Solitude can feel like a prison to those who don’t want it, while others deliberately seek to be alone in the hope of liberating themselves from noise and busyness. Many hermits across the ages can be seen to have chosen their isolation. However, as history tells us, the question of choice hasn’t always been so clear-cut.

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Kate is a Digital Editor for Wellcome Collection. When not submerged in a book, she can be found walking or practising Spanish. Sometimes both at once.

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Kate Wilkinson

@KAWilko on Twitter

Author

In pictures

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The Hermitage at Painshill, Surrey

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Death around the world in ten objects

Discover how death is celebrated and mourned around the world through ten objects.

Research the sciences of the mind, mental health and psychiatry through our collections.

Walk inside an innovative mobile clinic, designed to provide emergency services in remote locations.

Can hermits get lonely? Explore solitary lives through the ages, from early religious ascetics to children imprisoned in churches, and on to those compelled to withdraw from modern life in the 21st century.

Have people always felt lonely, or is this so-called epidemic a new one? Read personal essays and cultural analysis on modern isolation from a range of perspectives.

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The beach

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Have people always felt lonely, or is this so-called epidemic a new one? Explore the nuances of modern isolation from a range of perspectives, past and present.

The loneliness epidemic

The hermit life from medieval to modern

In Britain today over 9 million people, nearly a fifth of the population, describe themselves as lonely. Fiction’s most famous castaway, Robinson Crusoe, is Barbara Taylor’s starting point as she explores changing attitudes towards solitude and how the modern idea of loneliness began.

Throughout recorded history people have suffered from unwanted solitude. “Solitude,” the poet John Donne wrote in 1623 after a period of confinement with serious illness, “is a torment which is not threatened in hell itselfe.” But Donne’s use of ‘solitude’ here, rather than ‘loneliness’, points to an important historical shift.

‘Loneliness’ as we know it today is a modern concept, dating from the 19th century, and the terms in which it is described are very different from the way solitude was understood in earlier centuries. Today lonely people are regarded sympathetically and efforts are made to alleviate their isolation. People who opt for a solitary life, often for religious or creative reasons, are respected for their choice. We take these attitudes for granted, but they differ sharply from the very negative views of solitude that were common in the past.

Asked to name a lonely person from history, many people might choose Robinson Crusoe, the fictional narrator of Daniel Defoe’s novel of 1719. In the three centuries since Crusoe’s appearance, he has become an icon of solitude, his 28-year sojourn on an uninhabited Caribbean island the most influential depiction of loneliness in Western literature. Many writers before Defoe had pondered the solitary life, but none had portrayed it in such vivid detail.

Yet as a tale of solitude, the book holds some surprises. Most of us imagining ourselves in Crusoe’s situation probably reckon we would go mad, and in fact some of the real-life castaways on whom Defoe based his hero did become insane. But not only does Crusoe stay robustly sane, he rarely complains of what we now call loneliness, although his complaints, when they do come, are heart-wrenching.

Many writers before Defoe had pondered the solitary life, but none had portrayed it in such vivid detail.

Witnessing a shipwreck near his island from which none of the crew survive, he breaks into a wail of misery: “Oh that there had been but one or two, nay, or but one soul saved out of this ship… that I might but have had one companion, one fellow-creature, to have spoken to me and to have conversed with!” 

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Daniel Defoe engraving

But such moments are rare as he sets himself to building a home, cultivating crops, domesticating wild goats: all that ingenuous busyness that so entranced generations of young adventurers who, as one Georgian reader observed, were “less struck with the hardships of the anchorite’s situation than with the animating exertions which he makes to overcome them”. So successful are these exertions that within a few years Crusoe’s island has become a thriving “little Kingdom” over which he rules with “much content”. So although he is glad, after a quarter-century of aloneness, to acquire a companion (his “faithful savage”, Friday), to a modern reader his pleasure at this seems surprisingly muted. 

More surprising still are his repeated assertions that he has been happier in his “Solitary Condition” than in “any other Particular state in the world”. Why is Crusoe so happy in his solitude?

Crusoe’s solitude is suffused with the go-getting spirit of economic entrepreneurialism.

