Well at least now I know that some people get it.
In my current issue of The New Yorker, Paul Bloom, Critic At Large, writes about how A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness and That’s A Problem. How, you ask, could that possibly a problem given the hellish internal prison chronic loneliness is, let alone all the medical and health consequences associated with it. Well even before I cracked open the article, I had a few hunches, but I wanted to see what the Manhattan cultural gatekeepers thought the problem was too.
He gets it. At least, to a degree…
Loneliness, everyone agrees, is unpleasant—a little like a toothache of the soul. But in large doses it can be genuinely ruinous. A 2023 report issued by Vivek Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, presented evidence that loneliness increases your risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death. Persistent loneliness is worse for your health than being sedentary or obese; it’s like smoking more than half a pack of cigarettes a day.
Even the psychological pain can be hard to fathom, especially for those who have never truly been lonely. [emphasis mine] In Zoë Heller’s novel “Notes on a Scandal,” the narrator – Barbara Covett, a connoisseur of the condition – distinguishes between passing loneliness and something deeper. Most people, she observes, think back to a bad breakup and imagine that they understand what it means to be alone. But, she continues, “about the drip, drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don’t know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can’t bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. . . . I have sat on park benches and trains and schoolroom chairs, feeling the great store of unused, objectless love sitting in my belly like a stone until I was sure I would cry out and fall, flailing to the ground.”
If that kind of loneliness feels foreign to you, you’re lucky—and probably below a certain age.
And probably heterosexual. Or at least somewhere close to a Kinsey zero. Probably. I began feeling it when I was a young adult, some years after my first high school crush vanished from sight, and my second disastrous crush on a straight close friend blew up in my face, and I began to perceive that eternal long dark night of the soul that was ahead of me. I read a story back in the day about a gay man who turned 30 and still never had a boyfriend, and I swore I would never let that happen to me. I’m 71 now and I have still never had a boyfriend.
A bunch of near misses, sure. That’s probably a common story among gay guys of my barely post Stonewall generation. You start getting close to someone and next thing you know the righteous step in to break it up, because they need the broken pieces of our hearts to make their stepping stones to heaven out of. Or if not the righteous, then the contemptuous.
If that kind of loneliness feels foreign to you, you’re lucky…and probably below a certain age. And probably heterosexual. And probably not the sort of person who can be easily satisfied with a series of sexual one night stands. For these there were always the hookup spots, and more recently hookup apps like Grindr. Finding that heart and soul other is difficult under the best of conditions, and gay males do not enjoy the best of conditions, much improved though they are now. But there are those of us who just seemed to be condemned to the darkness right from the beginning.
You began to sense it every time you were last to be picked for a team game, or never invited to sit with the others at lunch. And like the kid born into poverty, you never really noticed how different your social life was from the others, because it was always thus. Normal was not getting invites. Normal was you had to ask if a someone wanted to go to the park with you, or a movie, or just hang out, not being asked. You weren’t a creep to everyone, you were that polite and friendly if scrawny kid with the puppy dog enthusiasm, a homely face, unkempt hair and clothes that were clean if not well fitting and fashionable, and you lived on the other side of the railroad tracks with your divorced mother, and you just assumed that everyone has to work at being included. But no…not everyone.
Then you reach a certain age and a need for something more than a friend to pal around with awakens within. But you’re need is different from the others around you. Different in a way that sets you apart not just from them, but it seems from the entire world around you.
From A Coming Out Story – What I Learned About Homosexuality. . . And Myself (Part 2)
And now, on top of being the kid who gets chosen last, now you’re afraid. But you’re as human as all the other kids, different only in the detail, and you’ve come of age and have to try. But you have to roll models to show you the way, only every dirty joke you’ve ever heard about homosexuals. And the thing is the objects of your affection are just as afraid as you are.
My first crush and I recognized something in each other. But it was 1971/72.
A Coming Out Story – What I Learned About Homosexuality – Part Three – Aftermath
Mad Magazine, #145, Sept 1971, from “Greeting Cards For The
Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”
I’m pretty sure it was after we made plans to go to Great Falls and stroll the towpath with our cameras, and I called to say I was coming over and one of his older brothers intercepted the phone call, that he got told to stay away from me. And being the obedient son, he put a distance between us, and that summer the family moved away, and I didn’t know until I saw the for sale sign on their empty house.
