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Harrison Scott Key| Longreads | December 6, 2023 | 17 minutes (4,850 words)

I have enjoyed many happy Christmases and plenty of disappointing ones, like the one I spent eating alone at a Waffle House due to an ice storm, or the Christmas my father accused all the unmarried relatives of being gay. But of all the sad Yuletides of my life, the one I spent guarding $100,000 worth of explosives on the surface of the moon tops the list. The year was 1996. I was 21 years old and, in a way, quite homeless. Home is one of the enduring themes of Christmas, the joy of being in its midst and the thundering melancholy of longing for it, wondering if you can ever really get that feeling of belonging back—if you ever had it in the first place.

At the time, I was a college student in Jackson, Mississippi, and rarely went home. I would only fight with Pop about why I stopped going to church or entertain questions from Mom about my sudden hair loss and what this did or did not mean about radon poisoning. I did love my family, or at least the idea of them, and took great pride in our being rednecks who lived far off in the Piney Woods, a lawless land where nobody would deliver a pizza. So many of my college friends came from civilized places with public parks and museums. When somebody asked where I was from, I would pull out the atlas to poke my finger at the unmarked point on a map of Mississippi, between Brandon and a subatomic little village called Puckett. “Traveling circuses wintered there,” I’d say, a detail I learned from the Rankin County News as a boy.

It was a nonplace, really. The boonies. The sort of place you only went if you were searching for an escaped convict or a coonskin cap. It did not feel like home. Nowhere did. Mom was from the Delta, Pop from the Hill Country up near Coldwater. “Mama and thems,” he called it, in a county where all the cemeteries had tombstones full of Scotts and Keys, which are two of my names. It felt nice to be in a place where so many of my family members had been embalmed. 

As a young man, my father declined an offer to take over the family farm and split for Memphis to seek his fortune like a character in an old country song, though he never found it there. Memphis is where I was born. Was that my home? When I was nine, Pop’s work brought us down to the Piney Woods near Puckett, some three hours south, where we had no kin. In a place like Mississippi, where kin matters, we might as well have moved to Tierre del Fuego. But I had my first kiss here, and hit my first homerun. Maybe this was home. 

It was, I suppose, until a week before Thanksgiving in my senior year of college. I’d come back to do a little laundry when Pop strode into the kitchen and gravely informed me that they were selling the house and moving again, due to a land dispute with a choleric farmer up the road who hated everyone but his cows.

“Where are you moving?” I asked.

“Up to town,” Pop said.

He meant the Ross Barnett Reservoir, an artificial lake with weedy marinas surrounded by forgettable subdivisions, which would allow my father to carry on his illicit affair with the largemouth bass. It was hardly 30 minutes away, but the people up there were all new.

“You coming up to mama and thems to hunt?” Pop asked as I folded laundry.

I didn’t want to spend Christmas with my family at a farm that never would feel like home, staring backward into a past that only made you sad. I wanted to stare forward. I wanted something new. I needed money, for one. My parents sure didn’t have any. “You have to come,” Mom said. “It’s Christmas.”

“Maybe,” I said, walking out of my last childhood home for the last time. I would never come back to this place. We had no people here. Why would I come back? Where would I stay?

I hadn’t been to church in years but still read my Bible often, with all those horrid battles and beasts and skin diseases that reminded me so much of my Mississippi childhood. The elusiveness of home is one of the Bible’s great themes. God himself was mostly homeless. “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests,” he says, “but the Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus says, a little passive-aggressively. 

God doesn’t seem to care too much about where you’re from, and when you’re from a place, he likes making you go somewhere else, usually worse. The whole book is a fever dream of exile and real estate development, beginning in a garden and ending 1,200 chapters later in something even better than New York in autumn, a hermit’s grand hallucination of a city almost impossible in its beauty and cleanliness and tax revenue. 

I remembered my Bible, and all those hymns, too, so many songs about looking for a home you can’t quite put your hands on. In “We’re Marching to Zion,” we sang about the “beautiful city” that awaited us, reached via “The Gloryland Way,” a spiritual highway leading into a metaphorical Canaan’s Land where there exists a habitation on a hilltop for peoples of every nation with no war or passport requirements. Until then, we slouched through arid and inhospitable lands, filled with stumps and snakes. The message was clear: you could find a home—you just have to die first.

I drove through woods and up into town toward Jackson, wondering if God had a home for me out there, somewhere. He’d led the Israelites to theirs with a pillar of smoke by day and fire by night, but driving back to campus in the dark, I saw no burning signs pointing the way. All I saw was a great big billboard off the interstate, bathed in spotlight. In a blaze of fluorescent fire, the sign shouted with holy ghost power: fireworks!

And I got to thinking.

There are places that matter, sites of consecration and meaning, both natural and human, that possess, through the alchemy of time and memory, a holiness: very old churches, ancient baseball stadiums, certain groves of trees on certain campuses. The Romans called it genius loci, the spirit that inhabits the earth and air of a place. 

There are places and there are also nonplaces, forgotten or ignored or transformed by human progress into blind spots of experience where nobody wants to be, like the landscaping in front of a Burger King. The expansive lot with the fireworks billboard off the interstate was a nonplace, which is perhaps why I felt so irresistibly drawn to it. 

The billboard stood high on a pole, just off I-55, alongside US Highway 80. Once known as the Dixie Overland Highway, it stretched from the briny waters of the Atlantic near Savannah, Georgia, to the raging tempests of the Pacific near San Diego, California, and through a now-forgettable piece of Jackson over the brown sad water of the Pearl River. As I drove by this nonplace, I beheld a magnificent wasteland below the billboard, once a truckstop, now a field of gravel featuring the sort of tattered sheet metal structures where they chain hostages to the floor. 

The fireworks sign stayed up all year, because every June and December, a capacious candy-striped circus tent filled with all manner of fiery delights materialized in this post-industrial apocalypse as if by some strange wood-elf magic. It seemed like the perfect place for a boy from nowhere to spend the upcoming holiday. I don’t know what prompted me to call the telephone company and find the phone number of the company that operated this fireworks tent, but that’s exactly what I did.

“Absolutely not,” Mom said, when I explained over the phone that I’d found holiday employment with Boom City, LLC, a subsidiary of The Hunan Group, Inc., managing Central Mississippi’s largest fireworks tent on a dark patch of highway just over the river from the Murder Capital of the New South. Death was rampant in the area: stabbings, execution-style shootings at the river or the strip clubs just over the hill.

“You’ll be robbed,” Mom said. “What kind of company hires a child to sell explosives?”

Something possessed me, a hunger to escape, to hurry up and exile myself and get it over with. Missing Christmas would be a hard stop, a clean death for the past. 

A few days later, during finals week, my father made a rare appearance on campus. Most of the students were gone already. 

“I brought you some things,” Pop said, opening the trunk of the car to reveal gun cases, ammo, and a machete wrapped in an army blanket.

“Your momma’s worried, son. The machete will make her feel better. I sharpened it,” he said, thumbing the blade.

Pop had brought along my old 12-gauge pump, my .30-.06 rifle, and three preloaded clips with 220-grain shot, in case the fireworks tent was attacked by a team of bison.

“And some pistols,” he said, handing me a bag of pistols.

“Thanks, Pop,” I said, transferring the arsenal to my trunk, a few parking spaces over.

Sometimes, when I think about my life, I think about the quiet moments that may have shaped me more than I could’ve known, like the time my father handed me a sack of guns in a dormitory parking lot because he didn’t want me to die. 

I reported for duty on Wednesday, December 18, 1996. I brought long johns, a hunting coat, bedroll, cookstove, radio, books, and the weapons; along with sufficient foodstuffs for the long dark winter: boxes of ramen, several gallons of Dinty Moore Beef Stew—enough survival gear to stage a delicious, hearty coup. 

The lot was hemmed in on two sides by interstate overpasses and a vast junkyard to the rear. In between the tent and the interstate sat a midcentury motor lodge for travelers using this highway, back when travelers used this highway. The place was still open, rot be damned. A sign announced: telephone in every room. Presumably, so you could call and say goodbye to your loved ones as you bled out on the floor.

The enormous circus tent had gone up overnight. A tractor-trailer the color of dry mustard backed up to one corner, but otherwise, the site was empty—a moonscape. Here I was to meet a man called Donny, who’d show me where the execution-style murders would take place.

Donny was maybe 30 years old with a .44 Magnum on his hip and ran all the Boom City tents in this part of the state. Orientation began in the tent proper, big enough for a church revival, strings of naked bulbs draped across the expanse of it. He opened the trailer, the merchandise stacked to the ceiling. 

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“It’s a hundred grand worth of fireworks,” he said. “I hope you got a gun.”

“I have enough guns to start a new government,” I said.

Behind the trailer, tucked away in the back, were my sleeping quarters, a tiny trailer the color and shape of a Grade B egg.

“There’s a hot plate in there,” he said. “But don’t use it.”

“Got it.”

“You get caught leaving, you’ll be fired,” he said.

“Got it.”

He looked around the empty tent and went to a dark place inside himself. 

“People will want to steal everything,” he said. “But don’t go calling the cops just because. Don’t be jumpy like the last dude.”

“What happened to the last dude?” I said.

“He got jumpy.” 

“What if I need to shower?”

“Use the motel,” he said, of the sex workers’ encampment across the lot. “They’ll give you a shower for five dollars.”

“Have you ever been inside it?” I asked.

“Hell no,” he said. 

Donny had me sign papers that relieved Boom City of any liability in the event of my dismemberment and said he’d see me in a week to empty the cash box and bury my remains.