Defoe’s hero is an idealised version of himself in his (singularly unsuccessful) role as a self-made businessman. Crusoe’s extraordinary exertions drive the narrative, with his solitariness serving to highlight his self-reliance and enterprise. Gloating over his crops and goats, Crusoe’s solitude is suffused with the go-getting spirit of economic entrepreneurialism. 

Isolated as he is, however, Crusoe is never entirely alone – God is with him. A worldly man, at first he knows nothing of this, but midway through his exile he undergoes a religious awakening and thereafter experiences the joys of Divine companionship. Yet Defoe was an ardent Protestant who, in common with most Protestants, abhorred Catholic religious practices, including monasticism. 

Was he accused of endorsing monasticism in ‘Robinson Crusoe’?  Possibly; the records don’t tell us. At any rate, a year later, still writing as Crusoe, Defoe set about clarifying his views in an essay that appeared in a retrospect on his island sojourn in 1720, titled ‘Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’ (1720).

This essay is a flat-out denunciation of the solitary life. A reclusive existence, Crusoe/Defoe writes, is a “very mean thing”, a “breach of Christian duties”, a “rape upon a human nature”. To opt out of society is selfish and ungodly; it violates the obligation to care for one’s fellows and, by removing the moral safeguard of virtuous company, leaves the recluse prey to wicked, even devilish, temptations (diabolic influence had long been perceived as a major risk for the solitary). 

All voluntary solitude, whatever the professed motive, is “unlawful”, he declares, including “all those religious hermit-like solitudes”, for a faithful Christian should be able to commune with God anywhere. The only true solitariness of his exile years, Crusoe/Defoe insists, lay in “my contemplation of sublime things”; all the rest was mere “confinement from the world and human society”. 

Nor does he waste any sympathy on his lone, pre-conversion self, whose time, he admits, was too often “ill spent”. A man, he notes, “may sin alone several ways” (a possible reference to masturbation, a widely decried vice of solitude). People need good company to be virtuous. 

MORE: The campaign to stamp out male masturbation

Perhaps the denunciation was a sop to critics, or perhaps it expressed Defoe’s more considered views as he looked back on Crusoe’s history. At any rate, in articulating such attitudes he put himself firmly in line with dominant opinion. 

From antiquity onward, solitude had been derogated in just such terms, as an unnatural, inhuman and immoral condition. Only a select few – philosophers, saints, poets – might be legitimately solitary, and even they were often criticised on this score. Ordinary mortals who preferred solitude to sociability were condemned out of hand. 

Individuals who, through death, desertion or other mishap, had aloneness foisted upon them – much rarer in premodern societies than today – were often objects of suspicion, especially if they displayed any of the psychopathologies associated with solitude (melancholy, misanthropy, madness).

Solitude had its defenders, but they were very much a minority. It was not until the late 18th century that voluntary solitude took on its Romantic emotional colouring – Wordsworth’s famous “bliss of solitude” – yet recluses were still often regarded with disfavour. And it was probably not until well into the 19th century that people suffering unwanted solitude became ‘lonely’. I say probably, because the history of solitude and loneliness is only now being investigated and much remains to be understood. 

One thing, however, is clear: in the three centuries since the publication of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ solitude has shed its reputation as an ungodly, vice-ridden state. Moral condemnation has been replaced by acceptance of, or even admiration for, elective solitaries – a tiny group in contemporary society – and widespread sympathy for the lonely, who comprise such a large proportion of our population. 

Perhaps Crusoe’s laments over his loneliness, fleeting as these are, mark a starting point in this transformation, as the shipwrecked mariner, staring out at the empty sea, feels “so strong a desire after the society of my fellow creatures” that his body convulses with it. Today it is this terrible pain, more than Crusoe’s survivalist endeavours, that resonate with us, as we contemplate the millions of our fellows suffering this most desolate of modern miseries. 

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. Her publications include ‘Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the 19th Century’ (1983; 2015), ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination’ (2003), ‘On Kindness’ (2009) and ‘The Last Asylum’ (2014). She is currently Principal Investigator on a Wellcome Trust-funded project, ‘Pathologies of Solitude, 18th to 21st Centuries’.

