Of
Monkeys, Of Towers and Naturally of Chocolate: National Loneliness Day
By
Robin Ford Wallace
I am rushing this
piece out before Valentine’s Day to make sure we have time for a straight
up-down vote on abolishing the whole thing.
But don’t panic,
merchants! What I had in mind was
replacing the national romance-and-chocolate day with a universal
self-pity-and-chocolate day. You’d sell
as many Godivas as ever, possibly more.
Not everybody has somebody to buy candy for, or somebody to buy it for
them; but the rest of us are sorry enough for ourselves to empty your shelves
so enough with the gift-wrapped hearts already! Just cram the goods into plain brown wrappers and let’s cut out
the middleman.
The idea for the
new holiday – shall we call it National Loneliness Day? – came about last
February, when thanks to the magic of Facebook I realized Valentine’s Day makes
practically everybody suicidal.
It started on the
Monday of V-week, when a single male friend on Facebook posted: “Since Valentine’s falls on Friday this
year, I have the whole week to think about not having a girlfriend, or even a
date.”
Then on V-day
evening came a post from a female FOF who had been what FB calls “in a
relationship” since before FB, in fact possibly before ZIP codes. “I understand him not getting me candy,” she
wrote. “He’s waiting until tomorrow
when it goes down to half-price. But
maybe a few flowers he could have brought...”
As for me, I was
spending the big date night with the tall, dark and handsome man of my dreams –
who was deeply submerged in his own.
Wrapped in the arms of Morpheus, not mine, his hot lips pressed into the
sofa cushions, TD&H was sleeping off his carb-heavy dinner, which we’d
eaten out not because it was Valentine’s Day but because it was Friday; and
which had been accompanied not by red foil crinkling off heart-shaped boxes but
by red condiments oozing off french fries; and which had been followed not by
drinks and dancing but by couch and newspaper; and which had climaxed in
snores.
So Valentine’s Day
was making me feel frowsy and pathetic, just as it had ever since the blush
wore off the rose, roughly around the Middle Pleistocene (I’ve been “in a
relationship” since before dinosaurs).
But this year, thanks to FB, I realized I was not alone.
Yes, maybe there
were still lovers experiencing Great Romance, but if so they were holed up
making out somewhere I couldn’t see them.
What I did see were singles not swinging but moping around wishing they
had a love life, unaware that we LTR participants were eaten with envy for what
we imagined they had that we didn’t, which is to say: a love life. We were all a bunch of slobbering
losers!
Which made me feel
much better.
Why? I don’t think it’s so much that misery loves
company as that the worst part of being unhappy is the loneliness. You imagine that everyone else is frolicking
around having a wonderful time while you’re the only one too stupid to find the
fulfillment button, or too unpopular for anyone to tell you where it is.
The great upside of
the Cyber Age is disproving this.
Google anything you like – “jumping cursor”; “uncontrollable
flatulence”; “Will anyone ever love me?” – and you’ll see that others have the
same problem.
Not that these
truths weren’t out there long before the Internet; they were just less
evident. I heard an NPR report about a
clever college orientation for incoming freshmen. The presentation in no way suggested that the freshmen themselves
felt lonely, or suggested remedies. It
merely noted that in the past other students had reported feeling especially
miserable during this period because they remained alone and left out while
they imagined others around them were “finding their tribe.” After the orientation, participants seemed
much happier, presumably simply because they now knew they weren’t the only
pariahs.
I went through the
pariah phase myself at that age and it was the pits, but about the unhappiest
I’ve ever been was later in life when I felt betrayed by someone I’d loved and
trusted. Betrayal is another of the
lonely pains – you think you must be the most genetically inferior pile of
steaming excrement in the universe, because even the people you thought loved
you most now hate your guts like everybody else.
While
I was suffering through that, I happened to be talking to a lawyer about
something unrelated when he grumbled about his clients: “I don’t mind helping them procure a
divorce, that’s my job; but I don’t understand why they have to complain to me
every time the ex fails to get the kid home by six.”
Well,
I understood why! It was because the
person they’d always cried to when the world treated them unfairly was now the
person making them cry, that’s why.
Where else were they to turn?
The arms they’d relied on for comfort were currently wrapped around some
Waffle House waitress to whom the louse was ratting out their deepest secrets.
But
even as I had these bitter thoughts came a new sense of ease, as I realized the
very fact that the divorce lawyer was doing a booming business meant I was not
the only one who had been betrayed. It
seemed about as common as hangnails.
Thinking about it
later, I also realized how redundant it is to say “betrayed by someone I loved
and trusted.” You cannot be betrayed by
anybody else. Being wronged by a
stranger falls among your garden-variety “slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune” as opposed to your “most unkindest cuts.” It takes someone you trust to watch your back to stab it.
So really, the
very existence of the word “betrayal” is a pretty good indicator how many
people have reeled through history with that same whiny, amputated feeling I
had. Like I said, such a bunch of
pathetic no-hopers we are! But there is
comfort in that word “we.”
Deepak Chopra in
one of his books referred to the mind in the body as a monkey in a tower,
sometimes happy and fulfilled and sometimes tormented by the loneliness of its
isolation. So when I think of humanity,
what I see is millions and millions of towers stretching into the clouds as far
as the eye can see, each with a little monkey face peering anxiously out the
window. What I would like to see with
my proposed new holiday is each of those monkeys contemplatively nibbling a
chocolate truffle.
The idea in
replacing Valentine’s Day with National Loneliness Day is not to denigrate
romantic love, which can in fact sometimes function as a metaphorical catwalk
among the monkey towers. But catwalks
crumble and love as often as not leads to yet more misery and heartbreak, to
say nothing of country music.
No, the purpose of
NLD is to assure each monkey in each tower that other monkeys are out there in
similar towers suffering similar torments.
I would say in fact that the purpose is to celebrate the human
condition, except by this point I am way too tangled up in these damn monkeys.
Anyway, fellow
monkeys, here is the message of National Loneliness Day: Take comfort, for we are all alone in the
universe –
Together.
END
