The Lonely Hunter: how our search for love is broken

By Aimée Lutkin

A COSMOPOLITAN BEST NON-FICTION BOOK OF 2022

More people are single today than ever before. Yet in a world where romantic love still reigns, the stories we tell ourselves haven't kept up. The Lonely Hunter explores the rise of singledom, the realities of loneliness, and whether it is possible to live contentedly alone.

‘So what's going on in your love life?’. An innocent question at a dinner party prompted Aimée Lutkin to finally tell the truth: it was six years since her last relationship, and she suspected it would be better to accept the life she had — a life she liked very much — rather than keep searching. But Lutkin’s answer was met with uproar; surely she couldn't give up on love? So she threw herself into dating, going on two dates every week.

Documenting her experiences, Lutkin explores the reality of sexual relationships today and reveals how the cultural messages we receive shape our expectations of love. From weird Tinder hookups to the way the ‘self care’ industry capitalises on our fear of being alone, to the complexities of queer dating and the truth about the ‘loneliness epidemic’, she uses her experiences to fearlessly tell a wider story about how we love now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Feb 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781925693904

Aimée Lutkin

Aimée Lutkin is a writer, director, and performer from NYC, where she was born and raised. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Book preview

The Lonely Hunter

Aimée Lutkin is a writer, director, and performer from NYC, where she was born and raised. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

Scribe Publications

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

Published by Scribe 2022

Copyright © Aimée Lutkin

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

The Lonely Hunter is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

978 1 912854 29 5 (UK edition)

978 1 925849 41 7 (Australian edition)

978 1 925693 90 4 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

scribepublications.co.uk

scribepublications.com.au

DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MY GRANDMOTHER,

CARMEN AQUILONE, AND THE PRESENCE OF

MY MOTHER, PAMELA ENZ

CONTENTS

Introduction: WHEN CAN I SAY I’LL BE ALONE FOREVER?

Part One

CHAPTER 1: Stasis

CHAPTER 2: If You Don’t Love Yourself . . .

CHAPTER 3: The One

CHAPTER 4: A Room of One’s Own

CHAPTER 5: Destiny

CHAPTER 6: What Is Dating?

CHAPTER 7: Expectations

CHAPTER 8: Deep in the Heart of Summer

CHAPTER 9: Let’s Party

Part Two

CHAPTER 10: Total Eclipse of the Heart

CHAPTER 11: The Great Escape

CHAPTER 12: The Road More Traveled

CHAPTER 13: See You Again Soon

Part Three

CHAPTER 14: Single! And Fabulous!

CHAPTER 15: New Ceremonies

CHAPTER 16: O Hunting Heart, Shall You Find It

CONCLUSION: A LOST-LOVED HUMAN FACE

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

When Can I Say

I’ll Be Alone Forever?

It was late in fall, long past the invigorating joys of vivid foliage. The clocks had been set back, and naked branches raked gray skies. There was still a long tunnel of darkness ahead before the twinkling lights of the holidays would emerge and illuminate a more cheerful atmosphere. These transitions were as familiar to me as the Brooklyn street I was walking down, carrying a bottle of wine in a black-and-silver striped bag, also familiar. The sensation of counting the days until the next thing and then the next thing was how I paced my life, with no expectations of more than what I already knew.

I knew the texture of the sidewalk, now with brown leaves ground into its porous cracks, the places where it bucked over tree roots. It led me to the door of a brownstone protected by a heavy, practically medieval gate hung with an actual bell that I’d rung many times. I rang it again. The brownstone housed a cooperative of six or seven people, depending on who was in town. I’d been invited to a dinner party and I’d arrived a few minutes before the hour it was supposed to start.

When I walked into the kitchen, nothing had begun to happen that would result in a meal, so I kicked off my shoes and sat at the dining room table, opening the ten-dollar bottle of wine and chatting with my friend Xavier, who’d opened the door. He’d come down from the upstairs living room a little flustered and sweaty, saying he’d been dancing by himself to shake off a bad mood.

The rhythms of this interaction were pleasant. It was another night in my uneventful life, a night that I imagined would be swept away along with so many others. Some members of the cooperative and other, less foolishly punctual guests slowly assembled in the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets, moving a stack of plates from a shelf to a table, volunteering for a deli beer run, until finally a feast was prepared. It was a nice dinner, and by the end, sated and a little buzzed, we turned the conversation to love.