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Professor Barbara Taylor

Article

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Diagnosing the past

Diagnosing the medical conditions of historical figures is fraught with complexity.

Research the primary source material relating to medical travellers and their experiences in locations around the world.

Walk inside an innovative mobile clinic, and follow its development from the early prototypes to the first complete version.

Robinson Crusoe, fiction’s most famous castaway, was certainly isolated, but did he suffer the intrinsically modern affliction of loneliness?

Robinson Crusoe and the morality of solitude

When his relationship ended, Thom James first withdrew from the world, then began to suffer from illnesses with no apparent physical cause. His experience reflects recent scientific findings revealing the serious health costs of loneliness in the modern world.

After the unravelling of a relationship I found myself living alone in the south London flat I once shared. As my first relationship with another man, it was fundamental for my understanding of my identity. I hardly left the apartment’s four walls, the post-breakup emotional limbo making me withdraw from my family and friends. I didn’t want to talk, as I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to be around others, as I didn’t know how to be.

My only real social interaction during this time was in the form of my numerous trips to New Cross Medical Centre: I went from GP to GP with fatigue, inflamed tonsils and intermittent stomach pains. There were blood tests and physical inspections, which found no apparent root cause. After being told to drink more water and to exercise frequently, no more was said or done. That was that.

Loneliness is often thought of as a transient feeling, brought on by a change of circumstance: a geographical move, the ending of a romantic relationship, losing a close family member, and, like puberty, many think it can simply be outgrown. However, loneliness doesn’t always pass after a few weeks or months have elapsed: it can be a pervasive state. And we can all feel haunted by the spectre of loneliness. 

The BBC’s ‘Loneliness Experiment’, supported by Wellcome Collection, has recently found out that people within the 16 to 24 age bracket feel the most affected by loneliness, with 40 per cent of them agreeing that they “often or very often feel lonely”. It’s not hard to understand why: the progression from teenage years into adulthood is often fraught with mental, emotional, social and financial anxiety. Throw the unceasing noise of the internet and social media into the mix, and loneliness worms itself into our very beings like a virus; we inevitably become its hosts. 

What’s particularly interesting – and daunting at the same time – is that loneliness doesn’t just have a profound effect on our mental and emotional states, but also our bodies, as our immune systems respond to it. Considering that my own past experiences of loneliness have resulted in negative physical health consequences, it’s something to which I can testify.

MORE: When everyday environments become anxious spaces

Medical research into loneliness is, thankfully, becoming more common over time. Julianne Holt-Lunstad has been spearheading research around loneliness’s impact on the body, and, consequently, morbidity and mortality. While researching her 2010 paper ‘Social Relationships and Mortality Risk’, Holt-Lunstad discovered that a lack of meaningful social interaction is comparable to risk factors such as smoking and alcohol consumption, and, even more worryingly, exceeds the risks posed by physical inactivity and obesity. Holt-Lunstad’s later study, in 2015, which involved 3.4 million participants, concluded that loneliness can lead to a 30 per cent increased risk of premature death.

Loneliness certainly doesn’t discriminate: it can affect anybody, no matter their age, gender, race, nationality or sexual orientation. Minorities, however, can consequently feel loneliness in a more visceral way due to their marginalised position in society. As a gay man, loneliness has, unfortunately, at various points in the past, fit like a nefarious glove – a comfortable, familiar but ultimately harmful state. And, as my first gay relationship ended, feelings of detachment from the people I once knew, from the public and from society (read heteronormative society) caused feelings of isolation to resurface.

Dr Michael Johnson, who works for the Lavender Health LGBTQ Resource Center in the United States, identified five different kinds of isolation that LGBTQ+ individuals face: 

1.  Social isolation (unable to openly talk about orientation or identity).

2.  Emotional isolation (feeling disconnected from social networks).

3.  Cognitive isolation (lack of access to information, resources and role models).

4.  Concealment of identity (pressure to succumb to heteronormative expectations).

5.  The realisation that one is ‘different’ from heteronormative society.

In retrospect, there’s no doubt that feelings of isolation contributed to my seemingly never-ending trips to New Cross Medical Centre – my body was buckling under the weight of loneliness. My experience was certainly not uncommon, however. The Institute of Medicine conducted a study in 2011, which revealed that lesbian, gay and bisexual adults are “at higher risk for mental and physical health disparities than heterosexuals”. 

