The Lonely Hunter, page 28
Gay marriage has only been legal on a federal level in the United States since 2015. Younger gay couples might choose to marry, but in 2010, 64 percent of LGBTQ+ baby boomers said they had a chosen family, according to a survey from the MetLife Mature Market Institute. Chosen families remain a stabilizing and supportive part of queer culture, and they’ve exerted a powerful influence on how families in general are categorized in the United States. Chosen families have been officially recognized in New York, L.A., and Chicago; members can now use paid time off if those families need care. In 2015, President Barack Obama signed an executive order guaranteeing federal contractors paid sick leave to care for any family members of “blood or affinity whose close association with the employee is the equivalent of a family relationship.” Similar local laws have arrived in Austin, Texas; Rhode Island; New Jersey; Arizona; and Cook County, Illinois, the county that contains Chicago.
Despite these expansions, for a lot of couples, getting married is the most streamlined way to have their union recognized by the state, and the most familiar framework for protecting financial assets and property, making it easier for courts to know what to do should that marriage end in divorce. That leaves people without a marriage certificate in a difficult position—including people who aren’t romantically involved but who have built a life together.
The nonprofit Unmarried Equality, which advocates for the rights of unmarried people, suggests on their website that people throw parties to celebrate their friendships—for your BFF, or for an entire friend group. But, Unmarried Equality warns, these events do not “involve laws or government agencies in any way.”
What if friendship commitments were recognized by the state, or the benefits of legally recognized chosen families were extended? How might that change the statistics about, for example, who can expect elder care? In 2017, Hawaii enacted Kupuna Care, a stipend offered to anyone providing care to an older adult, regardless of family ties. I know of a commune on Staten Island formed in the seventies where members are aging out, unable to maintain their structure without younger members entering to help maintain and run the household. What if New York State provided younger families with a stipend to come in and provide care? It would mean stabilized housing and a continuation of a communal living situation that had benefited dozens of people over the years.
When I lived in a communal home in my midtwenties, I had seriously discussed with some of my roommates what it would be like to raise children together. It was largely a hypothetical, but one that sounded much more possible to me than raising a child with one other person who was, additionally, my committed romantic partner. Most modern jurisprudence on child guardianship is dictated by the “rule of two,” meaning only two people are allowed to be legal parents of a child—generally the person who gives birth and the person they are married to or whose name is on the birth certificate, or the two legal parents in an adoption. With the complicated nature of conception, birth, and family relationships, it has begun to be recognized that in some cases more than two people should legally retain the right of parental guardianship. Most notably, in 2013, California passed SB-274, a bill allowing that in very rare instances, three or more adults could be legal parents to a child. Any state could change their rules around parental rights and not delineate so firmly who matters in a child’s life.
Beyond the scope of family life, we could make a bigger leap to the other ways people connect with and support each other in the places they live. How can we create the financial security needed to put down roots? If you want to alleviate loneliness, join a union. Worker protections mean higher wages and more stability, leading to stronger communities. Better yet, support worker-owned co-ops, so employment in a town or city isn’t contingent on corporations and monopolies based far from home. The work week could be shorter, the minimum wage far higher. Changing how work figures in our lives could accommodate lifestyles that center family and socialization over survival.
Or we can talk about how urban planning can alleviate loneliness. Instead of cordoning off the elderly in distant communities, they could be integrated into family neighborhoods. We could invest in crumbling infrastructure, especially public transit services, making it easier for people to socialize, get to work, attend events outside of their work life. Accessible transportation services for the disabled could remove them from the default state of exclusion that’s so institutionalized by abled society. We could have town squares that give people a place to gather instead of rows of unwalkable streets far from city centers. We could have tenant unions fighting for affordable rents or promoting co-operatives, instead of a housing crisis and empty buildings.
Universal healthcare, which both Traister and DePaulo mention, would alleviate loneliness. Traister mentions family-planning services like IVF, but that’s just one aspect of how guaranteed healthcare would support lonely people living untraditional lifestyles. The studies by Eric Klinenberg on eldercare and Julianne Holt-Lunstad on the loneliness epidemic all emphasize that people experiencing social isolation are often those who are homebound because of health issues, especially as they age. In the United States, many people are pushed into vast amounts of debt by an accident or illness. The stress of damaged physical health and financial ruin isolates people. Reliable mental health services, especially therapy, could reduce a sense of isolation. Loneliness is called an epidemic, and yet we avoid connecting the dots when it comes to the cost and scope of healthcare.
We could abolish punitive systems that create “loneliness” as the least of their ills, from the racist prison-industrial complex to the violently xenophobic U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Both break up families, with the burden falling disproportionately on Black, Latino, and Indigenous people. During the pandemic, news outlets reported that hand sanitizer produced in New York State was being made by inmates at their Great Meadow Correctional Facility, even as coronavirus ravaged prisons where few had access to hand sanitizer themselves. The situation was the perfect encapsulation of how people are dehumanized and disenfranchised by the prison-industrial complex, then expected to remain out of sight and suffer. Even if it were true that prisons function as a way to reform character or extract “debts to society” (they don’t), there could be no excuse for the stigma and separation that can dog a formerly incarcerated person the rest of their life.