One of my fellow diners asked me, So what’s going on in your life? With romance?

This is not an unusual question, and it wouldn’t have been particularly memorable either, except that I was feeling unguarded and open after consuming so much home-cooked food. And booze. So I answered honestly and said, I don’t really know if I’m going to date anyone ever again.

The friend who had asked, Rachel, was recently engaged. Her fiancé, Jon, was sitting at the table, too. I’d been friends with Jon long before I’d met Rachel, but she’d made an impression. They’d dated when they were much younger and had broken up. About eight months before this dinner party, Jon had emailed her out of the blue to say she’d appeared to him in a dream.

Usually, if someone tells you they just had a dream about you, it’s a euphemism for wanting to have sex. With Jon I really believed it. He had an otherworldly aura, an angelic calmness that soothed everyone around him. He was the sort of person you could imagine moseying through the landscape of dreams, checking in on old lovers to see if the fruit of a relationship had finally ripened.

They went on the second first date of their two relationships, and this time love stuck. They would be married in a few months, in the same house we were all having dinner in with the permission of their many roommates. Almost before I had finished my sentence, Rachel was rolling her eyes, responding with the dismissiveness of someone who had recently been plucked from singleness by a dream walker.

Of course you will, she said, shaking her head.

My throat constricted, a kind of tightening that happens when I’m compelled to say something that will make me feel more upset than relieved.

I think there’s this idea that everyone finds someone eventually, I managed. And I just think, realistically, there’s no reason that would be true. Some people are just alone forever.

A ripple of reaction went around the table. In turn, everyone denied that I was facing the rest of my life alone: Xavier, who was currently dating a woman in an open marriage, two friends of Rachel’s (completely unrelated women who looked like they came from the same wholesome, outdoorsy family), and a new redheaded roommate named Scott, whom I’d met mere moments before. He had taken a seat at the table during dessert to go through the household mail and weigh in on my love life.

Have you heard of Tinder? Or OKCupid? Scott demanded, clenching the pile of bills.

He was recently affianced, too, and clearly secure in his belief that everyone gets there eventually.

Yeah, I’ve tried both, but I didn’t meet anyone, I said, sounding pathetic even to myself.

He threw up his hands in an exasperated gesture, as though this were a longstanding argument between us and he was sure I was just obstinately opposed to dating. Scott turned back to the mail, done with my unrepentant stubbornness.

Xavier was a little quieter. I guessed that being in a relationship with someone who was already married had made him more aware of the challenges facing modern daters. His girlfriend didn’t keep him a secret, but her husband wasn’t thrilled with the arrangement. They still sometimes hung out as a group, going to summer events at the Prospect Park Bandshell and having dinners. I’d bumped into them in line for a screening of The Triplets of Belleville, a threesome navigating polyamory with the awkwardness of a coffee date.

The overall theme of the responses at the table that night was clichéd reassurance: there’s a lid for every pot. Everyone who thinks they’re never going to meet someone meets someone right then. It’s when you’re least expecting it, boom, love happens. If only that were true. How many varying states of expectation I’d lived in: sure, unsure, pretending to be unsure, hopeful, determined, entitled, defeated. No attitude had worked, law-of-attraction-style, to bring love my way. My current state was acceptance, a word associated with grief. It can also mean that you’re dealing with reality as best you can.

I was thirty-two years old. In the last six years, I’d had sex once—somewhere around year three. A quick fling in the midst of all that abstinence hadn’t been the end of a drought; it was more like a mirage in the desert, briefly convincing me I was about to be saved from the unrelenting tread across burning, sexless sand. In a way, my singlehood was just as baffling to me as it was to everyone else at the dinner table. I wasn’t going to be cast as the lead on a sexy CW show anytime soon, but I wasn’t unattractive; I wasn’t shy; I wasn’t unpleasant (whatever you may think after reading this); I had many friends and deep connections. There seemed to be plenty of other single people who could say the same, but somehow, none of them were the right fit. One year single had turned into another, then another. Time had flown by, summer to fall to winter, with no spring romances. Without planning it, I’d become a spinster.

Unlike my friends, I’d had some time to acclimate to the current state of no affairs. I’d learned to shop in small quantities, to eat at restaurants alone, to arrive at special events without a plus-one. It was fine! It was absolutely fine, until I had to explain what was going on with my love life to a bunch of people who actually had love lives.