All the studies and statistics point to one question: how can loneliness be combated? It’s far easier said than done, but mustering the courage to meet others helps to quell the burden of loneliness. And, although research from University College London Urban Laboratory has uncovered that there’s been a 58 per cent decline in LGBTQ+ spaces in London since 2006, all is not yet lost: there are a number of DIY and grassroots LGBTQ+ initiatives across the United Kingdom that prioritise both community and physical wellbeing. 

OutdoorLads is a group for gay, bisexual and trans men that has a focus on walking, hiking and cycling in the great outdoors. The lesbian woman’s answer to OutdoorLads are the Hiking Dykes and Dyke Hike groups, found in locations across the nation, including London, Exeter, Nottingham and Northumberland. For the artistic, there’s Charlotte Heather and Sophie Brown’s RITA MUNUS – a creative writing workshop that places emphasis on queerness, the body and chronic illness. 

There are also a huge number of LGBTQ+ groups on MeetUp – perhaps one for every niche, taste or hobby. MeetUp has personal significance for me – it was the primary medium I used to meet others. Using an online portal to facilitate a real life meet-up made the whole undertaking far less daunting.

The above websites and groups came to my knowledge due to chance, word of mouth or sustained online research – that is to say, it took time for these opportunities to reveal themselves. Finding a relevant group, event or space might be a process that takes an undefined amount of time and effort, but it is our best bet for forging real, lasting connections with other people, and healing sickness in the process. 

Suspending my feelings of worry and nervousness in order to establish new friendships and social circles helped pull me out of my post-breakup loneliness. And, whether it’s coincidence or not, my trips to New Cross Medical Centre lessened.

Thom is a British writer based in Berlin. His work has appeared or is upcoming in: Wellcome Collection, The White Review, The Quietus, Physique Pictorial, The New Statesman, The Huffington Post, The London Economic, and more. For the past three years he has helped organise Lit Live, a literary reading series based in south London. Thom has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Thom James

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The living room

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Is shoegaze the loneliest genre of music?

If you’re a fan of the dreamy subgenre known as shoegaze, there’s a chance that, you’re an introverted kind of music lover.

Research primary source material on nurses, midwives and health visitors and professional relations in health services.

Walk inside an innovative mobile clinic designed to provide emergency services in remote locations.

When his relationship ended, Thom James first withdrew from the world, then began to suffer from illnesses with no apparent physical cause.

Sick of being lonely

In many ways, loneliness is a kind of hunger – for feeling included, needed and cared for. Historian Fay Bound Alberti explores how Christmas food and traditions connect us to history and our community, and reflects on those who feel isolated, especially at this time of year.

Amidst an apparent ‘epidemic of loneliness’, UK charities and businesses are pledging to support those who are lonely at Christmas. The Alexandria Public House in Wimbledon announced a “FREE turkey dinner & a pint on Christmas Day for anyone who is on their own”, and will do the same in 2018. Believing “no one should be alone at Christmas”, a Pendle charity has similarly set up an “inclusive Christmas dinner” for anyone in need. And the homeless charity Crisis provides a range of advice and facilities, including a Christmas dinner for a homeless person, when someone donates just under £30. 

Such offerings are a welcome reminder that Christmas is regarded as a season of goodwill and bonhomie. Though loneliness is not just for Christmas – it arises at different times, for many different reasons. And there are various types. The loneliness of a homeless person vulnerable on the streets or existing without medical care will be different from that of an elderly person in good accommodation but recently bereaved. And not everyone minds being alone, or even lonely, at Christmas time. 

