Leave the Windows Open

Learning to Live with Loneliness

Window on the Engineering Quad at Cornell University

This article is part of the Claritas spring 2023 issue, Love. Read the full print release here.

By Katherine Becking

When I was growing up, my family moved to a new state about every two years because of my dad’s career in the Army. More often than not, I would start the school year in a brand-new place where I didn’t know anyone. Leaving our old town, old home, and old friends was painful. And in my mind, the only way to overcome my grief was to make new friends. As such, I have spent years of my life trying to get people to like me.

As an introvert, it always took me a long time to develop friendships. In many places we lived, I was lonely until just before we moved away. My junior year of high school was an especially dark time. We had just moved, and my dad had deployed to Afghanistan. In my loneliness, I became numb to everything good in life. Despite my desire to make friends, I was too bitter and exhausted to talk to anyone at school. I felt like I had been left outside to freeze in a blizzard. I would wake up in the middle of the night to eat oatmeal, cry, and yearn for the day that we would live somewhere long enough to put down roots and build lasting relationships.

The desire to have loving friends is universal, and our culture largely recognizes this. Even at Cornell, where the primary pursuit is academic and professional success, students seek comfort and meaning through connection with others. Weary from hours of studying, we scrawl melodramatic messages on the desks in Olin Library: “Is anyone out there? / To love / To laugh with.” [1]

Indeed, relationships are generally more fulfilling than status and material wealth. An 80-year long Harvard study on aging found that “close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives.” [2] But often we take this to the extreme. We treat the people we love as if they can cure all our mortal afflictions. Taylor Swift’s album Lover epitomizes this view. In the song “Cornelia Street”, she describes her relationship with Joe Alwyn as “my religion” (although in another song she admits that maybe “it’s a false god”). [3] [4] The couple has since broken up. The idea that we can attain perfect happiness just by finding someone who truly loves us is appealing, but it falls apart in reality.

This holds true in my own experience. Now that I am in college, I have more close friends than my high school self could have imagined. I live in a warm cocoon of community, and most of the time, I am content and grateful. But there are moments (usually when I’ve been awake for too long) when loneliness seeps back into my mind like cold air through my leaky dorm window. I feel left out or worry that my friends are sick of me. I feel like my gifts and personality are underappreciated. No one here really knows who I am.

These feelings reveal an uncomfortable truth: human relationships fall short of providing complete happiness. We are reluctant to admit it because it’s terrifying. Love is the best thing we have in this world, and if other people can’t bring us joy, then what can? Are we cursed to be forever dissatisfied with life?

Actually, yes. As a Christian, I believe that we were created by God, and designed to be in relationship with Him and with other people. But we turned away from God to seek happiness on our own terms. Separated from the Giver of life and love, we became separated from each other.

The biblical story of the Tower of Babel can be interpreted as a retelling of the fall. In Genesis 11, humanity decides to build a tower to the heavens to “make a name for [them]selves.” [5] God sees their pride and says, “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” [6] Humanity then abandons the tower and disperses throughout the earth.

This story is generally used to explain the existence of different languages in the world, but it also serves as a metaphor for the emotional isolation of individuals. Because of our rebellion against God, there are barriers of communication between us. We may speak the same language as our friends, but our speech is limited and our understanding is too narrow to comprehend the depths of one another’s hearts.

Furthermore, even if we could fully understand others, we are too selfish to love them unconditionally. Both secular research and the Bible attest to this fundamental issue. One study by Indian researchers found that if given superpowers, people would generally use them for selfish gain rather than to benefit society. [7] Psalm 53 says that “all have become corrupt, there is no one who does good.” [8] Because of our sin and mortality, we can only experience a shadow of the love and community for which we were made. This is why we feel dissatisfied and lonely even when we are surrounded by loved ones.

The evidence of human brokenness is all around us. Some friends cancel lunch plans to do work. Others aren’t there when we need their support. Many Cornellians share Daily Sun writer Vanessa Olguín’s experience of losing touch with high school friends who they were so sure would be in their lives forever. [9] It often feels, as one library graffiti artist states in blue gel pen, that “Love Sucks”. [10]

Fortunately, although human love is fallible and insufficient, God’s love is perfect and fulfilling. He understands us completely because He made us and knows our every thought. God even became one of us as Jesus Christ, experiencing the same emotions that we do. Jesus was chronically misunderstood, and His friends abandoned Him in His darkest hour. He was “despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” [11] No one else could fathom what it was like to be a perfect person in a fallen world. Whatever loneliness we feel, Jesus has felt more and can empathize with us.

Furthermore, God’s perfect character allows Him to love us despite knowing us completely. This is naturally hard for us to accept. We tend to think God is as easily repulsed as we are, when in fact He is more gracious than we can imagine. In Isaiah 55, God says that “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” [12] One commentator writes that this passage specifically refers to God’s thoughts being “thoughts of love and compassion that stretch to a degree beyond our mental horizon.” [13] I sometimes worry that if my friends knew me better, they wouldn’t really like me. Regardless of whether that is true, God will never cease to love us even though he sees our worst offenses.