Each person in the room had lived through a moment when they thought they’d never meet anyone. They’d been proven wrong. They were certain, looking at me, that I was just them in the past, in that moment before. Soon, sooner than I could imagine, I’d be in the after. I just had to wait and be patient, because my special someone was coming as fast as they could. The conversation at the dinner table circled. They were progressive folks, nonjudgmental, kind, open-minded, but what I was saying about my life made them too unsettled to really listen. Or maybe no one wanted to agree with Yeah, you’re right, no one will ever love you. When Rachel repeated, "No one ends up alone forever, I finally shrugged and said, Yeah, I know," so we could talk about anything else.

The group started clearing the table and doing dishes, moving on to other subjects. I felt exposed and out of place, like I was sitting at the table topless and everyone was pretending not to notice. Tears welled and I swallowed them. Gamely, I asked if anyone wanted tea and got up to fill the kettle. The sense of enjoying another typical, forgettable night had been disrupted, and I suspected even then I would remember this conversation for a long time.

Being alone wasn’t so difficult to contend with. Yes, sometimes it was hard. Sometimes I wished I had someone to bring to holiday gatherings, to split the rent, to spoon me on the couch on a rainy day. But more often, being single wasn’t the defining characteristic of my existence, which contained all sorts of delightful things: friendships, hobbies, parties, lazy weekend mornings, two long-haired cats, and the ability to make my own schedule without checking anyone else’s. The hardest part of being single wasn’t the quality of my life, it was really this lack of language to articulate the meaning of my own solitude as I saw it long-term.

What is so scary about someone saying that they might spend their life alone? Especially for people in relationships?

Love and relationships are often a marker of time. Forever is a concept we associate with love, though love was theoretically as tenuous as my single state. Like being single, being a couple can end any second, but we definitely don’t look to the end of a relationship the same way people hope for the end of singleness. Instead, the calendar of human events is built around partnership: the ceremonious connection of families, anniversaries, children. The cost of housing or healthcare or the inevitability of taxes. A promise of care in old age, or of bringing a guest to other people’s weddings, or even receiving an invitation to events and vacations upstate populated only by your coupled friends. The patches of ground where our bones will lie are often bought in pairs. Nearly everything prioritizes two over one. Some of these things are admittedly petty, but others are a matter of survival.

When I said, I think I might be alone forever, people in relationships could be hearing something much more threatening, something about how insubstantial these support structures really are. I was suggesting that we don’t find love as part of cosmic destiny or because we deserve it. If you’re in love, if you feel loved, you’re mostly just very lucky. It’s your ticket into a normal life as society understands human cycles. Few want to think about what they would do if their luck ran out.

By the time the kitchen was clean and the counters wiped down, our camaraderie was restored, if not my peace. I hugged Rachel, Jon, Xavier, and even Scott goodbye and walked back through the creaking gate into the small courtyard. The air was damp and smelled like someone had lit a fireplace. I yanked my hat down over my ears and walked to the train, mulling over all the things I wished I’d said, trying to construct the perfect explanation for how it feels to be alone year after year and never to have that acknowledged as a valid experience, only as an intermediate period it’s better not to discuss. My breath steamed out in front of me, blowing back into my eyelashes in an angry mist.

Getting dumped was a good example of the difference between my condition and what coupled people go through, I thought. In my years of semivoluntary celibacy, I’d had several friends who’d been in multiple relationships, some of them quite passionate and committed, with barely a pause in between each one. The immediate sense of loss after a relationship is painful, but at least there’s a label for it: heartbreak. I had no way to describe the slow, dull ache of separation from physical and emotional intimacy after years without it. What I felt had no simple words.

Ruminating on the evening, I realized why I was so agitated: the underlying message of those platitudes about pots and lids was that I needed to just keep on wishing and hoping and waiting and eventually I’d get to join in. Just wait, and wait, because something better than the life you have now is guaranteed. Love is guaranteed, if you just believe in it.

I wanted to cry at that dinner table, not because I was alone or even sometimes very lonely. I wanted to cry because I was exhausted from keeping up the farce that I was still waiting for someone to come find me. Waiting meant staying still. It meant diminishing the life I did lead, suggesting it would never, ever be enough as long as I was still on my own. I would never be free to say, I think I’ll be alone forever, only that I was in a holding pattern until real life began.

And when I thought of how I’d been letting the seasons change around me, letting one day bleed into the next without stirring into action and demanding something different, I did wonder if it was true. Was I waiting or was I living? Were the barriers to connection something internal or built into everything around me?