Alone now on the surface of this godless asteroid, I tossed my bag and bedding into the egg. I’d brought a single sheet and a pair of heavy, careworn quilts made by my great-grandmother, Mama Bessie—my mother’s mother’s mother—tough as old boot leather and the size of an emaciated gnome. Mama Bessie raised six children alone and came from a time when men were men and women were also men, due to all the men dying. She made her home near Possumneck, another nonplace, east of West and west of Ethel. I could not shake the strangeness of life—how one day, you’re a boy, hoping Santa Claus answers your letters, and the next, you’re living inside a fiberglass egg with a loaded rifle and a pair of heirloom quilts from a village that Santa will never again visit, for it no longer exists.

I worked myself ragged that first day, through the early sunset and into the blue-black chill of night. My overnight security would be arriving sometime before midnight. Donny had let me hire my own night watchman, and I’d selected my big brother, Bird, the only human I knew— besides my father—who seemed capable of manslaughter. He was in town for a few days and sleeping at the new house over at the reservoir, the one I hadn’t even been to yet.

When Bird finally showed up, my body was already covered in a fine layer of gunpowder. 

“What’s the new house like?” I said.

“It’s a house,” he said.

“I’m going to bed,” I said.

“What do you want me to do all night?” he said, surveying the ridiculous tent.

“Keep us both alive.” I handed him one of the pistols.

“I brought my own.”

“If something bad happens, wake me up,” I said.

“Just come out if you hear shooting,” Bird said.

That first morning, my big brother woke me with a vigorous rap on the door of the egg. I unfolded myself, thanked him, and he drove away, to return 16 hours later, as he would every night that holiday. Even when it turned steely cold, I found the solitary work hypnotic and absorbing, a way to vanquish the dread regime of time. For 18 hours, I unboxed and priced Roman candles, M-60s, Black Cats, Saturn missiles, my body covered in combustible dirt. At sunset, I walked the lot with a price gun in one hand and a pistol in the other. I warmed a bowl of Dinty Moore on the forbidden hot plate and watched holiday programming on a small TV on the counter.

When the weather turned cold and unexpected flurries began, I donned a woolen poncho and took my smoke breaks mere steps from the explosives, using the tractor-trailer as a windbreak. I must have looked a sight to the customers and dealers who came and went with some frequency from the Sex Lodge. Sometimes I read Shakespeare. I had a Complete Works the shape and size of a Bible, tiny print on cigarette paper. I had given some thought to becoming an actor, traveling the countryside with a troupe. Who needs a home when you’ve got a stage?

A hundred yards behind the tent, out in the scrubby desert of disemboweled cars, sat a cinderblock shed where a man with a wispy white mullet lived, sexton of the junkyard. I saw him only once a day when he tootled around the lot on a small dune buggy. One day after lunch, I walked across the gravel to introduce myself. Nobody answered and I walked away. Then a voice rang out.

“Ho, there!” 

I turned and there he was, in overalls and T-shirt, waving me back.

“I’m Otto,” he said.

“I’m working the tent,” I said. 

“I do like a sparkler from time to time,” he said, his mind wandering to a happier youth. 

“I’ve seen you out here on your dune buggy,” I said.

“That ain’t me,” he said. 

“Oh,” I said, though it was obviously him.

“That’s the other Otto.”

I wanted to ask him what it was like to live with dissociative identity disorder and which Otto would be slitting my throat later. But this Otto seemed pleasant. 

Customers were scarce—a few truck drivers, attorneys who drove over the bridge from downtown. One afternoon, a local TV reporter stopped by and asked to interview me for a segment on fireworks safety and I made up some important facts about fireworks safety. I must have looked like something dragged out of a bog, the scruffy character in the holiday movie who teaches life lessons.

I called Mom from the landline that ran into the tent from a nearby pole, to give her the number and offer proof of life.

“Could you come to the farm Christmas day, at least?” she said.

“I can’t,” I said.

“I left you a turkey breast, if you get a chance to go to the house,” she said.

“I can’t, I’m not allowed to leave.”

“I just hate this,” she said. “It’s Christmas.”

Isolation works a number on you. I almost wanted criminals to stop by. In the long stretch of dark between sundown and the arrival of my brother, I took to dragging a chair out in the middle of the lot, beyond the glow of the tent, under the great black ceiling of stars, staring up into the cold. I felt like Abraham when God told him to leave home and go find another one and that his family would grow as many as the stars above. I felt like Jacob, his grandson, who sleeps on the ground at night and demands a blessing and God puts him in a scissor hold and gives him a hip injury that lasts all his days. It always seemed odd to me that God would appear to Jacob and all Jacob wanted to do was wrestle. But after a week out on the moonscape, I understood. If God had shown up, I’d have wanted to wrestle, too. 

The night of Christmas Eve, I sat out in front of the tent looking at the stars, the faint wash of interstate traffic a distant waterfall. Where were all the people going? Back home or madly away? My school friends were spread across the country. Other friends were over beyond the gelid swamp rot at Martin’s, a seedy downtown lounge always lively in the homecoming days before Christmas, filled with a neon haze of cigarette smoke and the beautiful stench of whisky and ash. The thought of all that happiness made me sad. I didn’t want to be sad but you can’t help what you think about. All those people, at least the ones I knew, had homes to go back to, right there in town, warm childhood beds in leafy neighborhoods where they’d grown up and could probably keep coming back to for the rest of their lives, if they wanted. 

The idea of having a place to go back to—a house, a village, where you would know people and they would know you—seemed a priceless luxury beyond imagination. Pop had a place like that, at the Coldwater farm. He was there now, asleep next to Mom in a bed in his parents’ house, on the land he called home and always would. I had an egg on wheels.

When Bird showed up that night to let me sleep, I’d made up my mind.

“I’m going to the new house,” I said. 

“Thought you wasn’t supposed to leave,” he said.

“If Donny shows up, tell him I’m over at the motel.”

I careened through better parts of town, everything closed for Christmas Eve but shop windows gleaming yet with light. I wanted a shower. It would be a gift to myself, a small luxury, a humanizing act, a blessing to wrest from the grip of God. I pulled into the neighborhood, tucked away on a forgettable street among a series of forgettable subdivisions, each with its own forgettable boat ramp. The design of the homes was derivative at best, another subdivision without history, all those Frankenstein facades, a Victorian gable here, a Tudor chimney there, shallow porches, hollow columns. The new house was dark, just another brick ranch with shutters that wouldn’t close. 

As soon as I saw it, I laughed aloud: I’d once gone out with a girl who lived here, two or three years before. Uncanny. The girl, Libby, was so pretty, so kind, so tall, so blond—like a captain for the Finnish national volleyball team—and I remember feeling envy that she lived here, in a house, in a place where you could get pizza delivered right to your door. Life is weird.

Pop’s boat was backed into the open carport. Through the window, I caught the unmistakable glow of our lighted Christmas tree, though the house was empty. I found the key Pop had handed me a month before and tried the side door, but it didn’t work, and neither did any other key, and neither would the windows budge nor the locks be jimmied with a credit card. I kicked the shrubberies. I cursed the name of God. I whispered fuck very loudly. 

I climbed up into the bass boat, into the only good seat available, and smoked. 

Libby! Where had her family gone? The brass knocker on the front door still had her family’s surname on it. She’d lived here all her life, she said. Why’d they leave? Divorce? Promotion? A sudden turn of ill fortune? Where did she sleep now and was she sad about that? 

I guess it was in that moment that I must have first begun to see, through a glass, darkly, that all of us lose home eventually. Otto hadn’t been born in that cinderblock shed. Mom had no family farm. She had nothing but us, her children. No wonder she called the fireworks tent every night. When I took this ridiculous job and then hired her firstborn to risk his life so that I might sleep a little, I’d done more than cancel my own Christmas. I’d canceled everybody else’s, too. 

I threw my head back and exhaled a cloud of breath and smoke and overhead saw a perfect square cut into the carport ceiling. Maybe Christmas didn’t have to be annulled. Maybe I could climb through the ceiling and sit by the tree and just enjoy it, for an hour or two.

I found a ladder in the garage and climbed into the attic, crawling on hands and knees across ceiling joists with a lighter to show me the way. I would take a shower and make a delicious turkey sandwich. It would make Mom so happy to know she’d fed me. Maybe I would make a fire, sit by the tree, and watch It’s a Wonderful Life, remembering happier Christmases. Maybe even pray for a few more, down the road. I would make Bird a sandwich, too. 

Up in the rafters now, above what I reasoned was the kitchen, I kicked at every hole in the ceiling that looked like it might be an attic door, but nothing would give. I kicked and cursed like a failed St. Nick, with no gifts and no magic and no way into a house that would never be a home. No room in this inn. Not tonight.

I climbed out and drove back to the emptiness on US 80, where I half-expected to find Bird dead, all the money and fireworks gone, but he sat there, perfectly unharmed, a rifle across his lap, watching a snowy feed on the television. 

Later, Bird and I sat there together in the dark beyond the light of the tent and smoked. From the interstate, the warm red light of the striped canvas must have looked inviting in the blackness. The Bible says Jesus is just like that, a tent you can crawl inside. “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God,” writes John in the Book of Revelation. 

“Merry Fucking Christmas, little brother,” Bird said.

“So merry,” I said, fingering the safety of my rifle.

We looked at the stars and told stories. I did not want to leave him alone and I think he did not want me to go to sleep. Whatever sadness I felt was as much my fault as anybody’s. I’d made my choices. Home was out there, somewhere. All the hymns said so. Maybe it would be a city or maybe it would be a church or a wife and children or a house on a beautiful street, or maybe it would just be peace in the invisible tabernacle that was Jesus. Who could know.

A few days later, the world descended upon the house of explosives and bought almost everything. Nobody died, I saw no drug deals gone wrong, nobody shot anybody, and Otto didn’t show himself again and neither did the other Otto. I hired a few friends to help out on New Year’s Eve, and it was nice to have company. 