When I was a child, my dad often announced he would rather be alone. “Bah, humbug,” we told him. Because didn’t everyone want to feel part of the festive celebrations? Not so. For some people, solitude is more enjoyable than sociability, even at Christmas. And it’s common to feel lonely in a crowd. The pressure to be with other people during the festive season – alongside the pressures to spend, to see family, to celebrate – can even produce loneliness.

The Christmas dinner, then, is a symbol of togetherness but also alienation. And it’s a surprisingly recent invention. It was not until 1848, when the Illustrated London News published an image of the British monarchy around a decorated Christmas tree (a custom imported from Prince Albert’s German childhood), that the UK embraced Christmas decorations. This was part of a widespread move in the UK towards celebrating Christmas in distinctively modern ways. 

MORE: How storytelling helped writer JJ Bola understand his displacement

In 1843, the inventor Henry Cole published the country’s first commercial Christmas card, which depicted a large family gathering seated around a table and flushed with wine, while the remains of a roast are visible. To the left of this coloured image, a poorer, smaller group break bread; to the right, a Madonna-like woman and child are physically and metaphorically clothed, or so it seems, by Christian charity. Costing a shilling each, these cards would not have been within the reach of many ordinary people, but like the Christmas trees, Christmas crackers, gifts and home decorations, the Christmas dinner became part of an idealised Christmas.

The world's first commercially produced Christmas card, designed by John Callcott Horsley for Henry Cole in 1843.

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First Christmas card, Sir Henry Cole

Like all festive food, Christmas dinner means more than its parts. The ceremonials around the preparation and eating of the feast – from peeling sprouts to carving the bird, from stirring the coin into the pudding to drenching fruitcake in brandy – are physical acts that are rooted in tradition. Each member of the household might have a role in those processes, whether it’s laying the table or passing down a specific recipe (my own favourite being sprouts à la barigoule, without which Christmas isn’t complete). 

Food, as a way to celebrate identity, belonging, memory and place is central to celebrations around the globe. In Japan, it’s customary to eat fried chicken on Christmas Eve, an invented tradition that helped KFC get a foothold in the country. Consider the importance of latkes for Jewish people, tamales in Costa Rica, kūčios in Lithuania and the baida roti of Eid Mubarak. 

Most people have a physical as well as a psychological association with a particular food, whatever the culture being celebrated. Food has enormous emotional significance because it links people with the past, the present and the future; it creates a framework of belonging and resilience and it provides an antidote to loneliness. 

For those who do feel lonely at Christmas then, especially when loneliness intersects with old age and social isolation, homelessness or illness, food is an important reminder of rootedness to a longer tradition, custom or sense of community. It reminds people where they might (or might not) belong. While the table groaning with the weight of turkey, trifle, puddings and dates might symbolise togetherness, its absence promotes the sense of hunger and lack felt by those who are socially as well as physically starving. 

The charity in Pendle emphasises that their Christmas dinner will provide ‘warmth’ and comfort to those it welcomes. Crisis offers not only a hot meal but a warm shower alongside medical care. These languages of bodily warmth and fullness, alongside tending to the whole body, is important; people who are lonely talk in terms of physical as well as emotional coldness and lack. The hungry body becomes a powerful metaphor for loneliness, as the social neuroscientist John Cacioppo observed. 

For Cacioppo, who sadly passed away in 2018, loneliness was “a bit like pain, hunger and thirst”. Loneliness, like pain, was as physical sign of impending danger. For the individual without social networks, that danger came from social isolation – lethal for our tribal ancestors; dangerous in different ways today, as lonely people get ill more often, die earlier, and experience depression and disease.

The lonely body is a hungry body in multiple ways; loneliness makes people more prone to eating, and overeating, in order to fill that perceived lack. By contrast with the language of loneliness, which emphasises coldness and hunger – couched in phrases like “being out in the cold”, or “getting the cold shoulder” – the ‘warm heart’ of a companionable person brings emotional and well as physical comfort. 

All emotional experience is physical; it does not live entirely in the mind.

Bringing people together for a Christmas dinner is a kind and generous act, but it can also be a reminder of the broader disconnect of a lonely life; the everyday lack of sensory stimulation that ranges from a sense of touch – sexual and sensual as well as restorative – or the sound of a loved one’s voice, the scent of their perfume, the taste of home-cooked food. 

