Navigating Loneliness in the Month of Love
How to Boost Relationships, Stay Connected, and Learn to Enjoy Time With Yourself
Written By: Haley Moore
If you’ve been feeling lonely lately, this one’s for you. Social connection is so important to our health and well-being, and we all crave closeness to others at some time or another. If you’re tired of feeling lonely, you’re not alone!
Why Loneliness Is So Tough
Humans are social creatures. If we think about our cavepeople counterparts, loneliness makes a whole lot of sense. If you were living in prehistoric times, you needed people to stay alive. It was literally the difference between life and death if you had other people around you or were left by yourself. Although now we could theoretically live alone in the woods (but would still need tons of people to actually make this feasible!), our bodies still respond to loneliness like it is a matter of survival.
We actually feel physical pain when we feel lonely; it isn’t something you’re making up or blowing out of proportion. Loneliness is the main reason why people go to therapy and also increases our risk of early death! So here are some ways that you can navigate loneliness, especially in the ‘month of love’, whether you’re single or committed!
Enhance the Relationships You Do Have
Whether you’re feeling lonely because you’re on your own a lot or feeling lonely even when around other people, we want to give you a few tips to reconnect and build deeper relationships with the people you care about.
Identify Who You Want to Spend Time With
It can be easy when you’re lonely to spend time with people who are not filling you up. Maybe you say yes to a second date with someone you really aren’t interested in or make dinner plans with a friend who you really don’t get along with just to avoid being alone. These types of connections aren’t serving you, and are taking up time that would be better spent doing something you actually enjoy by yourself or with someone you do like being around. Think about the top three people in your life that give you energy that you would want to spend more time with if you could.
Reach Out & Plan Get-Togethers
Being the initiator is super vulnerable, and that is one of the main reasons why people drift apart even if nothing bad has gone on between them! Take this as your opportunity to be the brave one and reach out first. Think about those people you identified in step one. Ask them to grab a coffee, see a movie you’re both into, or even have a virtual catch up sometime soon. It’s always best if you give a few dates that you’re free to not start the back and forth conversation that goes nowhere (e.g. “Let’s grab a coffee!” “Yes, let’s do it!” and no plans were ever made..).
Establish a Routine
When you were a kid, you probably had a lot more friends than you do now. Why? Because you were around the same kids day-in and day-out. That’s it. Adult relationships, platonic or romantic, can be super hard to keep alive when we’re all so busy with living life. If you want to maintain a connection with someone special, it can help to make it a routine event. Maybe once each month you get that coffee, or have a video call, or go to a workout class, or meet up while your kids have a play date. Regularity truly makes our connections much deeper!
How to Enhance Your Relationship With Yourself
Relationships with other people are super important to help reduce our loneliness, because being around other people (that fill us up) makes us feel connected and special. An important thing to remember, however, is that you will always have a relationship with yourself. As other relationships come and go throughout your life, you remain constant. We can’t reiterate enough how vital it is to build a better relationship with yourself and how much this impacts everything else in your life (we love this topic so much that we’re actually planning a six-week course on self-love that you can join the waitlist for here!). In the meantime, here are some things we encourage you to consider doing with yourself:
Make You Feel Special
Let’s imagine for a moment that you were starting to date yourself. You’re trying to put your best foot forward to make your new romantic partner (yourself) feel special, wanted, and important. What would you do differently in your day-to-day life if you were treating yourself like you would a new romantic interest? How would you talk to yourself? What would you do with your time with yourself? How would you dress around you? We’re willing to bet you wouldn’t call your new romantic partner mean names, or scroll through your phone on your second date, or wear the old shirt with a hole in it that makes you feel sluggish - you would speak kindly and give lots of compliments, plan fun excursions to show them your favourite spots in the city, and wear things that make you feel sexy and confident. We encourage you to take this approach to your relationship with yourself, and see what changes.
Understanding Self-Care Versus Self-Work
Self-care is a buzz word these days. We actually did a whole blog post on it in January (which you can check out here if you’re interested!). Self-care is taking action on behaviours that truly make you feel loved, cared for, and energized. It’s taking a walk in the park, making yourself a home-cooked meal, or going to bed early because you’re extra tired that day - all wonderful things to do for yourself. But what we don’t talk about as much is self-work. Self-work is a very small shift from self-care in that it shares many of the same activities, but the main difference is the intention or the motivation behind it. Self-work activities are done with the intention of growth or progress in some way. For example, the walk in the park becomes a walk to make sure you hit your step count for the day. The home-cooked meal is focused around counting calories and macros. Going to bed early is to track your sleep habits and be able to get up early to go for a run to hit your 5k goal by May. To clarify, none of these behaviours are bad, they’re all actually pretty positive! It is just important to notice when you’re taking care of yourself and when you’re trying to improve or learn in some way, and make sure you engage in activities that fill both of these buckets.
Setting Boundaries With Yourself
We talk a lot about boundaries with other people, but it’s arguably more important to have boundaries with yourself. Boundaries with yourself are the compassionate ways that you set limits on the unhealthy behaviours or the things that are draining you to be able to redirect towards the things that are actually serving you. For example, if you enjoy coffee but want to be able to sleep better, a boundary with yourself may be that you can’t have any coffee after noon. Once you’re able to identify a boundary that would be helpful, you need to practice and consistently reinforce it; we all make mistakes and it’s really hard to make meaningful change!
Loneliness Sucks
If you’re feeling lonely, we want to end by truly validating how awful it can feel and how tough it is to sit with. We hope that the tools in this blog can help you to mitigate the intensity of your emotions, and can start to guide you towards making connections that feel supportive and loving. You’ve got this, we’re rooting for you!
References
Malik, J. (Host). (2025, January 19). Self-Care vs Self-Work And Why Knowing the Difference Is So Important by Kate Hesse of Nourish Nest Breathe [Audio podcast episode]. In Optimal Living Daily. Retrieved from: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/self-care-vs-self-work-and-why-knowing-the-difference/id1067688314?i=1000684266787
Seppala, E. (2020, October 2). Eight Ways to Ease the Pain of Loneliness. Retrieved from: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/eight_ways_to_ease_the_pain_of_loneliness
Zencare Team (2024, October 8). How to Make Your Long-Distance Relationship Last. Retrieved from: https://blog.zencare.co/how-to-make-your-long-distance-relationship-last/