Livre d'Or

Thanks so much for commenting! I don't think you're missing the point, I think this is very germane to what I want to talk about. Yes, some people are ace or aromantic or just simply quirkyalone and genuinely happy and fulfilled without relationships, I didn't mean to erase those people, and I really hope I'm not coming across as calling you "defective". The thing is, if you'd asked me when I was 17 to imagine my life at 27, I'd have strongly predicted myself to be saying something similar to what you're saying: I've never had a partner, I'm completely happy with that, I'm just carrying on watching all my friends couple up and that's nice for them but there's nothing wrong with me not choosing that. In fact people came into my life I liked enough to be willing to try relationships with them even though as a baseline I had no particular desire for a relationship in the abstract.

I guess what I'm arguing is that some people do strongly desire sexual and romantic connections, and those people aren't wrong to have those desires, it's no good telling them they should be happy on their own if they're not. I think it's an extremely good thing that being a single woman is a viable life path – I'd hope being a single man is viable and socially permitted too. I still feel sympathetic to people who are stuck being single when they personally don't want to be, if that makes sense?

I definitely agree that loneliness in general is different from romantic or partner-lacking loneliness, I tried to separate out the two in my post. I really like your broad historical view of the problem; it makes sense that part of it is the malaise of using agricultural society norms in an industrial to technological society, that's a really helpful way of thinking about it. And yes, feeling lonely is not exactly the same thing as feeling inadequate, but they can go together because of this expectation that if you are a successful person you will also be loved.

I suppose part of the conflation is to do with the fact that it's stigmatized to say you're unhappy because you don't have a partner (particularly if you're male and don't have a girlfriend), so people are more likely to admit to being unhappy because they don't have enough social and emotional connection. But I think there are quite a lot of people like PeterG in the Captain Awkward thread, who don't in fact lack social connection, but are still very unhappy because nobody wants to date or marry them. I want to talk about what to do to help people who are lonely in the more traditional sense, and also to help people who are lonely because they lack a partner; creating contexts that value non-romantic connections might well support both aims.