After midnight, when the crowd finally thinned and the traffic slowed, out beyond the glow of the tent, my friends fired off bottle rockets and multi-shot aerials, which burst in bright bouquets of color and light over the junkyard and far across the darkness of the river, and it was fun to see them having fun, but my mind was already down the road, toward some new future where I might never have to be alone again at the most wonderful time of the year. A family. A wife. A place to sleep without wheels. My last night on the lot, in the trailer shaped like an egg, I felt ready to hatch and fly toward some new home. 

These days, I don’t know what to tell people when they ask where I’m from. I have lived in Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Illinois, North Carolina, and Wyoming, and I’ve lived in Savannah, Georgia, now for 17 years—longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere. My mother lives here and my father is buried here, under soft green grass five minutes from my house. I have a wife, too, who moved as a child even more than I did. We have three girls. One will be off to college next fall and the other two after that. I like the idea of staying here so that our children can be from somewhere, even when they leave. It’s nice to know where you’re from.

When people ask where I’m from, I still say “Mississippi.”

And people say, “Whereabouts?”

Sometimes I say, “The Piney Woods.”

Sometimes, “Brandon,” where I had my first kiss.

Or “Star,” where I went to high school.

Or “Puckett,” where I hit that homerun. 

Mostly I just say “You haven’t heard of it. I haven’t even heard of it.”

I still think about that big circus tent. Strangely enough, I now live mere blocks from the very origins of the old Dixie Overland Highway, US 80. They call it Victory Drive here in Savannah, Georgia, but it’s the very same road that runs right by the tent where I worked that December, some 600 miles to the east. I ride my bike across this road to go to work. Crossing that road is like fording a river of time that runs back through the weird history of my little life and all the places I’ve lived and left. Sometimes I think the only home any of us have is in the tabernacle of memory, though I do own a pretty brick house on a leafy street, which feels as close to paradise as I’ll ever get, at least on this side of the Gloryland Way.

The year after I worked the tent, I heard that my successor had been robbed of all his money in the middle of the night and stripped naked, gagged, and bound to a pole. Discovered hours later he was believed to be dead but was only asleep. They say he was fine. I still drive over that piece of interstate every few years when I come back to Mississippi, and I always look off toward the moonscape with fondness; that desolation where I spent the loneliest Christmas of my life. The motel is still there, and so is Otto’s cottage. I don’t know if the tent goes up anymore. In place of the large fireworks sign is a great big banner promising romantic adventures. I have often considered stopping, to have a closer look and stand there amid the wasteland and feel the sweet pang of lost youth, but having no weapon, I drive on.

Harrison Scott Key is the author of three nonfiction books, including How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told, Congratulations Who Are You Again, and The World’s Largest Man. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens

Phillip Seymour Hoffman?

He filled me in on the details, about how the actor, a man three years older than I, had been found in his apartment bathroom, a syringe hanging from his arm. Hoffman had been to rehab twice in the two years prior, but largely that had been kept quiet. Until that time, his more than twenty years of sobriety were often mentioned in articles and interviews, perhaps especially because Hoffman had a penchant for playing sad, lonely, sometimes desperate, sometimes rageful men, the very people who were drunk or about to go on a weekend bender after years of sobriety. He played those roles from the inside out.

Addiction is a disease of loneliness,” a recovering addict in Vancouver tells the journalist Johann Hari in Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. What isn’t clear is whether he meant that addiction, by its very nature, isolates a person from everyone else, or if loneliness is one of the preconditions for addiction. The loneliness that I had wrestled with since I was a little kid stood at the core of my substance abuse. In my own case, I felt that drinking was a way to stop fighting the loneliness that I could neither solve nor escape, neither outthink nor outrun.

What unnerved me about Hoffman’s death, then, was that I recognized the latent potency of loneliness and how it can continue to develop, even as it is being curbed or kept under wraps. It moves quietly and often exploits the fact that we are slow to recognize it in ourselves. His death was, for me, a catalyst. That’s why I’ve now begun to try to understand loneliness, why I am seeking out its themes and variations. I may not be able to cure it, but I can learn how it thinks; I can figure out what it thinks about, there in the dark.

It wasn’t long before we both heard a deep rumbling. We stopped paddling and let the canoe drift in the current, wondering if we were hearing a highway nearby. After a moment, we realized it was the sound of the rapids ahead. I prickled with fear but we pressed on. A few minutes later we crossed a line of small red buoys that neither of us recognized as our last warning.

By Kara Devlin 

It was only a few weeks ago that I found out cabin fever — the restlessness, irritability, and loneliness that a person feels when confined to one place for too long — was a genuine, medical term and not just a casual way of joking about isolation. I was on a hypochondriac mission, tasked with discovering exactly why I felt so completely out of my mind after only one week in COVID-positive solitude. When I searched my anxieties and fears, dozens of incredibly validating affirmations popped up: You are not alone; your symptoms are real; you can get better. I had never taken being alone that seriously. It was a common, unavoidable condition of being alive, so why would I? 

My discovery that cabin fever was a recognized ailment encouraged me to see isolation in a new way. The severity of the condition was now obvious. As a kid, one day inside had been enough to send me climbing the walls, searching for anything to do. What I didn’t realize as I grew older was that isolation crept into my brain in a much quieter way. Loneliness, shame, unhappiness, and impatience replaced the agitation and boredom I had grown up with. The more I read, the more I realize how universal, yet unique, this feeling is. Why does being alone make us feel this way? 

Technology doesn’t help. Most of us can have all our wants and needs met from the comfort of our rooms — food delivered, friends found in anonymous chatrooms, entertainment discovered on endless streaming services. Technology, ironically, has brought freedoms to confinement. We could spend our entire lives within one small space if we chose to, as the economy molds to serve our desires. The lazy day watching Netflix, the guilt-laden Uber Eats order, even the bold Instagram message, have all emerged around a generation spending more time by itself than any before.

Of course, isolation is not just found through a physical landscape. The most harrowing form of loneliness can occur in a crowded room. Edward Hopper famously explored the loneliness of living in the big city through paintings like “Nighthawks.” This ubiquitous depiction of urban isolation, a diner with no entrance and no exit, serves as a memorable illustration of loneliness. When you are inside of this feeling — the metaphorical diner if you will — there is no perceived beginning or end, and no consideration from those around you, as nothing exists beyond this world-swallowing experience.

During the pandemic, isolation transformed from a misfortunate occurrence to something so widespread it was impossible to avoid. Like most people, I spent weeks and weeks inside my house, with no contact with anyone except the members of my household. All aspects of isolation hit at once and were impossible to escape. I realized how easy it would be to continue living like this — perpetually isolated.

I wasn’t the only one who had this idea. The switch to working from home brought the overlapping isolations of technology and the pandemic together. However, this change was not an unavoidable curse cast upon working society: Only three percent want to fully return to the office now that we are able to. Solitude is not just wrought upon us; oftentimes, we choose it. The desire to be left alone by the bothers of the social world often overpowers the negative experience that isolation implies. 

I am drawn to the idea that reading can connect the isolated — that one story on loneliness can link together hundreds of confined minds to think, Maybe I’m not alone. The stories on this list do not just seek to analyze and dissect the effects of isolation; they serve as a powerful tool of connection.

***

The Hikikomori couldn’t go outside for years. Then Covid-19 trapped them again (Ann Babe, Wired, March 2021)

Like many other people, the coronavirus lockdown was my first taste of prolonged isolation. It was a complete change from my regular lifestyle. But what was it like for those who were already isolated — people who had spent years of their lives locked in their rooms, having already chosen a lifestyle of reclusiveness? This describes the hikikomori, a unique subset of people, largely in Asia, who can live decades in almost complete isolation.

South Korean-based journalist Anne Babe thoughtfully explores the experience of these people during the pandemic. She sensitively lays out multiple, personal hikikomori narratives, displaying their anxieties, reservations, and fears, all without judgment. The effects of COVID on these people ran just as deep, despite the misguided thought that they should be used to it. Babe takes us into their worlds, reminding us that there’s not so much difference between us and them. 

Reflecting on the pandemic, Kim makes a comparison. “Someone who’s been living in the cold climate for a long period of time, like I have, is able to continue on in the cold weather,” he says. “But if that person is from a hot place, they will find it hard to adapt to the suddenly freezing climate. I would say I’m numb to the coronavirus situation because I am so used to being secluded in my room. But I wouldn’t say I’m completely indifferent to it, because I’ve experienced, briefly, the warmth of being part of society.”

The Future of Loneliness (Olivia Laing, The Guardian, April 2015)

As a Gen Zer, technology is an integral part of my life. It’s how I keep up with work, understand the daily happenings of the world, and, most importantly, how I talk to every single person I know. This reliance on social media for connection has potentially worrying effects, as Olivia Laing argues in her illustration of concerns for strictly virtual bonds. 

Written in 2015, Laing’s fascinating piece points out what we should have realized by then — that the internet is not the perfect tool for connection, that is just an illusion. We may believe it allows us to be seen while simultaneously supporting a level of privacy, but neither can truly be achieved. You will never be viewed for who you really are, just as you will never be concealed from prying eyes. Years later, her predicted anxieties have turned into daily reality. It is normal for every app to gather mountains of data on you, every mistake to result in a permanent “canceling,” and every relationship to spend at least half its time connecting through social media. Laing discovers the true nature of the online world and maintains tension to the last word as we discover more and more truths about our online activity. 

This growing entanglement of the corporate and social, this creeping sense of being tracked by invisible eyes, demands an increasing sophistication about what is said and where. The possibility of virulent judgment and rejection induces precisely the kind of hypervigilance and withdrawal that increases loneliness. With this has come the slowly dawning realisation that our digital traces will long outlive us.

Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture? (Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, March 2009)

I spent my lockdown days in Scotland, under the daily COVID guidance of Boris Johnson, who created laws that only permitted going outside once a day, for exercise. For years, like most other countries around the world, we could not meet anyone outside our “bubble” — the small group of people designated as our close contacts. These restrictions on freedom led to societal concerns about the power of government to forbid even the most basic forms of contact, such as a hug, and led many to come back to the fundamental question: Is socialization a human right?

Gawande delves into this concern in this piece, which focuses on the emergence of solitary confinement as a regular form of punishment within the American incarceration system. He draws us in with stories of monkeys and prisoners of war, creating a compelling argument for the inhumanity of isolation from the get-go. He keeps this level of focus throughout, putting you through the experience of solitary confinement with his illustrative depictions. By the end, you’ll be writing to your local representative, asking them to reconsider their position on this brutal prison punishment. 

This presents us with an awkward question: If prolonged isolation is—as research and experience have confirmed for decades—so objectively horrifying, so intrinsically cruel, how did we end up with a prison system that may subject more of our own citizens to it than any other country in history has?

On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets]) (Sarah Fay, Longreads, March 2020)

There is an implied difference between solitude and isolation. Solitude is a choice, your own rejection of the world, your own contentment with being alone. With isolation, the rejection flips; you are pushed out of society, no matter how much you want to climb back in. This peculiarity is just one that Sarah Fay explores in this piece. Subtle contradictions are her strong suit, as she walks the line between being alone and being lonely, the various subtleties between autophobia and eremophobia, and the distinction between interaction and connection. Ultimately, Fay’s personality is the driving force of this article, compelling us to read on to uncover her personal revelations on solitude.

The key to connection was not to be needy of connection with others. We have to give freely of ourselves, act as social philanthropists who donate anonymously expecting no plaques or appreciation in return. (Turkle and others have pointed to this as the reason why social media doesn’t make us feel connected. Each tweet, post, or friend request is made with the expectation of a response: a retweet, a repost, a like, an accepted request.) 

Together Alone: The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness (Michael Hobbes, Huffington Post, March 2017)

Isolation can often be interlinked with identity. People who are perpetually alone may come to the conclusion that this feeling is an inherent feature of who they are. This is particularly true with minorities, as each member finds themselves intrinsically different from the people surrounding them. Michael Hobbes reflects on this experience within the gay community, almost a year after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states. Hobbes meets each man he interviews with a deep understanding — he is a gay man himself — as he intertwines his personal narrative with that of his community. He allows their revelations to propel the article, using his own logic to back each reflection. 

I’m always drawn to pieces that effectively communicate an experience I will never personally understand. Hobbes’ depiction is painful; it is raw; but, importantly, it is thoughtful. Each sentence takes care not just for its audience, but for the subjects it depicts. The level of consideration put into each word creates a simultaneously welcoming and challenging reading experience.

You grow up with this loneliness, accumulating all this baggage, and then you arrive in the Castro or Chelsea or Boystown thinking you’ll finally be accepted for who you are. And then you realize that everyone else here has baggage, too. All of a sudden it’s not your gayness that gets you rejected. It’s your weight, or your income, or your race. “The bullied kids of our youth,” Paul says, “grew up and became bullies themselves.”

Loneliness and Me (Claire Bushey, Financial Times, November 2020) 

Is loneliness shameful? Does it function as a reflection of who we are as people? These are the integral questions considered by Claire Bushey as she investigates the hows and whys of her own personal loneliness, which started long before the restraints of COVID. To Bushy, being alone is neither a curse nor a blessing: It is simply a way of being. She presents her findings as a blunt response to the ideas that surrounded isolation at the start of the pandemic — that this was a new, torturous experience for all. What draws me to this piece is its honesty: Bushey doesn’t hide behind convention and expectation; she lays out everything she feels and experiences as if it were essential. 

Lonely as a cloud? I am as lonely as an iceberg, an egg, a half carafe of wine. I am lonely as the body is hungry three times a day, hollowed again and again by an ache that does not ease except with the sustenance of connection. The feeling differs from the peace of solitude, which many enjoy, including me at times. Instead, it is a gnawing sadness. Even before the pandemic, a combination of circumstance and choice left me with fewer close ties than I wanted. Every day I forage for connection, and some days I go hungry.

***

Kara Devlin is a writer and student based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her writing has appeared in Her Campus, Medium, and others.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Coping with the pandemic over the past year has been tough for many people — but imagine dealing with this strange new reality whilst also bringing a whole new person, or even two, into the world. Sophie Gilbert experienced this firsthand, explaining in The Atlantic how the only people to really see her pregnant were her husband, doctors, and doormen, with the isolation only increasing once her twins arrived. With powerful honesty, Gilbert explains the difficulty of becoming a new parent when your support systems are locked down. Not only do you have to figure a whole lot out for yourself, but your new identity as a mother occurs in a vacuum, with no one bearing witness to the transformation, or to the loneliness. 

Every person who’s given birth during the past year, I’d guess, has experienced a version of the same thing—a sense of isolation so acute that it’s hard to process. I was used to loneliness being something like a dull throb, a kind of ambient hum that rose or fell depending on what else was going on. The isolation of pandemic new parenthood was different. It felt like a wound. It stung bitterly from the very beginning, and every day that went by only made it more raw. Every milestone that my babies hit without anyone being around to witness it was colored with some grief. Every month we spent in the square-mile perimeter of our neighborhood made it harder to imagine ever leaving. Thanksgiving dinner, which we scarfed down on the couch after the twins fell asleep, was surprisingly comforting, but Christmas made me ache for everything it didn’t have. I can now see the same fragments of hope on the horizon that everyone can—vaccines, maybe a return to the office, some eventual imitation of “normalcy.” But the life that I had is gone, and I don’t know how to imagine a new one that has room for my children and anything else. Every second during which I’ve been a mother has been defined by closing off, shutting down, and retreating into a space small enough where the four of us can be safe.

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Anne Liu Kellor | Longreads | May 2020 | 9 minutes (2,136 words)

My ex and I used to watch the Doomsday Preppers reality show on the National Geographic channel together, and talk about how crazy those people were at the same time that we made mental notes about their good ideas. After watching enough episodes, we finally put together some basic earthquake supplies (the most likely disaster to hit us in the Pacific Northwest); we bought a rectangular plastic bin and filled it with freeze-dried foods, a first aid kit, hand-cranked radio, flashlight and extra batteries, extra clothes and shoes, our camping gear, some toilet paper, and a few random extras like playing cards and my expired pain meds from my cesarean (they could come in handy). We filled a couple jugs full of water and tried to remember to switch it out now and then. I put shoes under our beds (in case windows break, you need to be able to walk out of the house and not cut your feet), and continually reminded myself to get an extra pair of glasses (because without my vision, I’d be screwed and helpless). We would have gotten a very poor grade as preppers, but we did enough to feel a little better about our situation. And I knew that no matter what, we’d be in it together. That gave me comfort. I would not have to go through such a crisis alone.

Now, we are all going through a crisis, and I have been separated from my husband for five months. He moved out of our house on December 1st, a few months after we made the mutual decision to split. I have not once regretted this decision, which took many years of unease and heartache to finally reach, and I even started dating someone fairly quickly, enjoying my newfound freedom.

But now, we are going through a pandemic.

***

And while at first I was still seeing my boyfriend, considering him to be the “family” that I was “sheltering in place” with (as well as my son, who is with me half-time), over six weeks ago, when Washington State finally went into quarantine, we decided to take greater precautions. After all, it wasn’t just him, my son, and me. It was also — through my son — my husband, and his new girlfriend, and her two teen-aged kids, and whomever they were in contact with. And it was also my boyfriend’s roommate, and whomever she was dating, and whomever they lived with — and the chain goes on. It was easy to see how me choosing to still date my boyfriend was not just being in contact with “one more person” but a whole cluster of us who were now connected. So while I at first praised the silver lining of having established an exciting new relationship before this global tragedy hit (At least I’m newly in love! And we’ll have so much more time to get to know each other!), once I realized that we would not be seeing each other, this quickly shifted for me into a new level of pain.

Now, I am either with my 10-year-old son half the week during this pandemic, or I am alone. I am either trying to stay present, patient, and playful with him — trying to be a good, supportive mother — or, I am suddenly alone again, trying to settle back into gauging how I “really” feel about our upside-down world when I am not so busy taking care of another. Partly, I feel relief each time I am alone again. Relief to be able to return to my work without distractions. Relief to be able to take a long bath or lie on my bed and cry. Relief to be able to take ample time to breathe and feel all my feelings. Relief to journal quietly each morning and reach out to friends by phone.

But then another part of me feels my acute aloneness again. Alone, without a warm body to snuggle and hug. Alone, without another person to cook dinner with, process with, play games with. Alone without someone who is checking in on you regularly, someone you can fully count on to be there for you, someone who has made a vow to be with you during this time — in sickness and in health; for if you are sheltering in place with someone, you are pretty much accepting that if they get sick, you will too. It’s futile to try to separate germs while in the house; this virus is much too contagious.

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I am a person who loves her solitude, loves being alone, and who once spent seven consecutive years without a partner, and thus developed a backbone of intimacy with myself early in my 20s. So I scoffed at the suggestion from others that my quick “rebound” relationship after splitting with my husband was out of a fear of being alone; please, I said internally, I’ve felt emotionally alone in my marriage for years — it’s about time that I truly partner with someone! Plus I deserve to have some fun. I don’t want to sit around and wallow. I’ve processed and grieved this marriage enough. And I already know how to enjoy solitude. What I need to learn more of is to embrace my inner extrovert!

