Camelot

[osprey_archer]

I stayed in Camelot in few nights back. Not the Camelot of legend, but a house that my high school friend Emma rented with her four best college friends. Over the year they've had a murder mystery dinner, and Disney Princess movie marathons, and hours upon hours fencing literary references across cups of tea and endless games of Settlers of Catan.

I spent most of my solitary year in Minnesota viewing Camelot as a shining beacon of togetherness and doing my very very best not to envy Emma for it.

So when, near the end of last week's Arthurian sojourn, one of Emma's college friends commented (apropos of Emma), “She was lonely earlier this year” - I nearly fell off the couch.

“But she had the four of you!" I cried, incredulously. "She was living with the four of you!” (In a house that I had hitherto looked on through the golden, glowing haze appropriate to a promised land!)

“Well, yeah,” he said. “But she didn’t have a lot of friends outside of Camelot - close enough to hang out with, I mean.”

Because if you left out that desideratum, I'm pretty sure that in counting Emma's friends, you would run out of fingers and toes.

How many friends do we need so as not to feel lonely?

Like Emma, I’ve spent a lot of time being lonely with no real reason for it. One half of my journal from fifth and sixth grade consists of complaints that I was so lonely and didn't have a best friend; the other half is all hijinks and thoughtful chats with my friends. (It’s pretty clear, in fact, that one girl thought we were best friends, but I didn’t notice because she wasn’t terribly bright and therefore I found her confidences tiresome. *headdesk*)

And I continued to feel lonely in high school, and also in college, but I always figured this was just me: my peculiar genius for loneliness at work.

But it seems lately that loneliness is more common than that, which is in one sense rather cheering – we’re all lonely together! And therefore not alone! – but also incredibly sad. I loved the halcyon glow of Camelot. I don’t want that to be just an illusion.

Comments

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

I think part of loneliness is aloneness. It's not a question of how often you're surrounded by other people; it's a question of how well your emotional needs are being met. Whether you feel seen, heard, valued; whether you feel you have a participatory stake in the world around you. Whether you attribute the solid fact of being alone to an internal characteristic ("Nobody likes me") and whether it signifies something good or bad.

We need as many friends as it takes to feel we belong.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

goldjadeocean has a good point, I think. If what a person craves is a certain sort of soul mate, then she can be lonely even in the presence of cheerful, well-liked friends...

But that doesn't make the golden glow of Camelot not real. *You* in that situation might feel differently from Emma, and it sounds as if even Emma only recently has felt lonely.

It is true, too, though, that the reality of something lived day-to-day is probably less golden than that thing seen at a distance. Like rainbows and things...

[ladyherenya]

Your last paragraph really resonated with me.


For me, loneliness has been less about how many friends I have and more about how often I see (or talk to) those friends. Hence there have been times when I've struggled with loneliness, and times when I haven't... and I continue to hope that I'll find 'Camelot' again.

[artemis_wandering]

I'm very inclined to agree with goldjadeocean. For me, I'm often lonely because even when I'm surrounded by people, I have always lacked the quintissential BFF we are presented with in books and movies. I've had friends I considered BFFs, but most have not considered me that way. And so it's been an unstable and unequal friendship that leaves me feeling lonely when all my friends are out with their other friends and I am left alone, instead of with my own special friend. And even if I'm out with my friends, knowing I don't have one person who will get all my jokes or that I can tell everything to, that makes me feel lonely.

And I think Camelot probably means different things to different people. And while I would say it's real, I would also say it's fleeting. Eventually, girls (people, really) pull away from each other as they get older and have different lives and meet significant others and have kids and that's where their attention goes. I was actually just reading a NYTimes piece that talked about how hard it is for adults to make the true life-long friends they made in college. And the other day I was watching a bromance movie with a married friend and I was joking that it was an actual romance because no men truly acted like that with their male friends and she stated that her husband (also a friend) often feels lonely and sad because he doesn't have true friendship like that and he wishes it did - which reminds me of myself and how I view female friendships in the media.

So yes, we are indeed all alone, all together. The problem is that life gets in the way and we're often not able to bond over the mutual aloneness we feel.

[bogwitch64.livejournal.com]

For me, loneliness only happens when I'm bereft of like-minded people. I don't mean people who share all my likes and dislikes, but people with whom I can share moments, thoughts, dreams and sorrows without fear of being boring or laughed at.

Truly, one good friend is all one needs, IMO. Lots of ok friends just don't cut it. Maybe THAT is what your friend is longing for.

[entwashian.livejournal.com]

It probably depends a lot on a person's natural temperament, too. A group that might not be nearly enough for an extroverted person might be too much for an introverted person.