-->
Loneliness. It’s something not many people want to talk
about. But more of us than ever before are experiencing the crippling emptiness
of feeling alone, thanks to the popularity of moving away from hometowns, and I
think it will help me, and hopefully any of you who feel the same, to deal with
it and face up to it a bit better if I talk about it with you.
I don’t think I’m an obvious loner. I’m 21, I live with my
boyfriend in a buzzing city and I am in my final year of uni. Straightaway, to
me, I think that describing myself like that makes me sound sociable and
outgoing, with plenty of friends. The first two are correct; the third, sadly
not.
I do live with my boyfriend, in the vibrant city of Glasgow –
full of universities, therefore full of young people. However, I live here
because I moved here from Aberdeen, where I had a small circle of friends of my
own. I moved to Aberdeen from London, where I had an entire life and a huge
network of friends and family behind me. Moving to Glasgow meant leaving that
entire life behind, and, so I thought, making a whole new one. My boyfriend got
lucky; within the same summer that we moved, almost his entire friendship group
relocated here too.
For him, Glasgow is like a home from home.
For me, it’s the loneliest place on the planet.
My family is dotted all over the place – my parents are back
in London, where I lived until I was sixteen, and so are my grandparents,
brother, uncles and cousins. My other grandparents, aunties and uncles are in Aberdeen,
which, although much closer to Glasgow, is still a good few hours away. The
huge circle of friends from school has sadly drifted away to one real friend
and a small number of previous ‘best friends’ who are now just acquaintances,
people I used to know. The effort involved in long-distance friendship was
obviously too much effort for both of us to make to keep our friendship alive,
but that’s ok. I’ve always known that, as you grow older, you find out who your
real friends are, and I’m incredibly grateful for the one original one that I
have. If you can’t be bothered to really keep in touch, there’s got to be a
reason why. The similarly large circle of friends from my old job in Aberdeen
has whittled down to precisely zero, and only one girl from my social circle up
there actually bothers to remain my friend, again for which I’m glad; she’s
just lovely.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not some kind of social pariah. I’m
really good at making friends – that, for me, is quite easy. I’m chatty and
happy and friendly, and I think, a little funny too. I like to make people feel
at ease. So I’m good at getting people talking, but it’s the keeping them
that’s the problem.
It’s almost like I’ve gotten to an age where everybody
already has their friendship group, and they don’t need to make room for one
more. Everybody’s already been to uni and made the legendary ‘lifelong friends’
that everybody hears about. It’s the same for my university classmates. They’re
happy enough to chat to me, but no one wants to commit, to make that leap and
integrate someone new into their circle. Which, by the way, takes months, if
not years, if you’re lucky enough to get on with said circle at all. It’s quite
a depressing thought, thinking that awkward chats and ‘getting to know you’
stories could be on the cards for the next few years.
What about your boyfriend’s friends? I hear you cry. They’re
a lovely bunch. They’re intelligent and funny, and welcomed me with open arms.
It’s taken three years, but I feel pretty settled, certainly at ease enough to
entertain them on my own, and socialise with them without my other half. The
girls are great, and I do see them as friends. But there’s a huge part of me
that is fiercely independent, and absolutely hates the thought that the
majority of my social circle only exists because of who I choose to be in a
relationship with. I cannot stand the idea that I have to rely on him for my
friends. I am simply desperate to create my own social life too, like the one I
had before we were together, and before we moved away.
Just to prove I’m not some kind of freak, I made a friend of
my own last year. She was in a situation not dissimilar to my own; all of her
friends had already graduated, and she was the only one still at university.
They had moved on without her and she was pretty lonely. I got chatting to her
at the shop where we both worked, and something clicked. We started meeting for
tea, for dinner and drinks, for shopping afternoons. It was great! We were both
looking for a friend, and found each other at the right time. But something
happened somewhere and that was the end of our friendship. I didn’t speak to
her for a little while, to see how long it would take for her to contact me.
It’s been six months so far… I don’t think I’ll be hearing back, do you?
I made another friend too, at an evening class. She promptly
got thrown out of the class and her flat, and moved back up to some obscure
Highland island. Nothing to do with me, I swear.
This isn’t supposed to be one long ode to depression and
desperation; I do truly believe that my situation won’t last forever.
Currently, I see it as looking for a soulmate, and Lord knows that’s no easy
task. I feel that I’ve already found her, in my best friend of nearly eleven
years (where did the time go?), but the fact remains that she still lives
around 500 miles away from me. And while I would walk 500 miles (pun, anyone?
And I wonder why I don’t have friends…), it’s not always, or ever, practical. I
need someone in the here and now, someone to fill the void, someone who I can
drop in on for a chat, someone who will come to the cinema with me to see the
films I know my boy just wouldn’t stand.
I’m full of hope that one day soon, somehow, I’ll bump into
the girl of my dreams and we’ll hit it off like that. We’ll have plenty of things in common, but nothing to get
competitive about. We’ll share clothes and stories like sisters. We’ll see the
value of our friendship as above smaller things. We’ll get dressed up and go
for cocktails at the bar that I love but everyone else thinks is too expensive,
we’ll look forward to the future together, and we’ll console each other when
things don’t quite go to plan. When it materialises, it will be the best thing
that ever happened. And when Fate puts that lovely lady on my path, I know that
everything will be different, in the best possible way.
But in the meantime, seeing as Fate’s pretty unpredictable,
if you live in Glasgow, and you think you fit the description above - leave a
comment, let’s go out.
(I am, of course, joking. Unless you really do think you’re
the one. Then definitely get in touch.)
Well, we're due a cake date, lady! x
ReplyDelete