Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE

  • 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

  • “If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry.”

    —Anton Chekhov

  • ​​“When you come out of solitude, guard what you have gathered. When the cage is opened, the birds fly out. And then we shall find no further profit in solitude.”

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • So those who wish to live virtuously should not hanker after praise, be involved with too many people, keep going out, or abuse others (however much they deserve it), or talk excessively, even if they can speak well on every subject.

    —St. Diadochus

  • There are those who are called the slothful in the book of Wisdom, who strew their path with thorns, who consider harmful to the soul a zeal for deeds in keeping with the commandments of God, the demurrers against the apostolic injunctions, who do not eat their own bread with dignity, but, fawning on others, make idleness the art of life. Then, there are the dreamers who consider the deceits of dreams more trustworthy than the teachings of the Gospels, calling fantasies revelations. Apart from these, there are those who stay in their own houses, and still others who consider being unsociable and brutish a virtue without recognizing the command to love and without knowing the fruit of long-suffering and humility.

    James Stuart Bell, ed., Ancient Faith Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bibles, 2019), 752.

    They stay in their homes and “isolate from others” and their community. One of the most dangerous things people do is isolate themselves from the church community. All of this is a big thorn that you are putting in your life that makes you lazy, that makes you not put effort, and makes you isolated, and makes the devil easy to control you and change you.

    —Fr. Mina Dimitri, inspired by Gregory of Nyssa’s On Virginity, Chap. 23

    They take from people (by flattery, by anger, by complaining, by manipulation). Sometimes they’re lazy, dependent fully on their family, yet they’re still yelling and disrespecting their own family.

    —Fr. Mina Dimitri

  • Thus I felt that I did not want to see people nor yet to be alone; that I did not want to stay at home nor yet to go out; that I did not want to travel nor yet to go on living in Rome; that I did not want to paint nor yet not to paint; that I did not want to stay awake nor yet to go to sleep; that I did not want to make love nor yet not to do so; and so on.

    Boredom
    Alberto Moravia