The Lonely Road: A Guide for Men to Find Meaningful Connections

Well, the wife moved out and she took the kids and your dog! She couldn’t stand the pooch and the dog spent every minute you were home with you. Now you don’t even have your dog to turn to. That house has suddenly become very large. With all that space you are noticing that you are feeling very alone. So you get up and you go to the park and still, you are faced with a pressing sense that you are by yourself. Yet you see tons of people just laughing and living their lives. Why can’t you?

You turn to your old friends that you use to have and even though they answer it becomes clear that they have their own life to deal with. They have their own families and circle of friends. You don’t want to impose your misery on them so it is better to just not bother them again. You soon realize that you do not have any friends or too few friends who don’t have as much experience with divorce as you now do.

You turn to the friends you had when you were married and discover that those were the men of your ex-wife’s friends. So they have already chosen sides or simply don’t answer the phone at all.

Your divorce can be a challenging time for you. Not only do you have your soon-to-be ex-wife to contend with but you also don’t have anybody to talk to. How do men do this? Well, let’s first look at why you feel alone.

Why do we feel alone?

First, it is good to know what I am meaning when I refer to loneliness is defined by the American Psychological Association as,

affective and cognitive discomfort or uneasiness from being or perceiving oneself to be alone or otherwise solitary.

American Psychological Association

The reason you are feeling alone even when you are in a crowd is that you are not actually connecting with other people. We are community-driven creatures. We are social beings. Much like cattle and horses and bees. We have to be interacting with others to feel as if we are a part of society.

We need to have connections with other people and this is one reason that having a strong Man’s Community pillar is important. When we are faced with bouts of loneliness we are able to turn to those in our circle and get the connection alongside the help and insights we need.

We need that connection the most when we have a moment of crisis like our marriage imploding. Because of how much we put our purpose into our marriage. Yet sadly many men don’t build up a strong band of brothers and if that doesn’t happen there are some effects that can come from our extended bouts of isolation.

Some of the reasons we feel alone are according to Mind Clear Psychotherapy

Thought Error

You may be caught up in a line of thoughts that are holding you back. Thoughts along the line of nobody wanting to see you or thoughts that are creating a sense of self-pity. These will often have us spinning or ruminating on a thought that actually isn’t helping us in any way

Fear

Thought that you may get emotionally hurt again by another person’s actions. Though this is often the reason that keeps men from trying marriage again it is a wrong thought because that emotional pain you feel isn’t from your wife getting her divorce. It is from your thoughts about your wife getting her divorce. The pain we feel isn’t ever from the outside it is from the inside. Our thoughts create our emotions, every time.

Making Excuses

We often tell ourselves that we are doing something for one reason when in reality we are just lying to ourselves so we don’t have to try again. It seems safe and in a way it is. We don’t have to interact with other people and round the risk of having a thought that may upset us in some way. So We make up excuses like we like being alone, or it is for the best. You suck at dating or many other self-defeating thoughts that equal you to being not worthy of getting out and seeing other people. We need the interactions of others to keep us sharp and on our toes.

The Problem with Loneliness

When we are alone and feel alone we may try to get out among other people yet when we don’t connect with others that is when we start to feel alone. When we feel loneliness and we enter into the thought loop that we are alone and don’t need to even try we can find ourselves isolating ourselves more and more. That isolation has the same effects as solitary confinement does on prisoners. Yet there are many different problems associated with being isolated and feeling alone.

Dementia

The more a person stays alone and stops interacting with other people the lonelier they become. The lack of social interactions causes our minds to almost shrink due to lack of use. One of the reasons we need other humans around is to actually keep our minds sharp, and without someone to push back on our thoughts and to give us a sense of novelty with their interactions we can and often do start to develop dementia.

Cardiovascular problems

Humans also don’t move as much as they do when they have a friend that drags them out of the house. So without exercise, you can see that we will get less activity and humans who feel lonely also developed cardiovascular disease.