Like that, the path diverged and I looked in a different direction.

That evening started a ripple effect in my life, one that would tow me along on its undercurrents all the way back to dating, even back to falling in love; as a result of that dinner, I began to steer the next year of my life out of where it had run aground on the shoals. And when I reached the open waters, it became evident that my situation was indicative of something much more expansive.

One single woman at a dinner party full of couples might feel like a misfit, but if we pull back further, the balance between my circumstance and those of my relationship-blessed friends shifted. Earlier that same year, Rebecca Traister published her opus on the rise of single women and their influence on humankind, All the Single Ladies. One of the key points of the book is that in 2009, for perhaps the first time ever in the history of the United States there were more unmarried women than married, as much as it might have felt otherwise to me. There was nothing so unusual about my being single at all.

Singleness, as any peppy self-help book will tell you, does not equate to loneliness. Yet they’re words often used synonymously. In an editorial for The Washington Post, author Bella DePaulo, who has written a number of books on the bias against single people, pointed out that this conflation promotes this bias, painting singles as isolated and even self-centered. If you think of single as synonymous with lonely, it assigns negativity to a single person, or a negative value to being single. But it’s unlikely every single person thinks of themselves as lonely, or that loneliness doesn’t find its way into relationships.

Another reason people conflate the two terms may be because finding a partner is still considered the antidote to not only singleness but loneliness. We’re considered somehow incomplete, missing that special something, the final piece to fulfillment as long as we’re outside of a relationship. How could loneliness plague someone who is satisfied by romantic love?

But loneliness, feeling the ache of solitude instead of its pleasures, is a biological response, like thirst. There was a time in human evolution when refusing to participate in society was as perilous as refusing to drink when you’re thirsty, and this innate psychological alarm bell pushed us back into the crowd. That’s important: loneliness pushes us back to other people, not to a monogamous romantic relationship. That development came much, much later, under the pressures of social forces, rather than chemical ones.

In recent years, it seems that chronic loneliness is beginning to be understood better as something outside of dating or marriage, in part because so many more people are openly admitting that they’re suffering from it. In 2017, a report from the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness said over nine million people in the UK often or always felt lonely. Loneliness was declared an epidemic and by 2018, the country appointed its very first minister of loneliness. By 2020, the UK had gone through three of these ministers, each ordering new studies that tried to gather more information on how many people were lonely and to then implement programs to alleviate some of that loneliness. They introduced projects like paying younger people to work with older people on digital technology, and public health campaigns to reduce stigma around the issue.

In a New York Times opinion piece, Going Solo author Eric Klinenberg responded to the UK’s rush to declare loneliness a catching disease, warning that it was actually the poor, the disenfranchised, the elderly, people without access to medical or in-home care, who would be those most likely forgotten in the ministry’s approach to solving loneliness. Klinenberg argued that it’s a positive thing that loneliness is getting the attention it’s currently receiving—it is a huge issue connected to a variety of social ills. He then pointed out that the epidemic label is based on faulty, overly general data. When Britain announced its new ministry, officials insisted that everyone, young or old, was at risk of loneliness, he writes. Yet the research tells us something more specific. In places like the United States and Britain, it’s the poor, unemployed, displaced and migrant populations that stand to suffer most from loneliness and isolation. Their lives are unstable, and so are their relationships. When they get lonely, they are the least able to get adequate social or medical support.

What Klinenberg is saying is that loneliness can’t just be treated as an individual failing. It has to be seen in the context of society, as a result of decisions being actively made. Being alone is a state that is pushed on some people far more than others.

When Brigham Young University psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a leading researcher on loneliness, addressed the 125th annual convention of the American Psychological Association in 2017, she presented evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality. The magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators, she said. With an increasing aging population, the effect on public health is only anticipated to increase. Indeed, many nations now suggest we are facing a ‘loneliness epidemic.’ The challenge we face now is what can be done about it.

The research paper Holt-Lunstad was presenting to the APA is regularly cited in aggregated articles on loneliness, which often boil it down to a report on potential health effects; one of the paper’s most repeated talking points is that loneliness can have a greater negative effect on your health than obesity. Actually, Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues emphasize the same thing Klinenberg did, which is that people most at risk are the elderly and socially isolated, who may already be suffering from various mental and physical ailments that can’t always be meaningfully distinguished from health problems caused by loneliness itself. The phrase loneliness epidemic caught on anyway.

