• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

Sharing Housing

Improve your life and finances — and make new friends

  • Home
  • Articles
  • Resources
    • Learn How
    • Matching Programs
    • Common Worries
  • Books
    • Our Guidebook
    • Interviewing Guide
    • Other Books About Shared Housing
  • Online Lessons
    • 5 Key Benefits of Shared Housing
    • Sharing Housing 101
  • My Account (Login)
  • Cart
Is Living Alone Making You Lonely?

Is Living Alone Making You Lonely?

posted on March 15, 2013

Living alone makes it really easy to be left alone and discover that you are lonely. We want to people to remember that companionship is a great reason to share housing. If that’s what you’re looking for in life you might be ready to find a good housemate.

Single adults who live alone can easily spend whole days, whole weekends, without talking to anyone more meaningful than a store cashier. This is particularly true for those who don’t go to a workplace: retirees, disabled, the self-employed and the unemployed. And even for those who do go to work, it’s possible for any conversation to be solely about work with no other personal exchange. Or as has happened to me, to have no conversation for an entire day, using only instant messaging and emails for communication.

It Takes Work to Have a Social Life

If you want to be with people, how do you do it? Where can you go to simply be around others? To have a conversation? Where would you go? The common advice is to volunteer or join groups that are focused a particular interest. Hiking clubs, chess clubs, Toastmasters, team sports, community organizations, Meetups (link) are a good example of this. These are long-term answers because it takes awhile of just showing up before making connections that spill into one’s life. And that doesn’t happen automatically, it takes effort to connect, to become friends, to be social outside of the group.

In their book, Drifting Apart in the 21st Century , Drs. Olds and Schwartz tell about Lois Ames, a psychotherapist and poet, who has found that as a single women she has to make three times as many phone calls than she receives, and offer three times as many invitations as she gets if she wants to maintain her network of friends. And notice that the need to make three times as many call and invitations means that she has to cope with rejections.

A person who is already lonely may not have the oomph, the energy, to reach out and connect. Thus loneliness becomes a self-perpetuating condition. That’s what the research says too. Those who are lonely, feel left out. Feeling left out becomes a defensive and insecure position and the lonely person is more likely to be shy, anxious, pessimistic, hostile, and fearful of a being regarded negatively.[1]

Ouch!

I believe, deeply, that the daily contact that comes from sharing a home, having someone to say “Good morning” and “How was your day?” and perhaps falling into a conversation offers a social connection that can ameliorate the loneliness that so many live with. The sharing of our lives, the day-to-day minutiae, the story of the traffic jam, the missed lunch, the baby shower at work, the conversation with the boss, is simply human. When we get to hear ourselves, when we air our feelings and our thoughts the affect is to lighten our being. When we listen to someone else and offer the gift of our attention and being, this exchange creates warmth and connection.

It doesn’t happen overnight and instantly. Like all human relationships, it has to grow and develop. What is essential is that the housemates start out right by carefully selecting each other. The guidelines described in Sharing Housing, A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates are a good place to sta

Do you have a story about how living with others helps you? Tell us about it.

Read more about fighting isolation with shared housing: A Smart Way Out of Loneliness , Social Isolation Makes the News

Filed Under: Commentary, Should I Share Housing? Tagged With: companionship, loneliness, retirement loneliness, seniors

About Annamarie

Annamarie advocates for people to share housing for the benefits of cost, company, help and sustainability. Author of Sharing Housing, A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates, and founder of Sharing Housing, Inc. She lives in Vermont with one two-legged and two four-legged home-mates.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Annamarie

    April 19, 2013 at 5:20 am

    Exactly. That’s why it’s so very sad. And one of the reasons I think sharing housing can help. It’s not a perfect solution – because one has to select ones housemates carefully and a lonely person might not seem to be someone another person might want to live with …. if those obstacles are overcome, in a housemate there is someone to say hello, good-night, how was your day.

    For some reason I want to recommend this site to you. http://www.tut.com/ Sign up for the daily messages..

    Reply
  2. OwlJulie

    April 18, 2013 at 6:16 pm

    Hello! Being left out seems to increase anxiety and negative thinking, making it harder for those who already are feeling depressed to be able to get up and act fearlessly. Besides this, imagine if you have social anxiety, and you are lonely and need to make friends. It becomes even more difficult to reach out. So loneliness ends up perpetuating itself. Not an easy thing to overcome.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Footer CTA

Our Guidebook
Our Guidebook
Online Lessons
Online Lessons
Interviewing Guide
Interviewing Guide
Worksheets
Worksheets
  • Contact
  • About Us
  • Donate
  • Newsletter
  • Privacy Policy
  • My Account

© 2022 Sharing Housing · This is Clear.Design