We All Need to be Loved

Go onto ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever and ask the robot about the physiological effects of loneliness. You’ll get a laundry list of ailments, from heart disease to cancer and everything in between, not to mention psychic problems such as substance abuse and even suicide. Being alone is tough on people.

One thing I’ve come to realize as I’ve gotten older is how incredibly freaking lucky I am to have found my soulmate at the age of fifteen (!!!) and that we’ve been together pretty much continuously since the late 80s. Do you realize how insane that is? To find the girl of your dreams as a teenager and to have been married for coming up on 28 years? A one-in-a-million shot. Consequently, I have never been alone. Actually, I’m alone right now, for almost two weeks, as my wife is doing some work overseas, and I also left her in the lurch recently when I went to Mississippi, but I will never have that experience that many people have, in Tinder/Bumble hell, trying to figure out whether I should settle for fat chicks or just become a Unabomber recluse with lichens growing under my armpits, descending into a self-destructive pattern of Doordash and self-abuse. I hope I will never have that experience.

I am not the first person to observe that there is an epidemic of loneliness these days, and a lot of it is because of the stupid phone and social media and dating app culture. The personal connections we do make consist of a sub-seven-minute encounter followed by a lifetime of spiritual dis-ease. And as for the intervening interminable time periods in between said encounters, there is little but longing and despondence without end. And as for the relationships that are consummated, many of them are flawed from the outset. Hard to believe that the best decision I ever made in my entire life was to kiss that long-haired brunette on July 4^th, 1989.

Loneliness is soul-crushing. You’ve seen the chart of how people meet nowadays—school, church, bars, all plummeting towards zero, the dating apps skyrocketing towards 100%. I don’t know if you’ve ever done any reading on the anthropology of online dating, but it is a winner-take-all system, just like everything else on the internet. Basically, all women swipe right on the top 10% of guys in terms of looks. The guys are not picky and will swipe right on pretty much anyone. A caste system develops where the good-looking guys hog all the dates, and 90% of guys are completely shut out. And if you are short? Forget about it. Heightism is a real thing, and women are completely out in the open about it, discriminating indiscriminately against guys under six feet tall. So unless you are very clever in your profile (I am the man from Nantucket), if you are five-foot-nine, you have no shot. Alcoholism and depression is the result, and obviously, you’re not going to get any dates as a depressed alcoholic. A downward spiral ensues.

We all need to be loved. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs goes like this:

1. Physiological needs

2. Safety needs

3. Love and belonging

4. Esteem

5. Self-actualization

I have a quarrel with this. We need love more than food. We need love more than a house. If you are loved, you can go hungry and live in a tent. In our modern society, our physiological needs and safety needs are met, but the vast majority of people never get to experience love and belonging, and therefore, they will never make it to esteem and self-actualization. Pretty much everything I write about on this blog has to do with esteem or self-actualization, but love and belonging supersede. You want to know something even more depressing? My cats have love and belonging, and most people don’t.

It is a fact that married men financially outperform unmarried men, and the margin is not small. There is no reason for this to happen—except for spiritual and psychological reasons. Because married men experience love and belonging, they can move onto self-actualization. It’s not merely a matter of division of labor and household chores. If you are loved, and you know that you are loved, you have the space in your heart to focus on bigger, more important things. If you are alone, with your Doordash and self-abuse, you are not thinking about that promotion or raise. Your heart aches with emptiness and despair. Now, there is a certain subset of people who actually like being alone. I think there is asymmetry in my own relationship—I need my wife more than she needs me. She has wine and cats if I’m not around.

I am, of course, writing this from the male perspective. And while loneliness is not exclusively a male phenomenon, the truth of the matter is that if women are alone, it is usually by choice. And then there are the people who are picky, waiting for that perfect person to come along. There is a bit of game theory in relationships—what I have is good, but I’m looking over your shoulder at someone new. And if you kiss too many frogs, you are a frog-kisser. To the extent that people are still getting married, they are doing it later and later. There are economic reasons for this, but this is also a feature of the retarded dating apps, and how laborious and time-consuming it is to find the right person. I have a friend, a contemporary of mine, who is coming off a divorce and sowing his royal oats, and I asked him if he was using the dating apps. No, he said, the dating apps are not for people like you and me. The implication being that the dating apps are not for rich people, who should have no problem finding someone to spend time with. The utter absurdity of a centimillionaire on Bumble—it would never happen. I figure if I ever got divorced, I’d just get outcall masseuses until I found someone to settle down with. Kidding, of course.

We have not yet talked about divorce, which can be devastating and deadly, and I think we can all agree that men are not fairly treated by the legal system. Maybe the opposite was true in the 1970s, but it is no longer true today. The stories I have heard. It used to be that she takes half—I’ve heard instances where she takes all, and then not only are you alone, childless, and homeless, but also destitute. And damaged goods. I think divorce is the number two stressor on the list, only behind death. This ramps up the pressure on the dating process, especially for men, because you have to be pretty damn sure that this woman isn’t going to remorselessly clean you out at some point in the future. You have to be pretty damn sure that the marriage will not fail. This sort of thing used to be civilized. The vast majority of the time, the courts hold women completely blameless in divorce proceedings. And most of the time, it doesn’t even matter, if you live in a no-fault state. My wife and I have a tacit agreement that if we ever part amicably, we take our respective bank accounts and assets and go our separate ways, but it’s hard to think of a scenario where we would part if we were amicable. Therefore, I’m not getting any outcall masseuses. I have to mind my Ps and Qs.

If you have someone, hold onto them. If the relationship is flawed, fix it. By the way, the statistics on earnings potential do not distinguish between good and bad marriages. Men in bad marriages also outperform single men financially. But that is not the reason to stay married. The reason to stay married is because everyone needs to be loved, more than money, more than fitness, more than food—more than anything. If you get into bed at night with your spouse and you spoon and snuggle, you are in the top one percent. Don’t fuck it up.