The Art of Intimacy
What it takes to be less lonely.
Some time ago, I read “The Opposite of Loneliness,” by Marina Keegan, a 22 year-old writing prodigy, killed in a car accident upon graduation from Yale University. She opened her award-winning essay, which spawned an extraordinary, posthumous bestselling book of the same name, with perhaps the most succinct distillation of human suffering ever articulated in print.
We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life.
There are two profound tragedies of the human condition: Loneliness is one. Impermanence is the other. Loneliness is a tragedy of space. Impermanence is a tragedy of time. Humans are felled by their bodies — prisons that confine us to only where and when we exist. Today, we’ll focus exclusively on trying to subvert loneliness. We’ll explore loneliness in an attempt to find its “opposite.”
To find the word for the opposite of loneliness, we first need to define the word itself. Loneliness is commonly articulated as the sensational byproduct of being physically, mentally or emotionally alone. For example, if you had moved to a new city, or started a new job, and maybe the others would initially look at you like you’d grown a second head, as a curious interloper from another planet thrust into a foreign culture…
