Hot tub time machine

The question

At the weekend I was hanging out in a hot tub with a friend around midnight, talking about the kind of stuff you talk about in that situation, and they asked me: "If you could go back in time and tell your 20 year old self one thing – not a generic "everything turns out okay" message but a concrete, specific fact about your life now that you think would help them with their next couple of decades – what would you tell them?"

And there was a long pause in which I thought about it and then announced that I was going to cry. Because the "worst fear" thing I would like to be able to reassure her about – that her loneliness will not last, that she'll find a partner who will see and meet her fully and love her enduringly – hasn't happened for me. In that moment, I felt like I had really let her down.

I had a little cry, and my friend and I talked about it and were quiet about it, and it was fine. But it stayed with me, that realisation that I've been carrying a fear of loneliness for decades, despite so rarely being involuntarily alone. I have a phone, a car, and a large and almost farcically high-quality circle of amazing friends. To say I have a full life understates my beautifully shambolic diary situation. If I am alone at any given time, it's almost always because I am choosing solitude.

But I do often notice feelings of loneliness; and when I feel fragile, it definitely manifests as being a kind of alone that I do not welcome. My friend's hot tub time machine question got me thinking: What do I fear when I fear loneliness? What exactly am I lonely for? And what can I do about it?

Ancestral angst

Copy and paste a version of this from any one of a thousand self-help books: Human beings have evolved a life-preserving fear of social isolation. We fear loneliness and rejection because in our ancestral environment these things would have been the death of us. Our hearts seek connection as if our lives depend on it. We are born noticing what enhances our connection to others and what decreases it, what makes people less and more able to be present for us and to offer us safety, and we never stop noticing.

If we see that being open and vulnerable decreases people's ability to connect with us or offer us safety, we will resist being open and vulnerable. This can, ironically and unfortunately, result in us experiencing the outcome of isolation that we were trying to avoid. We replace the ancestral existential threat of physical loneliness with the emotional threat of relational loneliness.

And when I say "we", obviously I mean me. I learned early that expressing positive emotions kept me and my caregivers safe. I had a sharp lesson in my late teens that expressing persistent negative emotions, even to apparently the safest person in the world, can be costly.

Gendered labour

I have, I'm glad to say, also learned over and over that I can be very emotionally open and vulnerable with a large number of fucking amazing women in my life, and receive their steadfast non-judgmental love and support through thick and thin. These friends are a wonderful remedy for loneliness.

I also have some wonderful men friends (where you can take "men" to mean people who to me embody male energy; IDGAF about genitals or chromosomes) who love me and who matter to me, and to whom I feel close. But reflecting on it, I realise that sometimes my loneliness is heightened rather than soothed by spending time with them – even emotionally intimate time. It's almost as if our closeness makes me more aware of the unbridged space left between us, and the fear of rejection that lives in that space for me. When difficult things get stirred up for me in conversation with these men, instead of naming and sharing them, I generally let them stay unspoken and unseen. I take them away and soothe them by myself later. This reinforces both the dynamic and my feeling of being alone.

When I think, "What am I lonely for?", the answer I most readily reach for is, "A partner", and I'm sure there's some truth to that. But increasingly I wonder if another part of the answer is, "Emotional intimacy with men". Maybe I'm asking my women friends to do too much of the housekeeping in my heart.

Toxic gender bullshit

Given my life experiences, both early and recent, it's not surprising that I can close the intimacy gap with women more easily than with men. But what did surprise me, when I dug into it, was the specific "beliefs" I uncovered at play here. I put that word in scare quotes because consciously I 100% disown and reject these ideas, and have compelling evidence against most of them. But they are nonetheless active and influential in my life, and my brain leaps on confirmatory evidence like it's good news and chatters to me about it when I feel low.

The "beliefs" include:

1. That I am somehow not allowed or permitted to lean on men for comfort or support. As if male support is, by some kind of cosmic fiat, unavailable to me.
2. That it isn't safe to seek it anyway because men will not show up for me consistently.
3. That I cannot express persistent sadness to men and retain their friendship.
4. That the reason for 1-3 is that I am not feminine enough. This was the most confronting idea. That if I were petite, fragile, dainty or pretty, maybe even a bit unstable, strong men would want to care for and look after me, and some of them might fall in love with me. And that because I am a tall, broad-shouldered, capable, powerful, confident Amazon, that will just not happen. Women like me do not trigger the caring instincts of strong men, let alone the romantic instincts.

I know I am a really good human being. But it turns out I believe that, as a woman, I am a failure.

This is, obviously, toxic gender bullshit and needs to be excised. I'm not afraid of hard work, but I don't want to – and can't – do this by myself. I need help, and I'm going to try to source some of that help from the other end of the gender spectrum. Because, scared though I am to admit it, to prove to myself that I can trigger the caring instincts of strong men, I will have to try to actually do it.

Experimental design

My hypothesis is that, by being braver and more vulnerable in my connections with my lovely male friends, and by being more honest about my emotional needs and asking them for more care, I can:

• effectively combat those unhelpful ideas above; and
• meaningfully reduce the amount of loneliness I feel.

I won't be asking a lot – I'm just going to be bridging that last bit of space more often, being willing to make them a bit uncomfortable by saying the sad thing and asking for comfort, including in the form of hugs and touch. I think my bros will step up for me. Some of them already do. Hot tub time machine friend did this weekend.

And if it turns out it isn't okay for some of them, I will try to be fine with that. People can only meet you at the depth at which they meet themselves, and like water we will all naturally find our own level if we let ourselves flow. I need to let myself flow to the deep places and see who is willing to join me there.