Loneliness Can Be Healthy

We’ve probably all experienced feeling lonely in our relationships. Sometimes the feeling of loneliness is worse in a relationship than actually just being alone. It’s similar to feeling alone in a room full of people - a lot of us would rather just actually be alone. But there’s another type of loneliness that can happen in relationships. And it’s a healthy one.

It’s similar to the idea that you can’t truly love someone else until you love yourself. When we heal our relationship with ourselves, we then learn how to soothe and take care of our own feelings and emotions instead of expecting others to do it for us. If we’re healthy in our relationship with ourselves, then we choose to be with someone because we enjoy them, not because they make us feel better about ourselves. 

Likewise, when you argue with your partner, often your expectation is that they need to make you feel better after. While repair needs to happen between you and your partner for the relationship, your job is still to take care of your own feelings. This is where healthy loneliness comes in. So much of even our relational work starts and ends with ourselves. 

Here’s an example: I snip at my husband when he is once again on his phone while we’re having dinner together. Ideally, the relational repair would look like an apology from him for interrupting our time together and I would likewise apologize for snipping. But what’s just happened is that while my nervous system has somewhat calmed from his apology, it is still disrupted. It’s then my job alone to bring myself back online – calm down and move from my amygdala (fight or flight) back to my prefrontal cortex.

While the other people in our lives need to be accountable to us, we must also be accountable to ourselves. That work can feel lonely, but our ability to do it for ourselves is a sign of healing.