When You No Longer Need to Escape Yourself

Loneliness does not always begin when there is no one around. Sometimes a person lives among others, talks, laughs, receives messages, meets friends, and still feels a strange emptiness within. Because the presence of others does not necessarily mean closeness, and the noise around us cannot always drown out the silence inside. We may be deeply afraid of being alone not because we need another person so badly, but because, when we are alone with ourselves, what we have long been running from becomes far too audible.

Perhaps this is why we sometimes seek relationships for reasons that have little to do with love. We think we need a person, when what we really need is someone to distract us from our anxiety, give us a sense of significance, fill our spare time, and convince us that we are needed and worthy of love. Almost imperceptibly, the other person becomes a remedy for our inner emptiness. And while the remedy works, we call it happiness. But gradually, dependence takes hold: it is no longer enough for the person simply to be there. They must constantly confirm that we matter. Respond in the way we need. Give us the right amount of attention. Rescue us from a bad mood. And love begins to become one person’s obligation to sustain the other’s inner world.

Yet no one can constantly rescue us from ourselves. We can receive an enormous amount of love and still feel that it is not enough if there is a place within us that we insist must be filled from the outside.

In Mishlei, the Book of Proverbs, we read: “A generous soul will be satisfied, and whoever refreshes others will himself be refreshed” (11:25). These words offer a remarkable reversal of our usual logic. We think: first I must be filled, and then I will have something to give. Let someone love me first — then I will be able to love. Let someone make me happy first — then I will share that happiness. But the soul, it turns out, can move in the opposite direction as well: a person begins to give and discovers something within that they had never noticed before.

Wholeness does not mean that we need no one. That would not be freedom, but another form of loneliness. We need one another. We need love, friendship, touch, conversation, and the feeling that someone is waiting for us to come home. But there is an enormous difference between “I need you because, without you, I feel as though I do not exist” and “I need you because I want to share what is within me with you.”

In the first case, we cling. In the second, we open ourselves.

Perhaps the soul begins to mature when a person gradually stops treating someone else as the answer to all their inner questions. They learn to remain in silence without being frightened by it. They stop measuring their worth by the amount of attention they receive. They no longer see every evening spent alone as proof that something is wrong with them. They begin to know themselves without an audience.

And then something curious happens: a person who has learned to be alone becomes far more capable of genuine closeness. Because now they come to another person with something to offer. They no longer need to keep seeking reassurance that they are loved. They can listen instead of merely waiting to be heard. They can give someone space without experiencing it as rejection. They can love without turning love into the fear of loss.

Perhaps inner wholeness is not a state in which you are enough for yourself. We will never need only ourselves. It is a state in which another person is no longer obliged to fill, with their own presence, the emptiness we are afraid to face.

And then love takes on a different meaning. We no longer say to someone, “Fill my life, because without you it is empty.” We can say something entirely different: “I already have a life. And I want to share it with you.”

Perhaps this is the very moment when the flight from loneliness ends and genuine closeness begins.