But my new boyfriend was the one who actually made me question my bluster. “Really?” he implored. “You’re not afraid of being alone?” I paused and it didn’t take long for me to concede, okay, yes, I’m not necessarily afraid of being alone, but I am afraid of suffering alone. Dying alone. Being alone is great when you are feeling empowered! But being alone sucks when you are depressed, anxious, worried, ill, or going through a quarantine and pandemic.

***

Right now, everyone is going through their own struggle. My boyfriend lost his job and my sister may soon too. So many of us have no idea when or if our self-employed businesses will ever go back to “normal.” My friends with steady jobs are trying to work full-time and parent and homeschool at the same time. And all of us are worried about our elderly parents. All of us are worried about there not being enough hospital beds and ventilators. All of us are feeling the collective fear of suffering or dying alone.

It’s enough to contemplate dying and make your peace with it on an existential/spiritual level. It’s another thing to imagine you or someone you love struggling to breathe and not having the basic equipment needed to ease your suffering. Not to mention not being able to be with your loved ones as you or they die. It’s heartbreaking and overwhelming as we watch the numbers rise and try to process the fact that this is happening in other places, will begin to happen where we are, or is happening already now. Making our peace with the fact that we are all going to die is no longer some abstract Buddhist meditation. It’s also the terror coupled with the outrage at the scale at which this will happen, is happening, but didn’t need to happen like this. It could have been better contained.

And meanwhile, so many of us go on with our daily lives, daily chatter on the Internet, daily first world problems now magnified by the pandemic, but nevertheless still first world problems compared to other people in other parts of our country and the world who have long lived with the fear of not having enough resources or proper medical care, who have long lived that much closer to the awareness of the precariousness of their stability and health.

My first world problem involves being alone, separated from my husband, and now separated from my new boyfriend, as well. My first world problems involve realizing that, however well I thought I was doing with this whole break-up/divorce, the pain is still there, here, newly surfaced because of a pandemic. And that pain is about wanting to be seen, held, cared for, unconditionally. That pain goes back deep to my childhood, to my parents, and their parents, and a whole chain of how we were parented and raised. That pain was here long before my husband broke my heart and kept breaking it. That pain was here long before I realized that my new boyfriend could not fill those gaps, that he had his own world of demons to contend with, and that I needed to keep learning how to be here for myself. Again. Solid. Steady. Compassionate. Offering myself soft, soothing words when I feel low: You are doing so well, honey. I see you, I love you. You are doing such a good job at handling all this stress. I’m proud of you. It’s okay if you are not perfect. It’s okay if you are needy. It’s okay to let this pain rise up again and feel it, yes, baby, feel it. Let it all come out and wash over you. The pain is still here, the pain has always been here. And you need to come back into contact with it periodically to be reminded of what you are still working with. But really, baby, really. You are doing such a good job.

Sometimes a dear friend or my boyfriend will offer me their own version of such kind, affirming words: witnessing me, honoring me. But the truth is, you can’t count on friends or new boyfriends in the same way you can a life partner. They are busy; they have their own lives and partners and kids and dogs to tend to. They are not checking in and tracking your daily ups and downs with the same intimate nature that someone who lives with or is wed to you ideally would. They may have the best of intentions, but no commitment has been made, no mutual promise to be THAT person for each other — and there are no years of practice at it either. And so. You must turn to yourself again. You must be this person for yourself. You must learn this lesson for yourself, over and over and over. Offering yourself and your young parts all the love you’ve ever sought and needed. Being here for yourself, now and always. Pandemic or otherwise. This again. This lesson I am continually learning. I can do this. And so can you.

***

One of the many things that I used to be fond of about my ex is how I felt he would be a good person to go through an apocalypse with: calm, even-keeled, and resourceful when it comes to country-living tasks like chopping wood, building fires, smoking meats, hauling heavy objects, or improvising with makeshift materials and tools. Also, he had a good sense of humor. And a certain equanimity and far-sighted seeing. He felt like comfort and security. And for many of us (especially those of us hanging on to relationships where other joys have long since departed), this kind of thing is what we are hanging onto. This in the face of the fear of suffering alone.

Of course, I would like to have another adult here with me, sheltering in place. Someone to strategize with. Someone to hold and snuggle. Someone to laugh and binge watch shows and otherwise enjoy the novelty and yes, even, unexpected joys of this time with — despite the backdrop of anxiety and heartache. No, I am not worried about growing bored; I’ve got plenty to keep myself stimulated with, whether it’s work or writing or chores or taking care of my child; I know I am rich in inner and outer resources. And yet, I know I will also never look upon my desire for a warm human adult body in the same way.

I both honor the very human necessity of this desire, and I see more clearly the underlying old patterns of learned pain. We are all going to die. And we all want to be witnessed along the way.

We are meant to be here for each other. And yet, I now realize there is no true perfection in union, no true forever, no happily ever after. For anyone. But there is our need, and this need is not needy. We can learn to be badass in our solitary resilience. And still we cannot escape this need.

We are human. We are wired for connection. We are mortal. We are weak.

And this is okay. All of this is okay.

I love you, dear one. At heart, that’s all I really want to say — to myself, or to my loved ones.

You are already so deeply loved. And yet you still crave more.

And all of this is okay.

* * *

Anne Liu Kellor is a Seattle-based writer, editor/coach, and teacher at the Hugo House. Her memoir manuscript, Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging, was chosen as 1st runner-up by Cheryl Strayed in Kore Press’s 2018 contest, and her work appears in journals such as The Normal School, Fourth Genre, and Vela Magazine.

Editor: Sari Botton

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Sarah Fay | Longreads | March 2020 | 18 minutes (5,122 words)

This Longreads essay, published in 2020, evolved into a chapter in Sarah Fay’s book, Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses, published in March 2022 by HarperCollins.

The change came less as a chrysalis moment, an instant of emergence and blossoming, than after weeks of distress. My apartment at the time was in the rear of the building, away from the street. Even by studio standards, it was tiny — the kitchen too close to the bed, the bed practically touching the bookshelf and the desk. It had a slight view of the Chicago skyline but mainly looked onto a brick wall. My immediate neighbors kept to themselves. They were presences, a series of doors opening and closing. I’d lived contentedly in that remove. It suited me. Then it didn’t. 

Naturally, I blamed my apartment — the claustrophobic lack of square footage, the oppressive brick wall. The moment I walked in the door, I felt a crushing weight on my chest, followed by a pit in my stomach. My environment had to be the cause.

In his essay on solitude, the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne disagrees: “Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself.” Finding contentment in solitude requires self-reliance. (Ralph Waldo Emerson would later agree, though he remained very much engaged in public life.) Montaigne advises us to keep a “back shop,” a private room within the self, where others can’t enter. Plaster and wood have nothing to do with it. We must have “a mind pliable in itself, that will be company.” My inner back shop had somehow transformed from a place of solitude to one of isolation and loneliness.

The ideal of solitude is strength. It’s a skill to be mastered: the ability to be alone without feeling lonely. 

It’s decidedly male and often nationalistic, a symbol of American independence. It’s Thoreau, who writes in Walden that he never felt lonesome “or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude,” except once, for an hour, when he “doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life.” Of course, he may have found “the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant” because his “solitary” cabin was on land owned by Emerson, his very close neighbor. Thoreau often went to the Emersons for dinner, entertained friends at his cabin, and received meals from his mother. (That said, his Walden Pond experiment was less about living alone than living simply in nature.)

It’s righteous. It’s Benjamin Rush, the physician and founding father, who once called solitude “a mechanical means of promoting virtue.”

It’s a source of wisdom. It’s the Buddha on the path to enlightenment, Jesus and Moses in the desert, Muhammad on the mountain. It’s Thomas Merton abandoning the vacuous debaucheries of New York for the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. As he writes in Thoughts in Solitude, “When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority.” For Merton, “interior solitude” is essential. 

Four years. That’s how long I spent in what can only be called solitude. Or can it? What constitutes a solitary life? I wasn’t a recluse. True, I fit the secondary meaning of the word: a person removed from society. But the primary definition is one who retreats for religious reasons, and I didn’t follow a faith. Besides, recluse has an air of eccentricity about it. It’s J.D. Salinger, No. 1 on Time’s “Top 10 Most Reclusive Celebrities” list, forsaking publishing and granting just two interviews, one of which was to a teenage girl; and Howard Hughes, No. 2 on the list, who holed himself up in the Beverly Hills Hotel and let his finger and toenails grow as much as an inch in length (though in all fairness, he suffered from onychomycosis, which made his nails painful to clip). I wasn’t a hermit, which has an even stronger religious connotation than recluse does. 

It might best be called urban solitude. I resided among people, passing them on the street, but never engaged. Not once did I dine out or go to the movies or to a museum. I held a job — 12 hours a week, 30 weeks of the year, I taught English at a university. I worked out at a gym. I visited my mother. But that was pretty much it. I saw no friends and rarely talked on the phone, even breaking off a friendship with someone who lived in another city and wanted to speak once a week to stay connected, because that much contact was unaccountably burdensome to me.

People — scientists, psychologists, journalists, bloggers — often distinguish between solitude and isolation. The binary is simplistic: solitude good, isolation bad. Isolation is a punishment, thrust upon us and never entered into by choice. The word connotes solitary confinement and incarceration — two tactics rooted in oppression. The common remark that someone with a peaceful mind will enjoy isolation as monkish solitude whereas someone with a troubled mind will suffer solitude as imprisonment woefully misses the point that a monk typically isn’t in a 48-square-foot cell and is free to leave at any time. 

I was free to leave but never went far. Not a single vacation or journey. Not even a quick road trip just to get out of the city. In fact, I rarely went outside a five-mile radius. Same bed. Same breakfast, lunch, and dinner table. Same desk. Same walls.