When I think back on Christmases past, my memories focus on its physical reminders: the heat of the fire, the rustle of the wrapping paper; the taste of the trifle; the scent of new toiletries and spent Christmas crackers; the feel of the paper hat too tight or too loose; the clink of the cutlery and the familiar voices of people laughing, arguing, shouting or singing. I grew up in Wales, where my Christmases were also linked to the deep bass of Welsh choirs and the dusty smell of church prayer cushions. 

If you reflect on your own memories of festive events, I am sure you will have your own particular register of moments when you felt part of something bigger or entirely alone; when that togetherness felt warm or suffocating, and when isolation made you feel cold and exposed. 

All emotional experience is physical; it does not live entirely in the mind. Lonely bodies are hungry for more than turkey; if they are lonely, they are hungry, too, for the connections and memories linked to that turkey: to the feeling of being cared for and needed and included. In all these ways, the physical, lived experience of loneliness needs to be tended to, at Christmas as well as all year round.

Fay Bound Alberti is  a writer, historian and consultant focusing on health, gender, emotions and the body – in history and in the present. She co-founded the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, where she is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow, and her books include 'This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture'.

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Dr Fay Bound Alberti

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The dining room

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The poor child’s nurse

The dangerous substances in children's medicines were concealed by happy advertising imagery.

Research the close connection between food and health from the 16th century to the 21st century through our food and medicine archives.

Living with Buildings

Health and architecture have a long relationship, as you will discover in 'Living with Buildings' exhibition.

At Christmas, many charities provide dinners for homeless or isolated people. Food is central to festive celebrations, but it can also satisfy our hunger for belonging and community.

Lonely bodies are hungry for more than turkey

Internet dating can feel like a giant sweetshop: one where everyone takes a bite, or perhaps a few bites, and then moves on to something sweeter. After more than a decade of dating strangers, Christina Patterson learned a lot about the online world and relationships, including how endless choice can be a route into increasing loneliness.

“I’m determined,” said the man, “to hold out for something good.” We had just had sex. Quite adventurous sex. And now the man lying naked next to me had basically told me that I didn’t cut the mustard.

It was our third date. We had met online, and the other two dates had, I thought, gone fairly well. Our first was in a wine bar, where I discovered that he was handsome and could talk. I had learned that not all that many online profiles were of men who were handsome and could talk. 

Our second date involved an art gallery, a dinner and a boat. And our third date… well, our third date started with dinner cooked by him, and ended with what felt like a report. B plus. Tries hard, but could do better. 

I would love to be able to say that I leapt up, grabbed my clothes and told him that he should be so lucky. I didn’t. All night I lay next to him, cheeks burning and hardly daring to breathe. The next day I was feeling so lonely and rejected that I just wanted to lie on the floor and howl.

Internet dating is tough: I know because I’ve done an awful lot of it. I started in my thirties after watching nearly all my friends pair off. All through my twenties I smiled at their weddings, at their babies, at stories of their toddlers’ first words and first steps. Sometimes the effort was too much. I once walked out of a friend’s book launch after he had given a speech about finding the love of his life. 

I was sick of searching, sick of dating, sick of feeling that everyone else had managed to leap over a chasm I couldn’t even seem to get near. I couldn’t understand how they made it look so easy.

I once walked out of a friend’s book launch after he had given a speech about finding the love of his life.

Most of my friends met their partners at parties or through friends. They liked the look of each other, had a few drinks and fell into bed. No one ever used the word ‘dating’. That was, we thought, something that happened in America, something that made you think of high-school proms. But then it came here, a whole new world with weird rules that seemed to be a mix of 1950s small-town America and Jane Austen. A world where the woman generally waited to be asked to dance.

I started this new thing called dating because I didn’t know how else I was going to meet a man. My colleagues were mostly attached. My friends had exhausted their supplies of single men. I wanted someone to spend weekends with, and holidays, Christmases, birthdays and New Year’s Eves. I wanted someone to love, and someone to love me.