Here’s something I found online. Whoever wrote this, gets it.
A psychotherapist specializing in military rehabilitation once stated in a lecture that the deepest truma isn’t loss.
Loss is a fact, Someone left, died, or vanished. There’s pain, but there’s also a definitive end point. When you’re not chosen, however, an unending void remains. It’s the crushing feeling that you were there, you tried, you invested, but ultimately you were deemed superfluous. Not the worse, just “not the one.”
This experience pulls more powerfully than betrayal, because there’s no explanation in being rejected. The other person simply decided they didn’t need you. Not because you did something wrong, but because you didn’t captivated them, inspire them, or align with them. And your mind begins to frantically search: Where was the mistake? Where was the moment you could have pleased them more, loved quieter, walked more patiently?
This is where the insidious feeling takes root: that something is wrong with you. Not the situation, not with the other person, but with you. You are insufficient.
This is the trauma of unchosenness. Not because love wasn’t present, but because the choice wasn’t about you. And in that place where you weren’t chosen, you begin to doubt your right to exist.
My situation is different, but only slightly. There was the added pressure of homophobia making it difficult to nearly impossible for gay guys of my generation to make a romantic connection. But I know other gay guys of my generation who were successful, who did find their other half and made a life together, despite the hostility of the world around them. So it wasn’t just homophobia that kept me from finding my other half. And so I find myself in this exact situation anyway. Where was the mistake? Where was the moment I could have made a difference, and had a different outcome? Could I have been more patient? Or more forward, less afraid? Every time I tried, I failed. What is wrong with me?
There is not a night I don’t go to bed thinking about it, and then imagining alternate universes where gay kids could find love, and I was one of them. But only in my dreams.
Why am I never the chosen one? Well…except for big guys who think I have a cute butt and just want to fuck me. I used to get “Nice ass” lots from them. And also the occasional heterosexual woman. I got a butt squeeze in Kayenta from (I assumed) a young Navajo woman who walked up behind me and then quickly walked away. I took it as a complement, probably because there was no sexual baggage in it for me, but from other guys it just feels off putting at best, probably because there is.
I’m what the kids these days call a demisexual.
DEMISEXUAL demi·?sex·?u·?al
feeling sexual attraction towards another person only after establishing an emotional bond with that person.
Now, that’s not quite it with me. My low energy libito can readily feel sexually attracted to the right guy on sight. But to actually go through with it I need that emotional bond too or nothing is going to happen. Sex without any sort of love feels a little more than vaguely disgusting at best. There has to be romance. There has to be love.
Which is why despite chronic loneliness I’ve never availed myself of a sex worker, and I’m pretty sure an A.I. boyfriend won’t do it for me either.
Five years ago, the idea that a machine could be anyone’s confidant would have sounded outlandish, a science-fiction premise. These days, it’s a research topic.
You know what I wish were research topics? Homophobia. Or at any rate, how to get them to leave the rest of us alone. Maybe in a better world we teach gay kids the emotional and intellectual tools to stand up to bigots and see themselves as the perfect and whole human beings that they are. And…coupling. I have tried multiple gay dating services and I have to conclude they are mostly scams that prey on lonely people. There needs to be some science here. In the better world of my imagination, there would be not just sex-ed classes, but courses in flirting, dating, non-judgmental understanding of your own romantic and emotional needs, the better to know what sort of person is likely to match up with you. And how to let someone down graciously. That was a Big roadblock to getting myself in situations where I can meet random guys who might be compatible. Because I know how picky my libido is, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings because I know how it feels to be rejected. I know how it feels to be told, by other gay guys no less, that people who look like that want people who look like that.
A.I. companionship might be okay for some, but not for the likes of me. I have already walked through an adult life alone, in the most intimate sense. And despite what others have told me, I tried, I really tried. And those helpful others were really just telling me to go get laid and then I’ll feel better. But no. I was the unchosen one. Always.
I’m not anxious to leave this life just yet. But I won’t be entirely unhappy when death taps me on the shoulder either. I think my last thoughts might be something like Thank goodness I won’t be lonely anymore…
And no more trying to explain the trauma of how it is to live an entire adult life with that constant drip, drip, drip of heart loneliness, to people who think they understand, because maybe they were lonely and heart broken for a little while themselves, but really are light years away from getting it because they have never experienced that empty void of chronic loneliness for themselves.
