How the quiet keeps itself going

Up to now I've written as if the wait were a series of separate decisions, made name by name. It doesn't stay that way. When the wait has gone on long enough with enough people, it changes the person doing the waiting, and the change makes the next first move harder. This chapter is about that loop. I think it's the most important thing in the book to understand.

The research comes mainly from John Cacioppo and Louise Hawkley, who spent many years studying loneliness. They're careful to define it. Loneliness, in their words, is not simply being alone. It's perceived isolation, the feeling that your connections fall short of what you need. You can have it in a crowd and lack it in a lighthouse.

Their central finding is that loneliness alters how people process the social world. In their reviews they report that feeling isolated heightens vigilance for social threat. A lonely person becomes quicker to notice signs of rejection and more likely to read an ambiguous signal as a bad one. They describe biases in attention and memory, and a tendency to expect poor treatment and then find confirmation of it. They call the result self-protective and paradoxically self-defeating. It makes a rough kind of sense. If you feel you're outside the group, it pays to be alert to hostility. But the alertness makes you warier, and other people respond to wariness by keeping their own distance. That confirms the expectation, and the loop closes.

You can see how this joins up with the earlier chapters. Every misreading described there gets stronger as the quiet deepens. After a sociable month, a friend's slow reply looks like a busy friend. After three months of not seeing anyone, the same slow reply looks like proof. The brisk message that chapter 7 said to take at face value becomes impossible to take at face value. The tally gets more precise and more bitter. "Nobody ever rings me" starts to feel like an observed fact about the world, when it's partly a result of your own silence, which has been matched by theirs.

I should be careful not to borrow the wrong model here. This isn't like a drug, and nothing is being craved. But there's a structural likeness worth pointing out. Each time you pass the name and don't get in touch, you're spared a small discomfort, the little dread of composing the message and awaiting the reply. That relief is real and immediate. And each time, the thing causing the dread gets a little stronger. The gap is longer, the quiet is deeper and you're more vigilant. So the habit relieves, moment by moment, a discomfort that it's building up over months.

There's a hopeful side to this, and it comes from research on what helps. Christopher Masi, working with Hawkley and Cacioppo and another colleague, pooled the studies of interventions meant to reduce loneliness. These fell into four kinds. Some taught social skills, some provided social support, some increased opportunities for contact, and some addressed what the authors call maladaptive social cognition, meaning the habits of thought I've been describing. Among the properly randomised studies, the last kind was the most successful.

I find that encouraging, for two reasons. The first is that it says the usual problem isn't a lack of skill. People who wait tend to believe they're bad at friendship. The evidence points elsewhere. They're mostly fine at it, and they've been misreading the signals. The second is that thoughts can be checked against facts, and that's what this book has been doing since chapter 3.

The quiet also has a way of hiding itself, which the subtitle calls settling in as normal. You adjust. The empty weekend stops registering as empty. You build a life that works around it, with box sets, long walks and a good relationship with the radio. You begin to describe yourself differently. "I'm quite a private person." "I've never needed many people." That may be true of you, and the next chapter takes it seriously. But it's also what the loop would say if it could speak. The best test I know is the pang. If you still feel it when you pass the name in the list, then the quiet is a habit that has gone on long enough to look like your nature.

One more fact, given once and without drama. Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues pooled the studies that followed people over years. Loneliness, social isolation and living alone each went with a higher risk of early death, by roughly a quarter to a third. The authors describe that as comparable with well-established risk factors. These are observational studies, and ill health can cause isolation as well as the other way round. I don't mention it to frighten you. I mention it because people who wait often think of their social life as a luxury, the thing you see to once everything important is done. The evidence is that it belongs with the important things.