By definition, solitude and isolation are more nuanced than the good-bad binary makes them out to be. Solitude isn’t all purity and fortitude. It’s merely “the quality or state of being alone or remote from society” and can be “a lonely place.” And isolation isn’t necessarily punitive. The verb “to isolate” denotes the voluntary act of separating from others. It’s benign, even positive: “occurring alone or once.” 

The fears of solitude and isolation have been pathologized. People who suffer from autophobia, the fear of solitude, and eremophobia, the fear of isolation, don’t just go to great lengths not to be alone (overprogramming themselves or their children, a kind of busyness by proxy that only people with the luxury of time and money have the option to do); when alone, they’re choked by a sense of impending doom and danger. The autophobe dreads seclusion to the point of hyperventilation; the eremophobe fears isolation to the point of nausea, sweating, dizziness, even fainting. 

In trying to assuage their anxiety, autophobes and eremophobes face an existential problem: Solitude and isolation aren’t just physical conditions; they’re mental states. (The social neuroscientist John Cacioppo called this “perceived social isolation.”) One need only think one is alone or ignored or unloved to feel enclosed, walled in, bracketed off to the point of anguish. 

The cause of these phobias is unknown although Rush, the same physician founding father who extolled the virtues of solitude and first identified the fear of solitude as “solo phobia,” believed it struck those who thought not enough or too much, letting their guilty minds wreak havoc: “This distemper is peculiar to persons of vacant minds, and guilty consciences. Such people cannot bear to be alone, especially if the horror of sickness is added to the pain of attempting to think, or to the terror of thinking.” (Like many of the founding fathers, Rush is a complicated figure, fighting for humanitarian causes while holding racist and sexist beliefs.) 

Neither affliction has a cure. Treatment might involve cognitive behavioral therapy, where the autophobe confronts the irrationality of fearing solitude. Or exposure therapy, where the eremophobe is quarantined for minutes or hours (though this seems to harken back to ice baths and straight jackets). Or medication, the occasional benzodiazepine or daily beta-blocker. Or talk therapy, the efficacy of which is unknown. Or meditation, relaxation, and breathing exercises, America’s 21st-century prescription for so many ailments.

Autophobia has been gaining attention as a “women’s problem.” A recent article in a women’s magazine told readers that the fear of being alone might be a sign that a woman is just afraid she’s “not good enough to attract someone” or worried she’ll get hurt along the way. The editors of said magazine must not know that this doesn’t classify as phobic thinking, and an article like that does little more than tell women they’re pathologically insecure.

Clearly, I suffered from neither autophobia or eremophobia, nor did I experience an agoraphobic aversion to going out. I had a reasonable dislike of crowded places: music festivals; parades; my nearby farmer’s market, where people gathered to buy $6 pints of organic blueberries and artisan pizzas and participate in drum circles. True, I avoided stores to what some might call an unhealthy degree, ordering everything I could online, including my groceries. Still, I existed in the world; I just happened to spend most of that existence cloistered in a tiny room alone.

Not once in those four years was I lonely. Like the solitude-good, isolation-bad calculation, a similar binary is applied to solitude and loneliness, except loneliness isn’t just bad, it’s dangerous. In the U.S., it’s referred to as an epidemic, said to affect teenagers and the elderly most acutely. It’s a bigger health threat than smoking, contributing to heart disease and increasing the risk of arthritis, Type 2 diabetes, dementia, and suicide attempts. Loneliness affects how we work, making us less likely to succeed and take pleasure in what we do.

But etymologically speaking, loneliness isn’t threatening. The primary definition is “being without company.” Only the tertiary and quaternary definitions emotionalize it as “sad from being alone” and “producing a feeling of bleakness or desolation.” 

Loneliness, like any difficult emotion, gets its power from the conviction that you’re the only one feeling it. As a defense, we reassure ourselves that others feel it, too. We join loneliness meetup groups, hold speed-friending events, even form people haters clubs. Thousands of us like the books cited on the loneliness quotes page on Goodreads. A quote from Jodi Picoult’s bestseller My Sister’s Keeper received 11,000 likes: “Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.” The loner, the lonely one, isn’t to blame; it’s other people. 

During my solitude (or isolation [or loneliness]), it might be assumed that sex played no part in my life, but I had two monthlong relationships. It’s hard to call them relationships given their brevity and the way they played out. Both men lived in other cities, so I didn’t see them more than a handful of times. Both had been in my life years earlier, mainly as friends. Both were solitaries too. One lived on a remote farm in Michigan, the other in Portland, Oregon. Both went about their lives much the way I went about mine, albeit in larger spaces. (Both owned houses. No brick walls blocking their views.) Most of our interactions happened by text, which gives a false sense of intimacy. Frequent texting, with its vibrating interruptions into what might be an otherwise dull day, makes us feel wanted and attractive. But solitaries, I realized too late, don’t do well together. There was a prickliness to us. A certain distance had to be maintained. Both relationships ended fiercely and fast as if each of us had reached our saturation points of closeness and had to retreat or risk losing the edges — those brackets — that protected us. Neither were, to my knowledge, lonely either. 

On the internet, one of the most quoted lines about loneliness is wrongly attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” The quotation appears on Pinterest and Tumblr, in articles and epigraphs. It’s cited on a blog claiming to be an analysis of the novel. It has 7,000 likes on Goodreads.

Although the quotation isn’t from Gatsby, this is: “I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others — young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.” Nick admits this after he has attended the three parties that structure the first three chapters of the novel: the dinner at Tom and Daisy’s affluent home, the soiree at Myrtle’s Manhattan apartment, and the flapper bash at Gatsby’s mansion. No one, it seems, can cure Nick’s loneliness. But someone does, albeit momentarily. In the coupé on his birthday, he thinks of his age and his future: “Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.” Then Jordan puts her head on his shoulder and “the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.” Perhaps this actual quotation from the novel isn’t cited on social media or in blogs because it doesn’t fit our narrative that loneliness is inescapable and absolute.

In the past, Gatsby has been a companion to me. I taught the novel to undergraduates at least once a year, rereading it along with my students, nearly all of whom were assigned it in high school and forced to discuss the symbolism of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock ad nauseam. Most students came away from the novel with a completely different take on it. As one student wrote in her evaluation, “It was like I’d never read it before. It’s really good.” 

During my solitude (or isolation [or loneliness]), I listened to six unabridged audio editions, some several times. Of the six, the one that tends to come up first in a Google search is the glitzy Hollywood version narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal. The five other editions range in quality. Anthony Heald’s New York accent is distracting; Nick is from “the Middle West” and, if anything, should sound Minnesotan. Frank Muller’s narration is oddly sinister. (This may be because he also narrates, quite brilliantly, The Silence of the Lambs, and the memory of his performance still echoes whenever I hear his voice.) William Hope’s version is so blithe and Humphrey Bower’s so choppy as to make them unlistenable. The very best version features Alexander Scourby, the only narrator whose reading — with his hesitations and ability to draw out certain words — communicates Nick’s unreliability, an easily overlooked but crucial dimension to the novel. (If you’ve just raised an eyebrow, note that lying and seducing and ghosting women are, in fact, indicators of unreliability.)

Did these audiobooks count as companionship? Given that research has shown that reading narratives can decrease feelings of loneliness and audiobooks have similar benefits to reading, it might be safe to say yes. Other studies have examined how hearing loss increases feelings of loneliness, so the sound of another’s voice in your ears — the gift of Toni Morrison reading Beloved or Gabriel Woolf reading The Brothers Karamozov — must do something for us.

What about other media? Television? Radio? Do these media release us from solitude, rescue us from isolation, save us from loneliness? According to researchers, watching a favorite show staves it off, but a Netflix binge is a sign of it. Watching one episode functions as “social surrogacy” but sitting on the couch for 10 hours to consume an entire season is a red flag. Radio, according to surveys conducted by media strategists and the BBC, can be “a lifeline.” 

I did watch single episodes at a time, mostly Nordic noir — Forbrydelsen and Borgen and Bron/Broen — but didn’t listen to the radio. Instead, I read — a lot. 

My reading selections during those years of solitude (or isolation [or loneliness]) were ironic. For instance, I read all of Patricia Highsmith’s work. Highsmith was also a solitary who spent most of her life in Switzerland among cats. (She, however, was a rabid misanthrope and an alcoholic.) In her stories and novels, she favors degenerate, predatory protagonists who cheat and steal and lie and murder and whom we, perhaps uncomfortably, end up rooting for. I reread Strangers on a Train so many times I lost count. It’s fitting that I would immerse myself in a book about a seemingly fleeting human interaction so potent that one character has the power to influence the other to commit murder. My walls, after all, were up.

And social media? Many point to it as the cause of America’s collective loneliness. MIT researcher Sherry Turkle, one of the preeminent theorists of social media’s effects on our relationships, insists that social networking, and technology in general, has made us “connected, but alone.” We text when we should meet, comment and tweet when we should talk. Her research is primarily ethnographic. She observes and interviews, as she puts it in her TED Talk, “hundreds and hundreds of people,” including her daughter and her daughter’s friends, and reaches widespread conclusions based on those interactions; she conducts no scientific studies of her own. Social media, she says, denies us the capacity to find solace in ourselves and makes us lonelier: “Because by being in constant connection, we lose the capacity to feel content in our own company. If you don’t learn how to be alone, you’ll only know how to be lonely.” In her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, she writes, “People are lonely. The network is seductive.” For Turkle, social media is a contradiction: “We slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us less lonely. But we are at risk because it is actually the reverse: If we are unable to be alone, we will be more lonely.”

