I thought I was fine doing life solo—until it hit me I’m desperately craving these things

The moment I realized I wasn’t as “fine” as I thought came unexpectedly.

I’d made dinner, eaten it standing at the counter, cleaned up, and sat down to read. All the things I normally love.

But somewhere around nine o’clock, a feeling I couldn’t immediately name settled in—not sadness exactly, not boredom.

Something more like hunger, but not for food.

I put the book down and stared at the ceiling for a while, and then I picked up my phone and scrolled through my contacts without calling anyone, put it back down, and went to bed.

I’d been living alone for three years by then, and I’d genuinely liked it.

The quiet. The freedom. The ability to move through my own days without negotiating anything with anyone.

I had friends I loved and saw regularly. I had work I found meaningful. I was fine.

But that night I admitted something I’d been managing around for a while: I was lonely in a specific way.

Not the vague, occasional loneliness everyone feels. The kind that has a shape to it—a series of very particular things I was craving and not getting.

Not connection in general. Specific forms of connection. The kind you can’t manufacture alone, no matter how good you are at being by yourself.

What I’ve since learned is that this specific hunger is normal, biological, and also worth paying attention to.

Here’s what I was actually craving.

1. Someone to share the small things with

The thing I missed most wasn’t the big conversations. It was the nothing ones. The thing that happened at the grocery store was mildly funny. The bird that showed up at the window. The sentence I read that I wanted to say out loud to someone who would actually hear it. These micro-moments of sharing are so ordinary they’re invisible until they have nowhere to go—and then they accumulate into something that feels like weight.

I started noticing I was narrating things in my head. Not for myself, but for an imagined person who wasn’t there. The impulse to share something was arriving anyway—it was just landing nowhere.

2. Physical presence that doesn’t require anything from me

There’s a specific quality to being in a room with someone you don’t have to be “on” for—where you can both be doing your own thing, and the simple fact of another body in the space is enough. Not conversation, not even interaction. Just not being alone in the same room. What researchers who study connection and wellbeing keep finding is that physical presence—even quiet, passive presence—has measurable effects on stress hormones and how safe the nervous system feels. I didn’t realize how much I’d been missing that until I noticed the shape of its absence.

3. Being known deeply by one person

Friends know me. But there’s a specific kind of being-known that comes from daily proximity—from someone who saw you yesterday and last week and six months ago and can track the small shifts that don’t make it into the highlights of a dinner catch-up. Someone who can say “you seem tired” and mean something specific by it, because they have enough data points.

I missed being someone’s ongoing project, in the best sense. Missed being watched closely enough that another person could notice things about me before I noticed them myself. The people who know me best are ones I’ve accumulated slowly, over time. I was craving that kind of knowledge pointed back at me.

4. Meals with someone else across the table

I eat alone almost every day, and I’ve made peace with most of it. But dinner, specifically, has a social weight that breakfast and lunch don’t seem to carry.

There’s something about sitting down across from someone at the end of the day that registers as completion in a way I couldn’t access alone.

Researchers who study loneliness have noted that shared meals are among the most consistently cited things people miss when living alone—not because food tastes better in company, but because eating together is one of the oldest and most embedded forms of social bonding humans have. The table is supposed to have someone else at it. Something in me keeps noticing when it doesn’t.

5. Someone who already knows my full story

When something goes wrong at work, or a friendship gets complicated, or I’m trying to make a decision that has a lot of moving parts, I can call a friend and get good counsel. But there’s a gap between getting good counsel and having someone who already knows all the players, all the history, all the context I’d have to spend twenty minutes explaining before getting to the actual thing. Someone who is already inside my life, not observing it from outside.

What research on social support consistently finds is that the quality that matters most isn’t just having people to turn to—it’s having people who already understand your specific situation well enough that support can be immediate and precise rather than general. I realized I was missing the kind of support that doesn’t require setup.

6. Being touched casually, without it meaning anything

A hand on an arm. Someone sitting close enough that your shoulders touch. A hug that’s just hello, not a milestone. I hadn’t realized how much incidental physical contact I’d been going without until I noticed I was unconsciously positioning myself closer to people at gatherings—leaning in, staying longer in embraces, finding reasons to be near.

The body keeps its own accounting. Mine was clearly overdrawn.

7. Laughing at something with someone

Laughter alone is fine. I do it all the time. But shared laughter—the kind where you catch someone’s eye at exactly the right moment, or you’re both losing it over something that isn’t even that funny but becomes funnier because you’re both there—has a quality I couldn’t replicate alone. What research on social bonding keeps finding is that shared laughter is one of the most reliable predictors of closeness, more than shared interests or even shared history. I had plenty of funny things. I was craving someone to find them funny with.

8. Someone to just witness the ordinary days

Milestones get recorded. Achievements get shared. But most of life is just ordinary days that accumulate into a life and then vanish without being registered by anyone else. I started to feel, in a low-grade way, that my days were happening without being witnessed. Not that I needed an audience. Just a single person who could say “I remember when you were working on that” or “that was around the time you were going through that thing.”

There’s something about being seen in the small, unremarkable moments that makes a life feel more real. I’d been living quite a lot of it invisibly.

9. Someone who looks at me like I’m the default, not the backup

I see my friends intentionally, by arrangement, with some advance notice. And I’m grateful for that. But there’s a specific quality to having someone whose default is to include you—where the question is “what are we doing” rather than “do you want to get together sometime.” Someone for whom you’re the plan, not one of several plans under consideration.

10. A space that communicates that it’s not just me

This one surprised me most. Not a person necessarily—though a person would do it—just the small evidence that a space is shared. A cup someone else left out. Shoes by the door that aren’t mine. Some small proof that the apartment has been occupied by more than one consciousness. I came home one evening to find I’d left a light on, and for a moment felt something that took a second to identify: relief that the place wasn’t dark.

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our “As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy.