Divorced. The children have left home. If the phone rings, it's only a call centre... I admit it, I'm lonely

Arriving home from work, the lamp on a timer that has welcomed me back through the gloom of the past few months, burns, unnecessarily, in the sunny kitchen.
I’m reading a thriller, which is living up to its name. I sit down, still in my work clothes, and return eagerly to chapter three.

Two hours later, I put the book down and realise it’s dark. The lamp provides the only pool of light in an otherwise pitch-black house.
It’s also quiet, deathly quiet, without even the hum of the central heating or the swoosh of the washing machine to break the silence.
The mobile phone on the table beside me is silent. It hasn’t rung or beeped probably since yesterday, maybe the day before.
No calls, no emails, no texts, no Facebook notifications, no tweets, and there’s nothing blinking on the answering machine because no one has rung my landline since December, except people in call centres who can’t pronounce my name.

 

Novelist Marion McGilvary has opened up about how lonely an empty house can feel

All these methods of communication, and yet no one is communicating with me.

There was a time when coming back to an empty house would fill me with pleasure. I’d luxuriate in the extra, unexpected bonus of having the place to myself, and happily breathe in the peace and quiet.
But now, with the children grown, gone or not yet home from college, it’s just lonely.

There, I’ve said it: I’m lonely.

We’re all so popular now, so connected. Social networking is the buzzword.
We have all these new verbs: we blog, we Skype and tweet our thoughts in fewer than 140 characters.
We post our status on Facebook and talk and surf constantly on our mobiles, so that the trains or buses in the evening are a sea of heads, all bowed as though in prayer, worshipping their BlackBerries and iPhones, tap, tap, tap — the rosary of the text message.

It’s a mark of shame not to have any friends, real or virtual, no followers, not to be linked in to everyone you ever met for five minutes — once — at a party in 1974.

So finding yourself at home, alone, with only 30 followers on Twitter, four of whom are the same person, a silent phone and no one you care to call must mean there’s something wrong with you.
You’re unpopular, friendless, abandoned, alone. Lonely.
Surely somewhere there’s a party you should be at, a dinner you should be invited to, a partner who should be partnering you, a family who should be missing you?

Marion McGilvary says too much 'me time' leaves her feeling lonely

In my case, I have four children and my solitude is only temporary. Soon my newly graduated son and student daughter will arrive to re-colonise their bedrooms.
For the next year or two, my semi-adult offspring will continue to be reluctant, economic refugees in the house.
Even grown-up children need their parents — but they just need them to be alive. They don’t need them in the same room.
They want you to be uncomplainingly happy somewhere over there. In the background, out of the way.
And only to step forward when needed. They don’t want you to tag them on Facebook. This is as it should be.
You raise them to be confident, caring, well-adjusted, independent adults with rich, fulfilled lives and friends of their own.
You can’t whine about being lonely if they then do just that. If mine were still clinging to me for company, I would feel I had failed them.
Like, surely, I have failed at this popularity contest called life if I’m lonely; as, apart from Eleanor Rigby, the elderly and the recently bereaved, apparently I’m the only one who feels this way.
It’s not as though I am unfulfilled. I’m a novelist with a convivial job in a publishing company. My colleagues are sociable and fun.
‘Can’t you call someone from work?’ my former husband urged recently, when a back injury transformed me from able to disabled in the course of a day, and I realised, with horror, that he was one of the few people in my support system I could call on for help.