It looks as if I were “meant” to be alone, and that any hope of happiness is not meant. Am I too old to acquire the knack for happiness? Too old, perhaps, ever to take in another’s life to share with mine on a permanent basis? If so, I must make do with what I have … and what I have is a great richness of friends and a positively ardent love of nature. Not nothing!

Journal of a Solitude
May Sarton

That is one way to keep alive in self-made solitary confinement. I have found it useful also these past days to say to myself, “What if I were not alone? What if I had ten children to get off to school every morning and a massive wash to do before they got home? What if two of them were in bed with flu, cross and at a loose end?” That is enough to send me back to solitude as if it were—as it truly is—a fabulous gift from the gods.

Journal of a Solitude
May Sarton

“Well, I never did, but that’s what he claimed. He’ll never marry,” Eve said. “Why do you say that?” “I know it. He’s selfish, but it isn’t selfishness. He’s not afraid of being alone.”

Light Years
James Salter

I absolutely love “You’re the Best” from the first album. The first lines really struck me: “All I know is / when you hold me / I still feel lonely / lonely when you hold me.” Can you explain them a bit?

I wrote that song when I was at a point in a relationship that I often get to in relationships: I’m there. I am finally with the person I wanted to be with. And then he falls asleep and I realize I’m still alone. As much as I try and want to be bonded with this person, the dominant feeling that I feel at all times is a loneliness. It just doesn’t go away. And I think that resonated for a lot of people. Relationships doesn’t make that go away. You can be more lonely in a relationship sometimes than you would be on your own.

We had brunch with Kelly Zutrau from the band Wet—and talked about almost everything

But loneliness in marriage can be bitter. Caroline, now 47 and a successful writer, was married for 12 years to a man who, though never cruel, felt increasingly absent. “He was very gregarious,” she says, “always the life and soul of the party, but really very insecure. When we were alone, he would disappear into himself. He didn’t really either talk or listen. There was nothing I could put my finger on, but in a way that was the trouble: there was nothing.”

In solitude what happiness?

La messa è finita (1985)

“Living together alone is hell between consenting adults.”

The Possibility of an Island
Michel Houellebecq

No relationship, however deep and intimate, can ever fully take our loneliness from us. And as long as we go through life expecting this, we are doomed to constant disappointment.  We also do constant violence to our friendships and love relationships because we will demand from our friends something that they cannot give us, namely, total fulfillment.  For example, a goodly number of persons get married precisely because of loneliness. They see their marriage as a panacea for loneliness. After marriage, they discover that they are still lonely, sometimes as lonely as before. Immediately, there is the temptation to think that there is something seriously amiss in the marriage, to foist blame on the marriage partner or on the self, to become disenchanted and seek out new relationships, hoping of course to someday discover the rainbow of total fulfillment.

The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness
Ronald Rolheiser

Chekhov elaborates on what he sees as matrimony’s central antinomy, namely that the wedding of one individual to another produces loneliness, an absence of intimacy, and a kind of alienation so acute it causes love itself to cool in a relationship pulled apart by the asymmetries of social status and personal likes and dislikes. 

Marriage in the Short Stories of Chekhov
Mark Richard Purves
Brigham Young University