It’s a Privilege to be this Lonely

THE SMALLEST JAR of mayonnaise you can buy at the bodega on the corner of 72nd and Broadway is 7 ounces. I buy it every few weeks. I’m no mayonnaise lover; it’s just that I can’t finish even the smallest jar before the one that’s open in my fridge expires.

I watch as couples at Trader Joe’s tag-team their grocery shopping. One waits in the long, snaking line while the other weaves through the aisles, grabbing whole sacks of sweet potatoes, family-sized bags of chips, and massive jars of mayonnaise. Meanwhile, I lug around a basket full of cashews, single servings of vegetables, and aged dairy products—anything with a long shelf life.

When people praise singleness, they talk about the advantages of having all your time to yourself, no limitations on your schedule or dreams. What they don’t mention is the surplus, which, paradoxically, often feels like lack.

Those awkward hours in the evenings. Those ungainly Saturdays with no plans. Sometimes, you can use the excess as scraps: more time to work on that side hustle, spontaneous dinner dates with your best friend, a walk in the park at twilight, perhaps a nap. But other times, the excess simply sours.

A lack of accountability and unstructured time are not the best ingredients for productivity. During those unguarded hours, you can sometimes scroll too much, stay up too late, drink too much coffee or alcohol because you’re the only one who has to deal with the consequences. There are no watchful eyes, no one waiting to discover what kind of person you are. And you stare at these hard realities and try not to make them into excuses.

THE LUXURIOUS ACCESSIBILITY of tiny mayonnaise jars is not lost on me. It feels like magic: the very idea of a grocery store with tiny jars of pre-made food always at our fingertips. I’m one of the first generations in the history of the world to have resources like this. I’m also one of the first to enjoy the societal safeguards that allow me to live alone in the largest city in the United States. It’s a privilege to be this lonely.

There are other privileges unique to my generation. We get married later and have fewer children. Many of us don’t marry at all; modern life makes marriage and children optional in a way that wasn’t true for most of human existence. The innovations of the last few centuries have made us more prosperous. We are safer. And we are also more alone. But these are not all unprecedented 21st-century problems.

From the Middle Ages to AD 1500, the church in Western Europe outlawed polygamy and cousin marriage, sometimes up to sixth cousins. The church also forbade marriage to step-relatives, in-laws, and godparents. But communities were small, and the previous societal structure was largely tribal, so people relied on familial connections to form marriages.

When the church forbade these kin-based conjugal relationships, it reduced or even eliminated marital possibilities for many people, who may not have known anyone they could marry without risking excommunication by the church. In his book The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich states that 15 to 25 percent of Western European women at the time were still unmarried by the age of 30 and that the average age for marriage had climbed to the mid-20s for both men and women. Families were smaller, and fertility was lower. Sound familiar?

As I pluck items off the grocery shelves, I think how I could have it worse: I could be in love with my sixth cousin and unable to marry him. I could be married off to a rich ruler as part of a harem. Instead, I’m here at Trader Joe’s, listening to Taylor Swift singing, “Dancing phantoms on the terrace / Are they second-hand embarrassed / That I can’t get out of bed / ’Cause something counterfeit’s dead.”

I’VE BEEN IN LOVE. Twice. Excruciatingly, overwhelmingly. Those two hopeless loves made my world explode with an expansion that was not replicable in its drama and force. I bounced out of bed every morning. My thoughts were consumed by a singular focus, and yet the world felt bigger, more vivid. I was alive. I was frantic.

In her poem “A Pretty Song,” Mary Oliver writes:

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.
Which is the only way to love, isn’t it?

The complications of love are a feature, not a bug. It was unrequited love that prompted me to start a poetry collective called Unfortunately, i Love You with five other women. As one of them said, we wrote the hell out of heartbreak together. We cried over breakups and celebrated engagements in between writing poems about all kinds of lonely loves. That heartbreak hurt just as much, but it was the portal to the intimacy of friendship with women whom I wouldn’t trade for any romance. And though now I am less, I am also somehow more.

We learned from other poets who have done the same, becoming collectors of their words as well. Mary Oliver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Beckett, Shakespeare—they’ve taken their lack and made volumes from it. And so I’ve hoarded their words and gathered them around me. My collection stares back at me, unblinking, reminding me that even in my loneliness, I am not alone.

One spring afternoon, a friend in our poetry collective texted me: “I feel you may appreciate this little poem I stumbled upon.” It was “I Dreamed I Forgot” by Leila Chatti. The final lines read:

I thought the ache
would ruin me, and maybe it did.
Here I am in the beatific after
still calling back to you.

I added it to my hoard.

MUCH OF MODERN DATING advice and online content preys on single people’s feelings of anxiety and loneliness to make money or generate engagement—Instagram posts that read “Comment LOVE and for $60 I’ll send you my guaranteed 10-step plan to get a boyfriend,” or pundits squawking about how young people don’t date anymore because they’re addicted to their phones. Underneath all of this discourse is the idea that single people, if only they had the right formula, could solve themselves. But I wonder if a hyper-fixation on how to solve the “problem” of singleness may only be adding to our misery by keeping our attention attached to the wrong things.

After the church outlawed kin marriages in the Middle Ages and beyond, some single people turned to monasteries. Such communities provided protection and purpose for the unmarried, and it’s difficult to quantify the influence that the people who lived in them, in their rhythms of work and prayer, have had on the world. They created intricate illuminated manuscripts that have endured for centuries, promoted literacy and learning to transform Western culture, and invented the first mechanical clocks in Europe.

But recycling the innovations of history by simply creating new monastic communities may not be the best approach for my generation. I also don’t think we should give up on romance or marriage. We have to find our own way through the challenges of our own times.

There are spiritual undercurrents and mysteries of divine timing that self-help and analysis cannot deliver us from. But if we believe that God orders our lives, including the time in which we are born, and that we are not puppets but beings with agency, we can inhabit the mystery in between these truths. As Rainer Maria Rilke writes, we can “go to the limits of our longing” and discover what may be waiting for us there.

We are holding the surplus—the excess, both blessing and sorrow, that we may never be able to optimize—expired jars of mayonnaise, beautifully unstructured time, and nonromantic loves that expand us just as much as the romantic ones, though perhaps at a slower pace. We are holding the privilege of loneliness, the ruinous ache of longing, the happiness and the storms.

“I could be happy and sad,” writes Hilary Leichter in her novel Temporary, perfectly describing these tensions we carry. “It’s the way I can multitask; it’s the way two feelings can be the same feeling. It’s the way a rash and a willow can both weep.”

💌 NEW INKWELL POETRY COLLECTION: In case you want to start your own poetry hoard, Sarah Jane Souther has curated a collection for this series from our submissions inbox. Enjoy more fiery philosophies here!

Sarah Jane Souther
Freelance Writer & Editor

Sarah Jane Souther is the founder and editor of Unfortunately, i Love You, a poetry collective centered around the theme of unrequited love. Her writing has been published online at Fathom, Inkwell, and The Wall Street Journal. She currently resides in Manhattan and writes about culture, literature, and faith on her Substack, The Other Darlings.

📸 Photography by Elizabeth Sanders

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