop talking to someone I’m upset with and find a new friend group.”’

She told me that her students on campus can sometimes get so upset when there’s interpersonal conflict on campus that they would rather cut a peer off rather than engage with them and try to work out some sort of acceptance.

Sounds like someone I know (me)!!

This is when we both started wondering about itty bitty towns:

Back when we had smaller communities and we were forced to stay in one place, this must have been necessitated for us humans because we needed one another in order to survive.

(In the face of a common enemy or in war you would have had to get along with someone even if you didn’t like the person, or even if they made you feel bad about yourself!)

In the past, we must have had to learn how to continue to live with one another.

Or who knows, there’s the Romeo and Juliet option where we just all die?!

Amanda and I are both avid world travelers, and we’re both grateful that we’re not forced to stay in one place. We have also both experienced relationships that we absolutely needed to leave.

AND YET, our conversation about staying with people was rich and layered:

No one should have to accept abuse anymore, but we also don’t want to destroy or excommunicate (i.e. cancel) anyone because they’ve been abusive (which usually means they’ve been abused).

And we both have a special love for our friendships that have withstood ups and downs, highs and lows. Those are the strongest relationships because we have weathered disagreements.

I wonder how much of our global loneliness is directly linked to hyper-mobility. If there’s no reason or need to commit, then why do it? Why not just seek other people who see things the same way we do, articulate them using the same words, or feel them with the same level of passion?

Well, maybe because commitment is the opposite of loneliness.

As Queen Amanda responded:

To commit to someone, what a radical act in 2024! And, yes, potentially stifling, and heteronormative, but also how radical to commit to a person choice-fully. Or a place! How many of us have the capacity to do that these days? How many of us can say that we’re going to be in a place for a long period of time, and that our job or another need isn’t going to move us?”

This whole conversation made me fall in love over again with this radical concept of commitment—something I took very seriously during the deep pandemic when I stayed in New York.

You see, I’ve always been a commitment-phobe.

My friends used to joke that, as soon as I moved to a city, I’d begin packing for the next. I change my mind a lot. I like to follow my whims. I value flexibility and spontaneity. I won’t even sign up for a ceramics class if it’s longer than 8 weeks.

But, when I moved to New York seven years ago, I knew I couldn’t mess this relationship up. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with this city, so, like any relationship, I’d have to give it plenty of attention and signs that I was in it for the long-haul.

After a year of spending my Sunday mornings at brunch, or making up for lost sleep, I decided I wanted to go to a church. I’d show New York that I was here to stay by finding a weekly anchor.

I expected to do a bit of church shopping, but I knew right away that Trinity had some serious potential: It had the Progress Pride flag waving outside, the word ‘inclusive’ all over the website, an obvious commitment to feeding the hungry, and, just as alluring, it was a couple blocks from my apartment.

All of a sudden, I’ve been going just about as many Sundays as I’ve spent in New York.

Friends have moved in and moved out, I’ve changed neighborhoods and peer groups, I’ve cried over heartbreak and I’ve celebrated my engagement….and, all the while, I’ve seen and talked to the same community every week.

By no means is my church full of all my best friends in one room; it’s an intergenerational and intercultural stew of leftovers from all us side dishes that got kicked out from the main course. Weirdos and misfits galore, your girl right at home among them. I know, when something inevitably nightmarish happens to me, they will be there; and I, for them.

I joyfully greet people every week whom I know next to nothing about, who on paper have next to nothing in common with me. And yet, I’m 100% committed to them.

Is commitment the opposite of loneliness?

I was talking to my 74-year-old mom about loneliness the other week. While so many people her age feel it starkly, she doesn’t. Even though she is a recent widow who moved cities just a couple years ago, she doesn’t get lonely.

And I have a theory as to why: She has commitments. She has weekly phone calls, regular check-ins, active group texts, and daily recap emails from yours truly.

It’s not just about having friends; I’ve experienced many years of loneliness even with a good amount of friends.

It’s about committing to people and having them committed to you…which is just rare these days, no two ways about it.

Perhaps it’s because our culture greatly supports feeling before commitment.

In a lot of ways, this is a good thing.

In some ways, maybe it’s missing something.

After all, tons of arranged marriages are really successful on every level, including joy. And I’ve gained so much from the traditions of yoga and church where you go whether you’re feeling/believing it or not.

A life-changing adjustment I’ve picked up from the aforementioned Amazing Amanda is when she shifts feelings into verbs: She views love, faith, hope, justice, peace, survival, and belonging as lifelong actions rather than ephemeral emotions.

These actions preclude the feelings, rather than the reverse.

She told me:

Often, when we reflect on belonging, we remember how it felt when we belonged, or we think about times we felt silenced, unheard, didn’t belong. We think about how terrible or wonderful those feelings felt.

And sometimes, we believe that the way to get back to the place of security, inclusion, belonging, being heard, is to be in the safest possible space. And often for us that means we’re with people who think and act and respond to stimuli similarly (“affinity spaces,” so called in diversity work).

And what’s paradoxical about that impulse in us is that, in order for peace, justice, survival to work, we need to manage relationships across difference. We have to work with people. Which doesn’t just mean tolerating them—it means figuring out forms of collaboration in order to—as Donna Haraway says—“render each other capable” of, say, surviving a climate crisis or reaching a ceasefire agreement.

What’s funny about the belief that we can only reach consensus when everyone has the same position is that we don’t realize how our differences ‘render us more capable.’ What we’re failing to realize is that it’s our differences that make a lot of the work we do possible. The trite idea of ‘diversity’ is our strength.

Now, don’t get it twisted…

Do I LOVE these ideas in theory? Absolutely. Amanda suggested I check out the work of prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba who considers ‘hope’ a discipline and ‘satisfaction’ the goal when collaborating with folks of wildly differing opinions.

Do I LOVE these ideas in practice? Hello I am a human and I absolutely do NOT!!

Even as someone who is super interested in this work, I find myself swiftly mentally canceling acquaintances as soon as I feel a threat: the incorrect bumper sticker, a suspicious social media follow, evidence of a stop at a fast food chain whose CEO has questionable ideology.

But I recognize: Not only does that set me up for close-mindedness, it also sets me up for loneliness.

This radical idea of commitment helps un-lonely myself, but I can’t commit only to people I agree with all the time…or I will only be committed to my non-verbal house plants. And they are mostly dead.

I don’t know for sure if the folks in small town Wyoming have avoided loneliness or if they’ve achieved a low level version of world peace, but they have definitely achieved something that most city-dwellers have not: commitment to place and people, even on the hard days.

I’m horribly disturbed by our culture of disposability (paper plates, plastic forks, swiping on Tinder, replaceable friends) and yet I fully participate in it.

During the second half of this year—a year I have assigned to the concept of ‘devotion’—I’m devoted to seeing humans as un-replaceable. That’s everyone from the lovely cab driver in Cody whose car was covered in gun stickers to anyone I’d judge for not being ‘enough’ of some value I espouse.

I’m often hard on myself for not doing enough work in support of my passions, but this is my passion, and this is my work:

Committing to others throughout disagreements.

Unless you disagree that ‘Espresso’ is the song of the summer, in which case….