Mental Health problems

The bigger problem that men suffering from loneliness have is that they also get more mental illnesses like depression and the like. This just causes the problem of loneliness to compound itself. The more mental problems you have the more lonely you become. So even more you have to find friends to interact with. Now thankfully as men get out of their depression and thought loop errors, around why their divorce happened, they often tend to find more men to hang out with.

What steps are needed to change that feeling?

So let’s say you are feeling lonely. You have that foreboding sense of you are utterly alone in the world. What do you do? How do you find new friends? How was it so easy when you were younger to just make friends? Why is friends making so much harder once you are an adult? The reasons are all in your head. They are the thoughts you have about other people. Many are good they keep you safe while others are believed to be safe but are just thoughts you are telling yourself.

Change your thoughts

What if instead of hearing yourself say, that nobody wants to see you, you want to try to find someone who is excited to see you? What if you reframed the thought so that you made finding someone an adventure? How would you look forward to seeing someone if you changed how you thought if the event of meeting someone new?

Our minds are nothing more than computers and we program them every day. What if you changed that programming from “You hate meeting new people” to “You enjoy meeting new people”? How would you show up? These reframing thoughts do something amazing they change your mood and elevate your emotional baseline to something that shows that you are willing to try to at least have some fun.

Start interacting with other people

What if you just started talking to people? Learn something new about someone every day. Maybe that is your task for the day just get outside and earn your neighbor’s middle name. The very act of doing something will create more confidence in that action. So the more people you meet the more comfortable you are with meeting new people. You may find that you are actually the more outward-going person and you are the leader of a group of men that meet each and every week.

The very act of meeting people helps with reducing your sense of loneliness.

No one is in my area

You have looked and there is no one in your area? Really? Yeah, you may live out in the country and the nearest person is a 90-year-old farmer who can’t hear worth a lick. You are 15 miles away from town who are you supposed to meet? The answer is people 15 miles away or if you have internet you can also use your phone.

When you get there there are plenty of places you can meet other men who have similar interests as you.

Join a civic organization

From Lions Club, Chamber of Commerce to many others just about any town with at least 1000 people will have a civic organization. These organizations often do activities that benefit their community. This gets you out of the house and around new people and allows you to be out of your comfort zone. You get to try new things, and you start developing new connections with those people in the community.

Join a church

Now I get that a lot of people look at churches differently today than they did in the past. A lot of people want to say that churches are the source of many bad things. Yet, churches are the root of a lot of good things. Those good things range from better health to stronger community bonds.

The way this happens is that there are many little subgroups in each church. There are the sunny school classes that are divided up into different age groups, but also marital status and major life events. These allow you to find a group of people who closely fit you.

Another benefit of a church is that you have the opportunity to create your own class. So you can be a leader in the church. All you have to do is be active and the members of that church will get to know you.

Find a club

There are all kinds of clubs, that center around special interests. Where I live, there’s a blacksmithing club. There are also R/C plane clubs and more. These clubs are a tremendous benefit because you can actually start exploring your interests. You can see where your passions lie. On top of that, you also get to meet new people who also have similar interests. This allows you to build up acquaintances with more people as you continue to participate in these different clubs.

Join a Mastermind

Masterminds are great organizations to join. Now there are some master minds that are nothing more than paid groups where one person is doing all the talking, but there are groups of people who get together and learn from each other.

These groups, often center around a specific topic. For instance, if you are a new business owner and you’re wanting to learn how to start your own business, then a business mastermind would be one that works great for you. Now, if you’re an experienced businessman and you want to excel at your business there are masterminds for that.

There are a couple of benefits to joining a mastermind. The big one is that you get to meet 6 to 12 new people who you meet with on a very regular basis. This could be weekly or bimonthly or monthly. And as you help the other people in the group, those people help you. You could look at this as an I scratch your back / You scratch mine.

The second advantage is that your business or weight loss, or whatever topic of focus you have actually gets done. That’s because y’all are all moving in the same direction.

Finding friends can be a daunting task. You actually kinda have to put yourself out there for people to get to know you. Yet you need to be out there on a limb to help other people.

The more people you help the more people get to know you, and yes, some people may not like you. Yet, that is OK. You don’t need everybody to like you you just need some people to be very close friends.