My dad caught me off guard
He asked me recently, out of nowhere:
“Do you know what’s one of the most dangerous things we don’t talk enough about?”
I waited.
“Loneliness.”
Then: “Do you know what the difference is between being alone and being lonely?”
I gave him the textbook answer — one is voluntary and intended, the other is not.
He nodded. “It’s wonderful if you choose to have alone time. But if loneliness comes up — which is normal, which is part of life — I’d encourage anyone at any age to give it some attention.”
I’ve been sitting with that conversation since.
What loneliness actually looks like
We think we’d recognize it. But it’s a lot subtler than we give it credit for.
The obvious version looks like this: packing your calendar with other people because a quiet evening feels unbearable. Or being unable to sit alone at a restaurant — the discomfort of being visible, without someone else as social cover.
But the quieter version is the one most people I work with are actually carrying:
Feeling disconnected in a room full of people who love you. Feeling like no one really gets you — not your partner, not your closest friends, not even your family. You’re there, you’re present, you’re doing everything right. And still. Something feels like it’s missing.
That gap — between being surrounded and feeling truly met — is where loneliness lives for most high-achieving women I know.
The thing I keep telling my younger friends
I’ve been putting my Chinese auntie cap on lately with younger women in my life who are racing toward love, toward finding “the one”. I’ve sat a few of them down and said: you know, it can feel lonely in a relationship. In any long-term relationship, partnership/marriage, even.
They were surprised. Because they thought all they had to do was find someone, and they’d get their fairy tale ending.
But it’s not about finding the one. And it’s not about calling the search over and settling for just someone, either. Sure, it’s wonderful if you’ve found a companion, a ride-or-die. But none of it will feel whole if you haven’t befriended the most important person in your life first: yourself.
I know that sounds like a bumper sticker. It’s not meant to be. There is genuinely no one no one, who can fill the void of loneliness in you other than you. And the work starts with becoming aware of it, being with it, understanding where it came from, and then actually healing it rather than just managing it, suppressing it or what have you.
Where it starts — and why it doesn’t go away on its own
Loneliness isn’t something that just happens to you one day. It’s a buildup. It has roots.
I’ve been going back to my own childhood lately, looking at the specific ways loneliness showed up and what I made of them at the time.
For me: I grew up as an only child, and my parents weren’t always around. They were married but living in different countries, trying to make ends meet. I was cared for by whoever was around, an aunt, a cousin, my grandma who was visiting, an afterschool teacher, but I often felt like a burden, so I didn’t let myself be difficult. I never talked about it because it never occurred to me to until I was exploring my own inner child healing again.
It was a different time. I can give so many reasons for understanding, and acknowledging that they did their best, which then made me often dismiss the actual feeling of loneliness. I understood why and how it happened, so it’s okay, right? But it’s not. And it’s not that we need to go down a victimizing route either, but rather simply acknowledging like, hey, that feeling was real. And I didn’t take care of it.
Instead, I got on with it. I thought, “The conditions made sense. It’s logical.” Not realizing that the feeling remained.
It shows up differently at every stage of life
And here’s something I want you to consider — because this is the part that tends to land hard.
Loneliness doesn’t look the same at 25 as it does at 45. It shapeshifts depending on where you are in life, and that’s part of why we keep missing it.
In your 20s, loneliness looks like FOMO. Over-scheduling. Always needing to have plans, always having something on. Social media as proof of connection — the more you post, the more you’re managing the creeping sense that you’re not as close to people as the photos suggest.
In your 30s, it looks like watching friendships quietly dissolve. Friends are pairing off, having kids, getting busy with their own lives. The group chat is active, but nobody actually knows what’s going on with you anymore. Friendships require more effort now, and the effort often doesn’t get made. You’re surrounded by people who care about you in theory, and yet.
In your 40s, loneliness can look like being in a marriage and feeling invisible. Or realizing that most of your friendships are transactional — people who show up when they need something, and disappear when you do. This decade often brings identity shifts that are genuinely disorienting: who am I outside of my roles? Outside of being someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s high-functioning employee? When the roles get stripped back, what’s left?
In your 50s and beyond, it gets quieter and lonelier in a different way. The higher you climb professionally, the fewer people you can actually trust. Peers disappear into family life or other priorities. You become the “free one” — flexible, available — and that’s wonderful until you realize that while you can prioritize others, they’ll often have other priorities before you. It’s a subtle shift, but it adds up.
And then there’s the loneliness that comes with aging: losing peers to death or illness, physical limitations, adult children living full lives of their own. It just quietly narrows your world.
I’m not saying all of this to depress you. I’m saying it because we tend to think loneliness is a problem to solve — find more friends, get into a relationship, be more social — when really, it’s an internal experience that no amount of external arrangement will fully fix. And that YOU can.
The part we skip
Loneliness can show up even if you came from the closest-knit family. You might have been the odd one out in a tight family system. You might have grown up with siblings and still never felt truly seen. You might have had a parent who was physically present but emotionally unavailable. You might have found it hard to form meaningful friendships at school, and carried that quietly into adulthood.
The pattern is usually the same: we accepted the reality of the situation, but we never processed the emotion. We told ourselves, that’s just how it was. That was normal. Other people had it harder. And we kept going.
The feeling, though? It stayed. It went into your shadow, not away.
What it means when loneliness shows up now
If there are moments of loneliness that catch you off guard now — even though your life looks full on paper, even though you have community and people who love you, even though you’re in a long-term relationship that gives you a lot — this might be why.
You’re not broken. You’re not defective. You’re not failing at life. You’re carrying something that never got the attention it deserved for a reason you gave it a while ago. And there’s no fault in that either. You did only what you knew how back then.
And if we’ve worked together in energy sessions and I’ve picked up on loneliness in your field — but it didn’t quite land for you at the time — this might be your sign to sit with it now, from wherever you are.
Where to start
You don’t have to unpack your entire childhood this afternoon. But you can start by just acknowledging that the feeling is there.
Something like: “Oh hello loneliness, I see you.”
Or, if you want to go full theatrical about it — which I support completely — you could produce a full-blown musical: “HELLOOOO~~~! Hello, hello, hello! I am lonely, you are lonely, let’s get together and be friends!” Personally, I LOVE working off of the opening song “Hello!” from the Book of Mormons for that.
You can do this at whatever pace makes sense for you. There’s no timeline. There’s no correct way. The first step is simply letting yourself acknowledge that the feeling has been there — maybe for a long time — and that it deserves your attention.
Not victimizing yourself. Not going down a spiral of blame or grief. Just: this was real, and I didn’t take care of it. And now I can.