Yet many studies are cited without giving us the whole picture; others contradict Turkle’s view. Doctors, psychologists, and journalists often mention a study that found that only negative experiences on social media contribute to loneliness. Another reported social media can contribute to feelings of isolation but couldn’t state definitively which came first: isolation or social media. On the 2018 Cigna U.S. Loneliness scale, people who consistently used social media scored 43.5% whereas people who never used it scored 41.7%. It was a draw. In a Pew Research Center report from late 2018, in which roughly 700 teenagers were surveyed, eight in 10 teens (81%) reported that social media enhances their friendships and two thirds (68%) said they felt more supported by their friends in times of crisis because of it.

Social media made me neither connected nor alone. My followers on Twitter were in the double digits. I had hundreds and hundreds of friends on Facebook whom I didn’t know, even by name. I didn’t have an Instagram account. (How many artistic and abstract photos of my brick walls could I post?) Still, when I did go on social media, solitude didn’t make me immune to its effects. Facebook disheartened me and Twitter overwhelmed me, just as they sometimes do to other people. 

In combating loneliness, Turkle and the Cigna study agree that social media is less a factor than the quality of our interactions and merely having people in our lives does little; one in four Americans feel misunderstood, two in five don’t think their relationships are meaningful, and only half report having meaningful interactions on a daily basis. 

Maybe there’s another cause of loneliness. Edward Hoagland considered what he called “the crab-claw pinch of loneliness” on nature’s terms. As we’ve deepened our connection to technology, we’ve lost touch with the environment: 

The effect, Hoagland writes, is nature’s “swan song.” Loneliness is “a natural alarm-bell system” warning us to stop our abuse and neglect of the environment. If we don’t, we risk losing the one thing that can cure our lonesomeness.

Each day during my solitude (or isolation [or loneliness]), I went for a walk. My route through the park was relatively secluded. In the winter, it was downright desolate. It was always the same: under the bridge, north along the lagoon, past the driving range, to the harbor, and back. I don’t recall communing with nature; I barely saw the red-winged blackbirds and the monarch butterflies and didn’t notice until much later that an entire row of trees had died as a result of a beetle infestation. Just the route comes to mind, the repetition and orderliness of following the same path. There and back. There and back. 

I may have been outdoors, but I was still inside myself. Blocked off. Looking back, that time I spent in solitude is bracketed; that’s how it’s punctuated for me now. 

* * *

I discovered the power of brackets [ ] 10 years ago in the basement of a community center in Brooklyn teaching English as a second language. Most of my students had low incomes. Many were undocumented. These men and women sat in uncomfortable, beat-up school desks determined to learn English — such a difficult language to acquire with its changeling grammar rules and high-maintenance punctuation marks. They did so for three hours, three evenings a week while juggling multiple jobs and taking care of families. I’ve never had students so unabashedly grateful to me for teaching them. My birthday was met with a massive white-icinged cake and blue balloons. 

One night in class, I double-checked the answer to a grammar question. I turned to my copy of Warriner’s English Grammar and Punctuation. The book fell open to the page on brackets. 

Brackets signify a double enclosure in a text. They’re commonly used in citations but can also indicate parenthetical thoughts. Thoughts inside thoughts: (I am solitary [or am I isolated?].) They illustrate the way the mind works (most minds [or perhaps only my mind]) with its reservations and clarifications and contradictions. One thought can be a statement, another a question. One can communicate certainty, another doubt. Though some grammarians say that brackets include unnecessary information, this is far from true: Brackets represent our internal lives, our deepest secrets.

Rarely do we use brackets this way. Most grammarians would opt for commas or dashes, yet brackets occupy the primary position on two keys on the qwerty keyboard while parentheses (which we use more often) are relegated to secondary positions on the 9 and the 0 keys. Perhaps we don’t communicate through brackets to avoid experiencing the depths of ourselves. Commas are but speedbumps of separation, dashes are practically invitations to enter, and parentheses ask us to step over and inside. Brackets, on the other hand, are walls. 

The origins of brackets — once referred to as crotchets, crooks, or hooks — are a mystery. A distant cousin of the chevron <>, brackets are said to have been invented in the 14th century. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, brackets don’t appear in print until 1676 when the English Dictionary defined them as “marks of parentheses.” They show up in Samuel Richardson’s 1747 epistolary novel Clarissa (a tome I’ve actually read) and in Laurence Sterne’s 1759 novel Tristram Shandy (a tome I haven’t) to express material omitted not by the editor or the author, as would later become common practice, but by the characters. Brackets would eventually be used most often by editors to make comments and corrections on a text.

Like marks of parentheses, brackets are broken pieces of what once was whole. When the Elizabethan scholar and rhetorician Angel Day created parentheses, he conceived of them as a circle divided in two: 

 Given this, we might envision brackets as a broken square: 

Brackets emit a feeling of enclosure. Which is how I now see those four remote years: walled off, the self alone with the self, inside the self.

Although the emergence from solitude (or isolation [or loneliness]), wasn’t a chrysalis moment, a particular morning stands out in my memory as marking the before and after. One day in late January, I woke to the sound of the wind whistling through the unsealed gaps in my windows. I pulled up the shades to find them covered in frost. I couldn’t see outside, couldn’t even glimpse the neighboring brick wall. The weather app showed a “feels-like” temperature of negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit. A Google search revealed that a public-health advisory had been issued, warning people to stay inside. Schools and businesses were closed.

Normally, this would have been just another day in the apartment. I ate breakfast, wrote for a while, and graded papers. I’d just finished washing my spoon and cereal bowl when my skin started to itch. I scratched my forearms, inciting the itch. Soon my skin was red and puffy. I put Cortaid on it, and the itching went away a bit. 

Back at my desk, sitting at the computer, the shades drawn to keep out the cold, my apartment felt oppressively small. The walls didn’t close in so much as I became more aware of their closeness than ever before. I tugged at my turtleneck. My mouth went dry. It felt like I couldn’t swallow. My only thought was, Out.

None of my neighbors were in the hallway. No one joined me in the elevator. The lobby, too, was vacant. 

I stood at the glass-door entrance of my building, which wasn’t covered in frost, and peered out at what might have been a portrait of extinction. No cars passed on the street, no pedestrians on the sidewalk. Whereas once being cut off wouldn’t have fazed me, a wave of solitude (and isolation [and loneliness]) crashed over me. I saw in my reflection a woman very much alone, ready to reach out.

That force, a reach more powerful than the one that had pulled me into myself, propelled me out. It wasn’t pleasant. I became increasingly distressed. My whole default mode was ruptured. I felt exposed, my brick walls and frosted windows demolished. My life was no longer bracketed in the same way. 

One could argue that brackets, like human beings, are fundamentally relational. They communicate to the reader when someone else’s words have been altered. In quotations, they signal when only part of a sentence is being quoted but presented as if it’s a stand-alone clause. A capital letter is substituted in place of the lowercase one, taking Things weren’t great, but he was no longer lonely and changing it to [H]e was no longer lonely. It says these are someone else’s words that I’m using for my own purpose. They are boundaries inserted to connect two voices, causing the meaning to change. Brackets also clarify the context: He isn’t always like this [lonely]. Like people, they can be passive-aggressive, even a little catty, as in the case of sic, which points to an error in the original text: He says he’s never lonly [sic]. Not my error; that’s someone else’s.

Eventually, I settled into new patterns. A reasonable part of my day was spent in the company of others — family, acquaintances, colleagues, strangers. And I didn’t just notice people; I took note of them: the cashier at the grocery store, the person behind me in line, my Uber driver, the couple at a nearby table. Each day, upon returning to my building, I rode the elevator and stood in silence with my neighbors. Most of them stared down at their phones. When we reached my floor, I’d wish them a good evening, smile, and try to make eye contact with at least one person. Some responded with surprise, others like I’d startled them. One guy furrowed his brow with annoyance, almost offense, as if I’d invaded his personal space (or solitude [or isolation (or loneliness [as if I’d trespassed his brackets])]). Some made eye contact and wished me the same. Others responded with a mechanical “You too” without glancing up from their phones. 

At first, their responses mattered, but I soon realized they weren’t the point. The key to connection was not to be needy of connection with others. We have to give freely of ourselves, act as social philanthropists who donate anonymously expecting no plaques or appreciation in return. (Turkle and others have pointed to this as the reason why social media doesn’t make us feel connected. Each tweet, post, or friend request is made with the expectation of a response: a retweet, a repost, a like, an accepted request.) 

In this, I go against Turkle and the Cigna study. It didn’t take meaningful interactions to curb my loneliness. Noticing other people was enough. My “have a good evening” and “have a good one” communications were enough. What even constitutes a “meaningful interaction”? What degree of intimacy does it require? What emotions do we need to experience before, during, and after for it to qualify? Holding people to such high standards (or any standards) seems to invite loneliness.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t feel lonely, I did. Returning to my apartment filled me with dread, especially in the winter when I was met by late-afternoon darkness. Loneliness seemed to wait by the door to welcome me home. But the feeling — and loneliness is a feeling, not a fact — passed. 

Would we feel lonely if we’d never heard of loneliness? Ten years ago, I spent a month in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, trying to learn Spanish. It didn’t go well. It was winter. Normally a tourist haven, the town was desolate. The white-sand beaches were viewed, not enjoyed. I liked parts of my stay, particularly the people. Those native to the area, many of them Basque, were forthright and no-nonsense. 

One day, in the sterile classroom of the language school that catered to tourist-students like me, my tutor, who had dark hair and placid blue eyes, told me that she once had a nervous breakdown. Since then, she’d lived alone and didn’t socialize. Every day after work, she sat on one of the breakwalls along the Bay of Biscay and stared out at the water. Depending on the weather, she might stay for hours. Doing so, she said, had cured her. When I asked if she ever got lonely, she said no. In Spanish, there isn’t an exact translation for our concept of loneliness.  In Basque country, or at least for her, “solo” (on your own), “solitario” (solitary), and “aislado” (isolated) don’t quite mean the same thing.

