A book which makes the case for both companionship and loneliness.

Alone

Schreiber says he likes living alone, and that he “often feels fulfilled”, despite not having a romantic partner. However, he also finds himself wondering, “can you really live a good life alone, without a romantic relationship? Can our need for intimacy be satisfied by friendships?…” 

Firstly, it’s interesting to note here how Schreiber equates being alone with not having a romantic partner. He has plenty of friends, but still describes himself as ‘alone’.

There is research that shows friendships are more important for health and happiness than romantic relationships. So IMO, it’s certainly possible to live a good life without a partner. But is it possible to live a good life without any friends? 

That’s a question I’ve been pondering, and some of Schreiber’s own self-inquiry struck quite a chord with me as a result. He wonders, “whether I’m missing something fundamental but can’t admit it to myself. Whether I have become so good at living alone that I no longer notice my loneliness. Whether the fragile balance of my life is grounded in me unwittingly repressing my longing, repressing my desire.” He also asks, “how do you learn to live with being alone without it hurting, without lying to yourself?” 

Schreiber also considers whether claiming to be content alone is just a story he has told himself, and that sometimes we may have to “discard” such stories “in order to be able to retell them afresh or find new stories that do fit.” 

This resonated with me, as I’ve found myself developing more of a desire to connect with people over the last year or so, and have become curious as to what that says about me.

I’ve constructed this life narrative, this identity,  around being ‘socially distant’. I like being alone, because I’m ‘meant’ to be alone; that sort of thing. And yet, how does this square with the stirrings of a more social side of me? How can I maintain this narrative/identity, when I’m becoming increasingly aware that my solitary bent might be preventing me from realising my full potential?

Later on in the book, Schreiber notes that distance from other people, “also entails a bewildering distance from oneself, from those sides of the self that exist only in connection with other people” (my italics).  This is something I am also coming to realise –  that in actual fact, for my whole self to come alive, I do need to interact with people, I do need some relationships.

Therefore, maybe I also need to discard the story I’ve been telling myself – about being socially distant – and rewrite it to take into account these new stirrings? 

Schreiber goes on to reference Roland Barthes’ concept of “philosophical loneliness, a loneliness that arises because one moves outside of social systems and categories.” People who feel alone are susceptible to this, especially at times such as Christmas, when one can feel as if they are “moving through a world that belongs to other people, to lovers, to mothers and fathers, to grandparents.”

Friendship

I found Schreiber’s discussion of friendship particularly refreshing, specifically his critique of its “increasingly prominent celebration”, in a number of books published on the subject over the last few years. Such books, Schreiber says, “almost always explain how important friendship is for a good life, for our happiness and for our mental health. And they almost always describe a range of particularly moving scenes from intimate friendships.” 

I get what Scheiber is saying here. I too have read a number of books recently about friendship, and not only do they all unequivocally champion it, I would also say they almost put it on a pedestal, holding up platonic love as equivalent to romantic love. In one sense I agree with this (someone who has good friends, but no spouse, shouldn’t be seen as ‘less than’), however there’s also the danger of, ironically, romanticising friendship – creating all these unrealistic expectations around them, akin to that which exists around romantic love; it doesn’t matter if you don’t get to live happily ever after with your perfect partner; as long as you have friends who are always there for you, and you 100 per cent connect with, all will be okay. 

I therefore concur with Schreiber’s view that there is “often something strangely saccharine about this celebration”. He argues that the current discourse around friendship posits it as a “kind of therapeutic deus ex machina that solves every kind of life problem – a quick and obtainable consolation prize for anyone left alone. When every other tether to love has been broken, there seem to be friendships waiting for you, your own little substitute for happiness.”

He goes on to question whether this constitutes a type of “magical thinking”: “Has friendship become one of the straws we grasp at while the world collapses around us?”

“These conceptions of friendship arise from a timid view of life, a view that suppresses reality in service of a world of fantasy: the fantasy of total agreement, of self-affirmation, of relationships in which conflict is nominal.”

It’s worth keeping this in mind. As I consider the benefits of friendship, I don’t want to get swept up in our modern culture’s uncritical celebration of it. 

