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We are all somewhat lonely. Even the sociable ones choose to hide their weird, surprising, awful thoughts in the deepest parts of their minds.
Given a choice between honesty and acceptance, it's understandable that many choose to be accepted by others rather than be completely honest about what they want. We are lonely for 2 reasons:
The mathematical problem is that we will rarely get to meet people who share all deepest desires and opinions.
The psychological problem is that we can never know people completely, so there will be some behaviour that surprises us, which causes us to lose trust in that person.
📐 The Mathematical Problem
We are lonely because there are very few people that think like us. We were all brought up in different families, and in different environments.
Even for the few that might begin to understand us, it is very unlikely that we will ever meet. We might have walked past them on the street, or have briefly read their comments on social media (to which we agree so much that we pushed the like button). And that might be all the interaction that two kindred spirits will ever have with each other.
Even our significant others have to spend a lot of energy to listen and understand us. It is not easy for them to enter into our world of experiences and see things the way we do.
Heck, even we can't understand ourselves completely. How many times have we done something random and someone asks us "why did you do that?", and we just respond with "...I don't know". We often live our lives on autopilot, and not living with intention.
🤔 The Psychological Problem
The 2nd problem is psychological. Humans are extremely complex psychological beings, our psychological world is much larger than we think. We experience things consciously and subconsciously, and of course we can't freely access our subconscious mind.
And even for the things we are consciously experiencing, a lot of times we just can't quite express it in words. We feel that sort of spine chill when we listen to beautiful music, look at gorgeous art, or just staring up at the high ceiling of a grand cathedral. We know we are feeling something, but we just can't quite put it in words.
Since it is sort of hopeless to try to understand ourselves completely, trying to understand another person deeply is even more hopeless.
🔍 Filtering the world
The problem with psychology is that we can only experience the world only after filtering it through our minds. There is nothing that we can know for certain (objective truth), there is only things that we think are true (subjective truths). This was the one of the conclusions that the French philosopher René Descartes discovered.
We can only see a filtered version of the world through our limited senses. It's sort of like that riddle:
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?
It seems quite silly, of course the tree still makes a sound! But the truth is almost always not that simple. Objective truth is only one aspect of truth. We shouldn't ignore the aspect of subjective truth as well.
If a person is afraid of dogs, she will still be somewhat afraid of a cute and harmless dog. Even though we know objectively that the dog is harmless, we still shouldn't ignore her own subjective truth, and try to be a good friend and avoid bringing her near dogs.
The main point here is basically that we cannot know the world, we can only think we know about the world. Similarly, we cannot know our friends objectively, we can only think we know our friends.
😄 What Friendship Really Mean
We won't know for certain how our friend is like, or what he will do.
We can only think about our friends, we can't know for certain. In other words, our friendship only exist in our imagination, and of course, our imagination can be wrong. Even the famous German writer Goethe who supposedly had many friends, famously said:
No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else.’
Therefore, what it means to be in a friendship or relationship with someone, is that we can only trust that their patterns of behaviour now will be consistent with their patterns of behaviour in the future.
When these behaviours are predictable, everything is at peace. We are happy with them, and they are happy with us. We don't know everything about them, but we still trust them.
But when this pattern is suddenly broken, the trust will be lost, and everything breaks down. We begin to question everything about this person, everything is up for grabs. This is not an overstatement.
When our friends/partner betray us, we begin to question the present. The person standing in front of you suddenly becomes a stranger.
The seemingly stable future that we envisioned with them, suddenly crumbles.
Worse still, even our happy past with this person will not save us: "Is he even the same person as before, or was that all in my imagination?", or "Looking back now, the signs seem so obvious. How could I be this blind?"
Again, what it means to be in a friendship or relationship with someone, is that we can only trust that their patterns of behaviour now will be consistent with their patterns of behaviour in the future.
Conclusion & Solution
This is the tragedy of relationships. The mathematical problem is that we will rarely get to meet people who share all deepest desires and opinions. The psychological problem is that we can never know people completely, so there will be some behaviour that surprises us, which causes us to lose trust in that person.
The mathematical problem can be solved using the internet. Reddit just about has groups for everything we can imagine, bringing like minded people together from anywhere in the world.
The best solution for the psychological problem seems to be to just accept it. We might never know another person completely, but it is okay to be a good enough friend. It is good enough to know a person only partially (and we aren't bad friends for not knowing someone utterly and completely, like what romanticism would teach us).
Similarly, we will still feel somewhat lonely because we will not meet others like us, or that others will never understand us completely, but that's okay. We can form healthy friendships as long as we mildly enjoy each other's company, somewhat trust one another, and commit to helping them in times of need.
Never break the trust, or even attempt to "test the relationship".
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