Of course, loneliness is in our vernacular, as are solitude and isolation. At any point, we might find ourselves inside them, bracketed off from others and the world. And then, just as easily, not.

* * *

Sarah Fay’s writing appears in many publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, The New Republic, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, The Millions, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and The Paris Review.

* * *

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Matt Hudson Giles
Copy-editor: Jacob Z. Gross

More about Sarah Fay and the book

They wrote you an intro

Wow and hello. You seem phenomenal and you probably receive four million messages but I just couldn’t resist…

Gorgeous woman, you are taller than me. I’m bummed.

I am capable of taking care of you financially, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. I love unconditionally, with all my heart, and I love you as you are. 

Your hair looks nice. See ya.

My self-summary

Some days I log in and read introductory messages that ring hollow, like the promises of car salesmen. Others, I receive long and far too intense missives declaring love or making some other absurd commitment based on a quick glance at my photos. And most days, I receive a tepid “hey.” Most days, I ask myself why I bother maintaining a profile –– what am I hoping to find? And isn’t there a better way to date?

I had never used a dating app until a few months ago: a combination of introverted tendencies, a series of summers spent at an evangelical Christian camp, and a traumatic sexual assault in college made it so I was scared to form relationships with people I knew in real life, let alone strangers on the internet. But after my first long term relationship ended, I moved across the country to a town where I knew hardly anyone and made a profile for the first time. While uploading photos and answering questions, processes which underscore just how much artifice is involved with online dating, I grew a little nervous. I had heard stories from friends about men who ghosted them; who retaliated viciously via email and other social media platforms when rejected; or who showed up to the date and weren’t exactly who they said they would be. After being in a safe, committed relationship for so long, the idea of trusting someone to be kind and respectful on a first date was nerve-wracking, but I took precautions in my own way, and tried dating.

At first, it was fun, even exceeded my expectations. I met people I otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to find within the scope of my daily life. I explored parts of my new locale with people who have histories here, and enjoyed visiting places I’ll continue to return to. And the dates were lovely, for the most part. There was homemade pizza and wine in a park; dates who snuck away to secretly cover the bill without asking for anything in return; and hikes where we foraged for berries in spots only a local would know. 

But there was also the guy who lived at home, told me his mom cooked for him every night, and that he would expect his partner to do the same. There was the man who told me, after a few dates, that his friends had agreed I was “too smart” because I had earned my PhD. And, there was the date who leaned across the table to pet my hair and told me I would be “even hotter if I hunted,” though he had proselytized veganism to me just moments before. 

After some time, skimming profiles no longer excited me. Instead, the series of photos started to look like a grid of loneliness, in each answer some sort of want.

I spend a lot of time thinking about

Are dating apps the best way to meet people in this day and age? Do they even work?

Gina DiVittorio’s viral video about dating on Hinge.

How much of my relatively positive experience on dating apps is based on location? My identity as a straight, cis, white woman who has an invisible –– rather than visible –– disability?

Are there ways to improve online dating so that it is safer, more inclusive, and less discriminatory?

What I’m actually looking for

The same as everyone else, probably: to permanently log off these apps.

1. What I Learned Tindering My Way Across Europe (Allison P. Davis, March 21, 2016, Travel + Leisure)

I use them all—Tinder, chiefly, but also Hinge, Bumble, Happn, Desperat*n (I made that one up) 3nder, Flattr—and they are all swipes to nowhere. In boom times I experience a weak trickle of men; during drought, it’s like I’m in the dating version of The Martian—except Matt Damon did eventually receive messages from humans.

When Allison P. Davis left Brooklyn to travel across Europe, she wondered if dating would be any less lackluster, or if Tinder would offer her anything other than sex. In chronicling a variety of dating experiences and encounters in London, Berlin, and Stockholm, Davis ruminates on the differences between dating in the U.S. and abroad, particularly as a black woman. 

2. Diary (Emily Witt, October 25, 2012, London Review of Books)

Subletting an apartment for a week in San Francisco, Emily Witt goes to a bar alone in hopes of finding some form of human connection. Instead, she ends up perusing OkCupid. Witt, in this piece, offers a comprehensive history of online dating and ruminates about the specific kind of loneliness that beckons people to online dating apps. 

I wanted a boyfriend. I was also badly hung up on someone and wanted to stop thinking about him. People cheerily list their favourite movies and hope for the best, but darkness simmers beneath the chirpy surface. An extensive accrual of regrets lurks behind even the most well-adjusted profile.

3. ‘So Can You F*ck?’: What It’s Like to Online Date With a Disability (Sarah Kim, April 15, 2018, The Daily Beast)

It’s not news that lots of women receive ridiculous and misogynistic messages on dating apps, especially on Tinder. But as a 22-year-old with cerebral palsy, I get one at least twice a week.

‘So can you f*ck?’

‘But you look normal in your pictures.’

When Sarah Kim creates online dating profiles, she questions whether or not to immediately disclose her disability or to let potential suitors get to know her before sharing. By interviewing a range of experts like sexologist Dr. Mitchell Tepper and therapist Dr. Danielle Sheypuk, and other people with disabilities who have dated using apps before, Kim offers valuable insight and ultimately comes to the conclusion that how –– and when –– to disclose can be handled in a variety of ways, and decisions are best left up to each individual.

Related read: Online dating is hard enough. Try doing it with a disability. (Timothy Sykes, January 18, 2014, The Guardian)

4. How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love (Kevin Poulsen, January 21, 2014, Wired)

As summer drew to a close, he’d been on more than 55 dates, each one dutifully logged in a lab notebook. Only three had led to second dates; only one had led to a third.

Most unsuccessful daters confront self-esteem issues. For McKinlay it was worse. He had to question his calculations.

After largely striking out on OkCupid, Chris McKinlay decided to put his mathematical prowess to the test, using a Python script to create a database of women’s answers and subsequently analyze patterns. With his unconventional approach, he succeeded in going on far more first dates –– but not many at all led further. As Kevin Poulsen notes in this strange and fascinating story, McKinlay had to strike a balance between calculation and human intuition in order to find true love.

5. What It’s Like To Date Online as a Trans Person (Brittany Wong, October 29, 2018, Huffington Post)

Tinder only enabled users to select gender identities such as “‘transgender,’ ‘trans man,’ ‘trans woman’ and ‘gender queer’” three years ago. Slow to evolve, OkCupid, Tinder, and Grindr have put transgender users at risk in their failure to incorporate inclusive models, as Christiana Rose, Dawn Dismuke, and Jackson Bird explain in their interviews with Brittany Wong.

Though roughly 1.4 million Americans identify as transgender, there’s still a widespread lack of understanding of trans issues among the general public. And sadly, transphobia is on the rise; 2017 was the deadliest year for transgender people, with at least 28 deaths tracked by the Human Rights Campaign.

6. I Thought My Immigrant Mother Would Never Accept My Queerness. I Was Wrong. (Krutika Mallikarjuna, February 19, 2019, Bitch)

Of the many pitfalls of being a queer desi woman swiping through Tinder, I never expected to find myself getting trashed in a bar trying to forget that I was on a date with a white girl named India.

After a date unsettles her, Krutika Mallikarjuna finds herself reflecting on her mother’s reticence to accept her as queer, and experiences a deep depression. Mallikarjuna, in this essay excerpted from The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America, chronicles the ways her relationship with her mother has evolved as a result of therapy and phone calls, eventually leading to shared laughter over a date gone wrong.

7. ‘Least Desirable’? How Racial Discrimination Plays Out In Online Dating (Ashley Brown, January 9, 2018, NPR)

OkCupid released a blog post in 2014 showing dating that “most men on the site rated black women as less attractive than women of other races and ethnicities. Similarly, Asian men fell at the bottom of the preference list for most women.” Through interviews with people who have encountered racism on dating apps, and interviews with experts who consider how apps might evolve to become more inclusive, Ashley Brown offers a harrowing portrait of the harm caused by racist dating app users.

Other dating experts have pointed to such stereotypes and lack of multiracial representation in the media as part of the likely reason that plenty of online daters have had discouraging experiences based on their race.

8. Guys are Reporting Women On Tinder for the Crime of Not Being Into Them (Lauren Vinopal, September 10, 2019, MEL Magazine)  

After Lauren Vinopal politely declines a date with a man, he sends her a slew of rude text messages before reporting her to Tinder, resulting in her being banned from the platform. When Vinopal researches the cause, she discovers she’s not the only woman to be banned for rejecting a man –– in fact, there are a large number of others who share her experience.

Many other people have reportedly been banned for reasons that have nothing to do with terms and conditions — e.g., disclosing that they have herpes, identifying as transgender, or in the strangely specific case of 32-year-old Nichole, posting a picture with a dead deer during hunting season.

9. Why It’s So Hard for Young People to Date Offline (Ashley Fetters, September 5, 2019, The Atlantic)

Such a staggering number of millennials start dating because of connections made through apps that Camille Virginia wrote a book called The Offline Dating Method, which provides tricks and tips for potential daters to make conversation in public and frequent places where they might find a partner. Ashley Fetters, in addition to providing an overview of Virginia’s book, contemplates how much the era of “stranger danger” and the increasing prevalence of convenience in apps across the board –– in areas of food, services, etc., –– have contributed to people relying on online dating.

In the years since, app dating has reached such a level of ubiquity that a couples therapist in New York told me last year that he no longer even bothers asking couples below a certain age threshold how they met. (It’s almost always the apps, he said.)

***