Schreiber also calls into question “the myth of harmony between friends”, the idea that the strongest bonds are formed between people who share similar interests and have the same outlook on life, etc.

He instead argues that for friendships to survive you need to “leave behind this narcissistic desire to recognize yourself in the person sitting in front of you” and that, “In the long run, in our friends, it is not a wise strategy to seek out doppelgangers.” He doesn’t provide any research to back this up; he instead turns to philosophy to flesh out his position that, “the calculation of sameness and narcissistic appropriation that it entails ultimately constitute a form of involuntary violence. You necessarily misjudge the other. You miss the chance to find out who this person you are close to really is.” 

Schreiber turns to Hannah Arendt and her “lived philosophy of friendship”, the key to which was “the recognition of the otherness of the other.” For Arendt, “it was the differences between people, and not their sameness, that led to real friendship, to what takes place between the self and the other, to that in-betweenness in which a genuine exchange of experiences and views can take place, in which openness and mutual trust prevail, but in which, simultaneously, we are also able to experience alienation and reticence” (my italics).

He also cites Jacques Derrida: “Friendship, for him, was, by definition, about granting the other a place beyond the reach of one’s own will”. He quotes the following line from Derrida: “‘I renounce you, I have decided to… [is] the most beautiful and the most inevitable… declaration of love.”

Schreiber concludes that, “Only the mutual recognition of each other’s otherness ensures that relationships grow… Friends help us break through our narcissistic inner barrier and to perceive the whole reality of life. Without friends, it would be impossible to evolve, impossible to be truly human.”

I wonder whether this vision of friendship that recognises our otherness in relation to one another, is one that schizoid and other socially distant people may find more palatable than the romanticised version critiqued earlier. Having someone seek themselves in you, to find wholly common ground with you, may provoke fears of engulfment, appropriation, a swallowing of the self. “Involuntary violence”, indeed. Much better to go forth on the understanding that we are all inevitably separate and ‘other’ to one another, that some distance will always, and should always, remain.

Loneliness

Alone also touches on the stigma and shame surrounding loneliness. Again, Schreiber critiques the dominant discourse, this time the one which espouses concern about the ‘epidemic of loneliness’. The “magnitude and significance” of the connection between an increase in people reporting feeling lonely and the number of people living alone is “usually overestimated”, claims Schreiber. 

He goes on to suggest that “… these discussions about the ‘loneliness epidemic’ simply mask a wistful longing for the good old times… The response of those who employ these grand warnings is almost always to invoke the power of the nuclear family” and to, “… portray loneliness as a pathological consequence of social change.” 

Schreiber says that taboos around loneliness can be seen in the distinction that’s often made between loneliness and solitude: “I am solitary, not lonely… I will not profess to you that I am lonely. I am not vulnerable. My solitude does not hurt, I am not suffering… Please tell me this is solitude, not loneliness.” It’s easier to claim you’re solitary, than to admit you’re lonely. Am I ‘guilty’ of this? Earlier on in the book, Schreiber asks himself whether he’s “too proud to admit that I sometimes feel lonely?” Am I too proud to admit the same?

The positive case for loneliness

Solitude is so often held up as the ‘good’ alone, the healthy alone, the un-lonely alone. 

Schreiber makes a case for loneliness, arguing that “positive experiences of loneliness are as central to our humanity as the anguish this feeling causes.” 

He quotes the philosopher Odo Marquard, who talked about our “‘capacity for loneliness’. For him, it is only in the ‘strength to be alone’, the ‘capacity to endure isolation’ and the ‘art of living so as to experience loneliness positively’ that it becomes truly possible to encounter oneself and other people.” 

Schreiber also references the psychologist Clark E. Moustakas, who wrote a book called Loneliness, in which he extolled the benefits of the lonely condition. Schreiber summarises as follows: “Only the realization that we are alone in a fundamental sense, despite the people in our lives who love us, ensures that we become aware of ourselves. Without this insight, we cannot take responsibility for ourselves” nor “really take care of ourselves.” 

Moustakas went on to say that facing our “existential loneliness” is “an important path to inner growth”. Loneliness “brings with it a form of self-awareness that we cannot otherwise attain” and without its pain “we would not be able to seek closeness to other people, we would not be able to love.”