Making societal loneliness into an illness is dangerous in that it obfuscates larger problems, even if chronic loneliness can be considered a mental health issue, even if being alone correlates to or causes physical illness. It’s almost too convenient. Most illness is treated as a personal problem rather than a systemic one, despite the massive influence that everything from geographic location to access to food and basic medical care can have on health. Describing lonely people as being sick in some way means pushing lifestyle changes instead of alleviating larger economic and social problems. It also puts it into people’s heads that loneliness is catching, which can only compound the problem for those experiencing it.

Being single was definitely my personal problem as far as my friends were concerned. Many of the single ladies shifting the U.S. census numbers that Rebecca Traister analyzed would likely marry eventually, holding to the expectation that they do something about being alone. So might I, because life is long and full of surprises. But if not, where would I turn as I aged and statistically became more exposed to the social isolation Holt-Lunstad warned about?

Many people depend on children to function as a safety net in their old age, but the number of babies is declining, too. In 2017, federal data from the CDC showed that the U.S. fertility rate was at its lowest point ever. For every thousand women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four, there were only 59.8 babies. For comparison, the 1950s baby boom had a birth rate that was twice as high. When people do start families these days, they’re also considerably older. Forty years ago, the average age for a woman to give birth was twenty-one. In 2000, it was around twenty-four. In 2017, it was about twenty-six, edging toward twenty-seven.

Canadian journalist John Ibbitson and political scientist Darrell Bricker wrote in their 2019 book, Empty Planet, that the lowering birth rate is actually a planet-wide phenomenon, which they largely attribute to the increased access to knowledge via smart phones. An increase in education will often lead to a decrease in family size.

That might be interpreted as a reflection of women pursuing careers instead of raising kids; however, it seems to me that anyone with an awareness of their own economic precarity would be hesitant to have children. In the United States, the expense of having a child in a hospital could ruin a family before it’s even begun. Affordable childcare is practically nonexistent, which often draws women out of the workforce as the simplest solution. Public services like education (public school being the closest thing to universal childcare in the United States), are being defunded in nearly every state, and to extend this list of potential expenses as far as college, the cost of a degree for the next generation is staggering. And if you are particularly grim about what’s ahead (clearly, I was on that autumn night of the dinner party), the looming disaster of climate destruction must make potential parents think about what they’re promising a child born right now.

With fewer children being born, there’s a huge care gap ahead that may quickly mount to a crisis as seniors find themselves without supporting family. It’s currently estimated by the Institute for Public Policy Research that by 2030, the number of elderly adults in the UK who need care will have doubled since 2012. That’s two million people without adult children to care for them, and potentially with no backup plan. That’s also a shortage of young people in the workforce who might be available to care for elderly communities as a career.

In Going Solo, Klinenberg doesn’t advocate for people to pursue coupledom and make a baby to avoid the isolation of age. That’s because he found in his research that most people do die alone, even people who get married or have kids. Many elderly people live completely alone because they can’t afford some form of assisted living. Furthermore, in the United States, nursing homes can be not only prohibitively expensive but poorly run and dangerous for occupants. Klinenberg suggests that the solution for an aging and increasingly lonely population could be found in state-sponsored assisted living facilities that bring safety and dignity to aging. But this is a suggestion, not an existing option. Aging without family care is a form of loneliness anyone can face, whatever choices they’ve made, but the myth persists that coupledom and children will save you from social isolation. Once again, a major gap in public services becomes an individual’s problem.

There are so many ways in which people’s choices are policed, and it’s so we can point to where they went wrong rather than where they were failed. The stereotype of the career woman who refuses to settle down and then regrets waiting too long haunts popular culture. This characterization implies that there is a choice in the matter, as though the breadwinner model of household division is a manageable option for most people. Delaying settling down is more often a survival tactic than an attempt to buck traditional values. For millennials like myself, graduating into the crash of 2009, a full-time job with healthcare, benefits, and stability felt as out of reach as winning the lottery—or meeting someone willing to support me as I cared for our home. Even if I was never financially in a place to support myself and a child, the stigma of waiting too long would follow me.

When I first started thinking about these issues in 2016, I had no idea what was coming only four years later. It is still too early to tell how COVID-19, prolonged quarantines, and the restructuring of social behavior around social distancing will affect family structures in the long term, but the data is not looking good.

By the spring of 2021, many studies reported a significant drop