God made us out of love and for love. Our gut instinct that love is the best thing in the world is true. We just have to remember that it is God’s love, not human love, that has the power to heal and fulfill us. All other loves are mere shadows of His abundant and everlasting grace.

Love from other people can never take the place of God’s love. And unfortunately, in this life, we will always be a little bit lonely. We live in the suspenseful time after Jesus has defeated death but before God has renewed the whole earth. We are not instantly cured of our selfishness and isolation when we put our faith in God. When Christ returns and redeems the whole world, we will be fully healed of our loneliness. But until then, we must live with it.

Surrendering to the inevitability of loneliness may seem depressing, but in fact it is freeing. It allows us to stop seeking fulfillment in human relationships. I have been blessed with a loving family, but their love never felt like enough, so I spent years trying to win the approval of my peers. Yet now that I have several close friends, I am still discontent. I continue to seek validation from ever-widening circles of people. I need everyone to love me, and it’s exhausting. Yet I know that it is futile to chase the approval of others. The great thing about God’s love is that we don’t have to chase after it. He readily extends it to us.

Additionally, when we realize that human relationships are inherently flawed, we can stop holding those we love to an impossible standard of perfection. For a long time, I have had complicated feelings about my dad. On the one hand, he is gentle, wise, and patient. His life is one of the best pictures of selflessness that I have, and his love as a father reflects God’s fatherly love. On the other hand, my dad’s career in the Army has caused me deep grief and depression by requiring us to move so frequently. I often resent his choice of career, especially since he was a military kid himself and as a teenager swore that he would never inflict this lifestyle on his own family. It is extremely hard to reconcile my dad’s love and goodness with the pain I experienced growing up. In my heart, I know that he is a fallen human, and that I cannot expect him to be perfect. I am gradually building a bridge of forgiveness as I internalize this reality.

There is one more bright side to the fallibility of human relationships: they make grace more visible. There is something beautiful about friendships that persist through disagreement and conflict. My friends disappoint me sometimes, and I have disappointed them, but we still love each other. Our brokenness is an opportunity for grace and forgiveness to shine. And it is an even greater opportunity for God to reveal His much more abundant grace to the world. This is essentially the reason for everything. God has designed all of human history to tell the story of His love. He created us, let us stray from Him, and redeems us all for His glory. One of my favorite songwriters puts it this way: “Maybe it’s a better thing… To be more than merely innocent / But to be broken, then redeemed by love.” [14]

As previously mentioned, the window in my dorm room is far from airtight. One morning I woke up with ice on the inside of the glass. But I actually like it. The leaky window reminds me of how cold it is outside and makes me grateful for the warmth that I have from the radiator (and from the curtains which are somehow better insulators than the window). Likewise, I have started to see moments of loneliness as a reminder of the hope I have in Christ. My friends and family can never fill the void in my soul that was meant to be filled by God. But one day, my relationship with God and others will be fully repaired, and I will dwell in the warm house of the Lord with everyone I love.

This article appeared in Claritas’ spring 2023 Love Issue

Sources

[1] Unknown Artist. n.d. Untitled Graffiti. Pencil on wood. Olin Library. Ithaca, New York.

[2] Mineo, Liz. 2023. “Over Nearly 80 Years, Harvard Study Has Been Showing How to Live a Healthy and Happy Life.” Harvard Gazette, April 5, 2023. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/.

[3] Swift, Taylor. “Cornelia Street.” Track 9 on Lover. Republic Records, 2019.

[4] Swift, Taylor. “False God.” Track 13 on Lover. Republic Records, 2019.

[5] Genesis 11:4 (ESV)

[6] Genesis 11:7 (ESV)

[7] Das-Friebel, Ahuti, Nikita Wadhwa, Merin Sanil, Hansika Kapoor, and V. Sharanya. 2019. “Investigating Altruism and Selfishness Through the Hypothetical Use of Superpowers.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, July. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167817699049.

[8] Psalm 53:3 (NIV)

[9] Olguín, Vanessa. 2022. “Friendships of Proximity.” The Cornell Daily Sun. January 30, 2022. https://cornellsun.com/2022/01/30/olguin-friendships-of-proximity/.

[10] Unknown Artist. n.d. Untitled Graffiti. Pen on wood. Olin Library. Ithaca, New York.

[11] Isaiah 53:3 (ESV)

[12] Isaiah 55:9 (ESV)

[13] Ortlund, Dane C. 2021. Gentle and Lowly. pg 158.

[14] Peterson, Andrew. “Don’t You Want to Thank Someone.” Track 10 on Light for the Lost Boy. Centricity Music, 2012.