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I started with lonely-hearts ads. You didn’t even get to see a photo. There was the man who was six inches shorter than he said he was. There was the man who smelled of fish. There was the man with very unfortunate buck teeth. When I saw him, my heart sank, but I thought I had better at least stay for a coffee. When I told him I had to go, he shouted that I was “a cunt” and left me to pay the bill.

Next there was the dating agency. And then there was the internet – a whole new world of men who lived in Swindon and worked in IT. They all liked nothing more, according to their profiles, than to relax with a glass of wine by a roaring fire. What they weren’t so great at was conversation. As I’m a journalist, I’m good at asking questions, so I’d spend our so-called date asking lots of polite questions and sometimes went home wondering if they had learned a single thing about me. 

When I started internet dating, it felt like a shameful thing to do. Couples who made it beyond a few dates lied about how they met. I would log on – log on! Even the language now seems prehistoric – after a day at work and find another bunch of peculiar men lurking in my inbox. This was before smartphones, and you couldn’t just swipe left.

I tried. I really, really tried. One man wooed me with chocolates and flowers and then ran away. Some months later, he did the whole thing all over again. But really, we were all doing the same thing all the time. We were looking for love and failing to find it. 

We had joined a giant sweetshop, one where everyone takes a bite, or perhaps a few bites, and then moves on to something sweeter.

Choice, as any psychologist will tell you, does interesting things to the brain. Suddenly, you’re catapulted from meeting the odd single man at the odd party to a world where you could literally click on options all day. The cycle is set up: the search. The surge of hope. The disappointment. It’s exciting and exhausting. 

It’s like going on an endless round of job interviews, but one where no one’s clear if there’s actually a job. And it can make you feel even more lonely. A packed diary is not the same as a lovely time. All that effort, but you’re still waking up on Sunday morning alone.

I did internet dating on and off, but mostly off, for nearly 13 years. In that time, the process changed. For a start, the stigma has gone. We’re nearly at the point where it’s the most common way for couples to meet. The algorithms have got so much better that a new study has shown that couples who meet and marry through internet dating are slightly happier than those who don’t. The robots, in other words, might give us a better chance of happiness in a relationship than locked eyes across a crowded room. 

Most of us look for love because we don’t want to be on our own. Britain, according to a survey conducted by BBC Radio 4 in collaboration with Wellcome Collection, is one of the loneliest countries in the world. We have a bigger pool of people to meet and engage with than ever before, but that huge pool isn’t making us feel less alone. 

Is internet dating the answer? Well, no. Friends are the answer, or part of it. Real friends you see in real life. Communities where you give and you get are also part of it. And work too, feeling that you’re contributing something to the world – as well, of course, as paying your bills. One relationship can’t be the answer to everything. 

Internet dating may have given us more options, but it hasn’t taught us how to have relationships. It has set us free to state what we want, but not to think about what we might give. It has brought the most intimate relationships of our lives into a marketplace, but one that can leave us feeling that nothing is quite good enough.

In my years of internet dating, I learned to recognise the warning signs on profiles. If someone has a giant shopping list, you’re probably not going to have a very relaxing time. I learned that there’s no point in long email exchanges before you meet. You know nothing until you meet. I learned to keep first dates short. And I learned that you need to keep hopeful, keep trying, keep listening and keep learning, but that it also helps if you can turn your biggest disasters into a good story with a close friend over a nice glass of wine.

Finally, I learned that it’s sometimes worth giving someone a second chance. Reader, I did, and he has just moved in. 

Christina Patterson is a British journalist who has written for the Guardian, the Independent, the Sunday Times, Spectator and many other publications. Her book ‘The Art of Not Falling Apart’ includes stories about people she’s interviewed as well as about her own life, and was published in 2018.

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Christina Patterson

@queenchristina_

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The restaurant

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The Ladies of Llangollen

The 18th-century romantic friendship between two women that managed to avoid scandal.

Discover more about sexual behaviours and customs through our collections.

The packed diary of an internet dater doesn’t necessarily denote fun, companionship and love. Find out what Christina Patterson learned on her internet-dating odyssey.

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The loneliness epidemic

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