In the summer of 2020, when protests over the murder of George Floyd by officer Derek Chauvin began, it wasn’t only about racist police violence. It was about how the pandemic was already killing Black people at a far higher rate than white people in the United States. It was about racial justice in healthcare, housing, and the workplace, and the need for meaningful reparations. Many of the issues white people are just becoming aware of under the extremity of a pandemic have been suffered by Black and Indigenous people since the United States was colonized. COVID-19 put a lid on a pot that was already simmering. All the justified rage and pain boiled over.
Protesting was one of the few group activities of 2020, and it felt meaningful to participate. Prison abolition and defunding the police had been relatively fringe proposals, as activist for prison abolition Mariame Kaba says in an essay from her 2021 book, We Do This ’Til We Free Us. The essay was originally published in 2014, and addresses the protests in Ferguson in response to the murder of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson, and the ensuing proposals for police reform.
“Advocates call for reforms suggesting that the current practices and systems are ‘broken’ and/or unjust. There is a (racist) backlash by people who support the police. A very few people whisper that the essential nature of policing is oppressive and is not susceptible to any reforms, thus only abolition is realistic. These people are considered heretics by most. I’ve spent years participating in one way or another in this cycle.”
According to Kaba, only six years ago, abolishing the police was a proposal from “heretics.” It became a common phrase on protest signs across the country in the summer of 2020. It’s a testament to the speed with which ideas can become mainstream when evidence of their validity mounts—and to the widespread recognition that community health is more underfunded every year as the police become more militarized. Even people sensitive to the words “defund the police” were likely to understand “fund education, fund healthcare, fund community centers,” and that money is better spent on these things than policing.
“Everything worthwhile is done with other people,” Kaba says in her book, as she’s interviewed by sociologist Eve L. Ewing. That’s the framework within which she approaches activism and organizing, and I find myself thinking it often since I read the words.
To implement even a few of the changes above would require a huge shift in political power. We’d need representatives who push to tax the ultrawealthy, and put those taxes back into the communities that prop them up. Change like this requires a huge shift in thinking, in how we see one another and what we think we owe one another.
Each of these issues is limitless, and the movements based around them are interconnected. Mentioning them seems far outside the scope of my personal story, but as the pandemic unfolded, it became more and more ridiculous not to mention them. I’ve realized that ignoring the much bigger reasons why people are isolated denies that they are often purposefully isolated. Together, we could change so much, but not if we think we’re alone in loneliness, spending all our time scrambling to find a way out by ourselves.
We are all grappling with ways to break out of the narrow story we’re told about what’s possible, either by choice or necessity. One person can’t alleviate every issue that intersects with the “loneliness epidemic,” but these are the suggestions I’ve come up with for a very small start: if you’re lonely, pick one thing you can do to make the world a more just place and find the other people trying to do the same. Pick one thing you can do that separates you from other people’s humanity and refuse to do that thing. And pick one thing you think is wrong with you that justifies your loneliness and ask, “Who gains power from me believing this about myself?”
The deepest love has to include the work of solidarity: sometimes messy, boring, painful, sometimes violent and frightening. It’s a love that goes beyond the sensations of body and mind, beyond the euphoria of romance, past the doorstep of my home. The capacity to love and to let it encompass more instead of less is the only thing that has ever made me feel less lonely.
DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MY GRANDMOTHER,
CARMEN AQUILONE, AND THE PRESENCE OF
MY MOTHER, PAMELA ENZ
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I must thank the people who have been most key in shaping my psyche, for better or worse, in particular my mother, my grandparents, my dad, and my friends, especially the ones who appear in this story.
This book would absolutely not exist without Susan Golomb. I don’t think anyone else has ever before taken the kind of chance she did on me, and it’s really a big deal and a gift I’ll value always. Thank you also to Mariah Stovall for her notes and time invested in corralling my thoughts when they were becoming a proposal.
Thank you to my editor, Whitney Frick, who supported and guided me throughout this process, and gave my writing direction whenever it went astray. I have been so lucky to be in your care.
There are a bunch of people who helped me who might not even remember doing so, but I do: Malin von Euler-Hogan, Beth Newell, Kelsey Murphy, and Rosalie Knecht answered all my emails when it would have been very easy to ignore them. Thank you! You never know when answering an email might change someone’s life.
Thank you to the team at The Dial Press and Random House, including Rose Fox, Avideh Bashirrad, Debbie Aroff, Jessalyn Foggy, Karen Fink, Luke Epplin, Mimi Lipson, Donna Cheng, and Grace Han. Thank you so much to Sarah Braybrooke at Scribe and her team. Thank you to the staff at Jezebel, who let me write essays people would actually see.
And finally, thank you to the people whom I’ve fallen in love with, especially when it was against my better judgment. You know who you are.
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