I’ve been single for most of my thirties, and for most of that time I operated with a background assumption: that once I found the right person, a particular kind of ache would go away. The specific loneliness of coming home to an empty apartment, of having news and nobody to immediately tell it to. That kind. The kind I could point to and say: This would be solved by a partner.
And then I started paying closer attention to my friends who have partners. Not out of resentment—just genuinely watching. A friend sitting across from her husband at dinner, both of them on their phones. Another friend, describing a hard week and adding, almost in passing, that she hadn’t really talked to her partner about any of it. A third friend crying in my car, saying she felt lonelier than she’d ever felt when she was single.
None of this made me want to be single. I still want what I want. But it complicated the story I’d been telling myself about what a relationship would solve. What I was watching wasn’t a problem with those specific partners. It was something more structural, the way that living with someone doesn’t automatically produce the closeness I’d been imagining.
And I’ve been thinking about some things ever since.
I thought love would take care of the rest
There’s a version of the story where love is sufficient—where if you choose the right person and love each other enough, everything else follows. Connection, intimacy, the feeling of being genuinely known. I believed that version more than I realized. I thought the hard work of a relationship was mostly finding the right person, and that once you did, the closeness would be more or less automatic.
What I see in my friends’ relationships is that closeness is actually something you have to keep making. It requires ongoing attention, honesty, and the willingness to say things that are uncomfortable to say. It requires showing the real version of yourself, even when the relationship has gotten comfortable enough that you could just show the easier version. Love is the reason you do that work. It’s not a substitute for doing it.
I’ve seen the loneliness inside my friends’ relationships
Marina Edelman, LMFT, writes that loneliness in relationships is one of the most misunderstood forms of disconnection—that it rarely presents as dramatic conflict or obvious unhappiness, but instead emerges quietly, embedded in patterns couples gradually come to accept as normal.
That description matches what I’ve watched in people I love.
The relationship looks fine from the outside. Both people are showing up. Nothing is obviously broken. And there’s still something missing—a particular quality of contact, of being truly met by another person—that neither of them is quite naming. And the not-naming is part of what makes it harder to fix.
I’ve had to get more honest about what I actually want
I thought I knew. But the answer I had was mostly about circumstance—having someone to come home to, not eating alone, not being the only single person at the table. Those are real things I want. They’re just not the same as what I actually need, which is closer to: someone who is genuinely curious about me. Someone I can say the hard thing to without managing how they’ll receive it. Someone whose company genuinely restores me rather than someone whose presence I’ve learned to work around.
That’s a more specific ask than “a partner.” It’s also the thing I think my friends who are lonely in their relationships didn’t quite name before they got into them. They wanted partnership—and they got it—and the deeper longing went unaddressed, partly because they didn’t know they had it.
I’ve realized I’m responsible for some of the loneliness
Kiaundra Jackson, LMFT, writes on her site that loneliness is a psychological state—that it’s about whether you feel the quality and quantity of your relationships are where they need to be, and that you can have a life partner who loves you and still feel lonely if the connection isn’t genuinely nourishing what you need.
That framing shifted something for me.
Because it means the loneliness I’m feeling isn’t just a logistics problem that a partner would solve. Some of it is about what I bring to connection—whether I’m showing enough of myself to actually be known, whether I’m available for the closeness I say I want. Getting a partner won’t fix the parts of the loneliness that comes from me.
I’ve stopped treating singleness as the problem
For a long time, being single was something I was trying to get out of. The relationship was the destination, and everything before it was just waiting. What that meant in practice was that I wasn’t fully investing in the life I already had—the friendships, the things I wanted to build, the version of myself I wanted to become. I was on pause. And a person on pause doesn’t become more ready for closeness. They just become more desperate for it, which is a different thing entirely. I’ve been trying, slowly, to stop waiting and start actually showing up to the life I already have. Not as a consolation prize. As the thing itself.
I’ve realized there are things I’m trying to escape
Some of what I want from a relationship is genuine—I want companionship, intimacy, someone to build a life with. But some of it, I’ve had to admit, is escape. Escape from the vulnerability of still being single. From the questions at family dinners. From the narrative I carry about what it means that I haven’t found this yet.
And that’s the part I’ve been sitting with, because I know—from watching my friends—that getting a partner doesn’t make that narrative go away. It changes the external circumstances and leaves the internal stuff untouched. The people I know who are loneliest in their relationships aren’t lonely because of their partners. They’re lonely in ways they were lonely before, that a relationship didn’t reach.
I’m working on being someone who can actually receive love
I’ve done enough honest looking to know I have my own avoidances. Ways I keep people at a certain distance. A tendency to present the managed version of myself because the real one feels more at risk. All of that would come into a relationship with me. A partner can’t fix it—they can create the conditions for it to be worked on, but the work is mine. Becoming someone who can actually receive the closeness I say I want is a project that has to start before the relationship arrives. Otherwise, I’ll end up in the same position as some of my friends: in a relationship, technically not alone, and wondering why I still feel lonely. That’s not the version of this I want.
I still want to get married
I want to say that clearly because I think what I’m describing could be read as resignation—as talking myself out of wanting what I want.
It isn’t.
What’s changed is the story I tell myself about what marriage will do. I no longer believe it will solve the loneliness automatically. I believe it’s something you build, actively, over time—and that the building requires things from both people that a lot of couples never quite get around to asking of themselves.
I’m holding out for the kind of relationship that’s genuinely close
Not a relationship in the logistical sense—someone to split rent with, someone to be my emergency contact. But the actual thing: a relationship where I feel genuinely known and genuinely knowing. Where the closeness gets tended to rather than assumed. Where two people are honest enough with each other that the real loneliness—the internal kind, the kind that follows you from one life situation to the next—actually has somewhere to go.
That’s what I’m holding out for. Not because I’m being unrealistic, but because I’ve watched what the alternative looks like, and I don’t want it. The apartment is lonely. But so is lying next to someone and feeling far away. And if I’m going to feel lonely either way, I’d rather it be the kind I can do something about.
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.
