LONLINESS

A movie I watched last night left me strangely disconcerted and made me think about the relationships we form in these technology-saturated times. The movie Mili directed by Rajesh Pillai was about a teenage girl who grows up with feelings of rejection. Nothing she does is good enough and she keeps getting into trouble at school for being ‘weird’ and ‘different’, unable to complete simple academic tasks, always being lost in a dream-world. She is sensitive and kind but painfully shy.  She stalks her crush on Facebook but is too shy to talk to him in person. She spies on her room-mates who have boy-friends and she makes their lives difficult by hogging the bathroom when they need it, overhears their private conversation that they have with their boy-friends, reads  the messages on their phone, her irrational behaviour stemming from jealousy and a feeling of neglect. She has no friends, nobody to talk to and as the days pass, she cocoons herself in a web of loneliness. She becomes more and more depressed and finally cuts herself on her wrist in order to cope with the pain of alienation, withdrawing deeply from the world. A young man who is a motivational trainer enters her life and he understands what she is going through. He points out that what she is most afraid of is to get out of her comfort zone. He spends an evening talking to her, and his words have some impact on her. She finally ‘makes friends’ with a jolly-bear waste bin! She forms an attachment to it, carries it around everywhere and talks to the bin too. She slowly starts taking steps to change her life, and in the final frames manages to turn her life around, after shedding her indecisiveness, fear and uncertainly. She finally manages to escape the clutches of loneliness. There is no romantic involvement with anyone here, and yet she manages to combat loneliness.

Most people when asked why they want to get married, or why they want to be in a relationship, say that the idea of being ‘everything for someone’ appeals to them immensely. They like going from a ‘me’ to ‘we’. They enjoy coming home to somebody, sharing a home with someone, raising a family together and many other such things which only a marriage or a committed relationship can provide.

Research tells us that loneliness , even though isn’t a condition that requires urgent intervention, can have disastrous effects on mental and physical health, affecting our immune systems, increasing inflammatory responses and putting us at a greater risk for cardio vascular diseases and depression.

But is marriage or a long-term committed relationship an antidote to loneliness? I don’t think so. For, it is not just those who are single who can be lonely. Loneliness can creep up in marriages too. Over the years, the partners may not feel connected to each other even though they are living under the same roof. Their conversations become purely functional and practical, like asking each other if the telephone or electricity bill has been paid or whether the grocery shopping was done. The partners may no longer do things together, being immersed in their own routines—like one partner going to bed at 10.00 pm for an early start for an exercise class the next day, while the other staying up late watching TV or surfing the net. Affection and caring for each other might very much be there in the marriage—and yet the partners might be lonely as they are emotionally isolated.

Loneliness is measured by the subjective quality of our relationships not the objective ones. To combat it, what needs to be done is a conscious effort to communicate. To be genuinely interested in others---what they love, hate and what makes them tick. You have to take the initiative, create meaningful exchanges and do things together. In short, you have to fall in love again—and discover the other as well as yourself in the process.
The magic mantra to combat loneliness is connection and a lot of effort.