Promising thread title isn’t it?
Yeah, it doesn’t get any better.
So my question is this(have I asked this already?)
How does one cope?
With the loss of companionship, intimacy, the difference in the feel of an empty house and one thats lived in “deeply” by someone else?
Most of the time, I’m ok, able to ignore the yawning chasm. Sometimes it becomes a bit overwhelming.
Divorced, widowed, man woman, I don’t care, how do you cope when it becomes too much? how do you adjust?
I’ve never been married, but I’ve lived alone for well over a decade. (And will eventually die alone and unloved.)
Entertainments. Hobbies. I’ve got at least four of them that I cycle between as one or another grows stale. It’s like staying busy, but the slacker version.
If the house gets really quiet, go shopping. Wander the aisles a while.
Also if you have friends and family around, visit with them now and then.
ETA: Hey, you’re in Boise too! If you’re truly friendless, well, how are you with cooperative board games? I don’t need another person to play with, but I suppose I could put up with one.
I drink a lot of beer and cry myself to sleep.
I do volunteer work. Helping someone else takes my mind off things that depress me.
Dork, I feel ya man. I have a large family. Lots of sibs. Mr.Wrekker has a large family. I have kids and grand kids.
But, I have, due to agoraphobia, set myself away from all of them. Mr.Wrekker has always travelled for his work and now his hobbies.
Staring at the 4 walls and this way-too-big house gets to me on occasion. I go outside if I can. I do volunteer work. Not as much as I used to. My health won’t allow much.
I have dozens of email and texting friends that check on me regularly. I read. I write. Pets do more for me than I realize.
I’ve learned to like my solitude. I like being with myself.
Good luck. Find a good hobby or take a class in something. You can always vent here on the Dope. PM me if you need a shoulder.
I’m a widow. No kids, no siblings, no parents, no family at all really. The first year or so after my husband died, I could not be home in the evening. So I hung out at friends’ houses and got home around 10 pm and went straight to bed. I kept a journal where I poured out all of my feelings. I couldn’t have gotten into that bed if the journal hadn’t been there to catch everything that was erupting out of me. (BTW I’ve never gone back to reread it, and I probably never will.)
Sadly, after a couple of months or so, other people have “moved on,” and if it has never happened to them, they don’t understand what they think of as your inability to “get over it.” How do you cope? Just keep putting one foot in front of the other and don’t look at the horizon. Don’t look too far ahead at all-- waaay too scary. It can take years for the Reality and Finality of your loss to really set in. For me it’s been 19 years, and it won’t take that long for you to start feeling like yourself again, but it might take 5-6 years. Seriously.
I’m also divorced from my first marriage over 40 years ago. We had not been married long, and I was the one who wanted out. I was just too freakin’ immature to be married. But I will say that, even so, for TWO YEARS I couldn’t listen to the radio because every song made me cry.
Find a group, online or in person, where you can share your feelings with people who “get it.”
I’m divorced and the worst part is going a week or two without seeing my kids, it greatly depresses me because they are young. I pretty much just try and divert my attention, suppress my emotions or drink myself to sleep.
Seconded. I cannot overemphasize the efficacy of keeping a journal. I have one I’ve been maintaining since 2006, and another I keep on the bedstand for those thoughts that keep you awake at night. They have seen me thru separation, divorce, and eventually, the wonderful new life I have found. Highly recommended.
Drinking is fine for the celebrations of life and maybe the odd, really, REALLY bad times. But don’t drink yourself into oblivion every night. It will just heap another issue on top. Lonliness is a bitch. No doubt about it. You have a young son, get him in a play group or sport that you can oversee. You’ll meet people of like interests with kids. Some of my best friends were found at things my children were involved in.
I do visit my parents a couple times a week, hell without them, I’m not sure I could successfully manage single dadhood when I have the Vaderling, they truly are my support network that I can never repay. I tried the journal thing for a while, it was not good, I sorta went places in there I’d rather not think about(sometimes it pays to not reflect to deeply and yes I am an all kinds of fucked up person inside)
So, I guess this is where I go for therapy…
Drugs and booze are right out, I like a drink now and then, like a couple times a year, but I am waay past that phase.
Like I said, most of the time I’m ok, just, now and then…I realize I’ve been with someone pretty much my entire adult life, its those nights when it really sits heavy on me.
Oh, and begbert what sort of board games? What is a. Cooperative board game?
How old is your kid?
I’m clearly not begbert, but a “cooperative board game” is one in which the players aren’t competing against each other, and which typically have only one winner at the end of the game (which is how most traditional board games, like Monopoly, work).
In a cooperative game, the players are working together towards a shared goal, and if the players succeed in the game, “everybody wins.” A number of the most popular current games are co-op games, such as Pandemic, Arkham Horror, Mysterium, and Betrayal at House on the Hill.
A cooperative board game is where all the players are on the same side - rather than there being a winner and a bunch of losers, all the players win together or lose together as a group. Rather than the other players being your opponents, the humans are your allies and the game itself is your opponent.
This is important to me because when I lose a game to a human the only way to regain my honor is to kill them. This can make you run out of friends pretty fast, so playing cooperative games helps a lot.
Cooperative games used to be vanishingly rare, but now there are more and more common nowadays, probably due to the computer games acclimatizing people to the idea of cooperative play. In most of the games you are playing against some sort of countdown timer - win together by the end or everyone loses. Sometimes this timer is a literal timer; other times the game ends when a villan playing piece reaches the end of a track or when a deck runs out. Or, alternatively, you lose when some or all of your players get killed - or sometimes both (some games have several lose conditions that you have to watch out for).
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Note that Betrayal at House on the Hill is not actually a cooperative game, for reasons suggested by its title. It also requires at least 3 players.
Most actual cooperative games that can actually be played alone, since even if you have no friends there’s still the game itself to play against. However I don’t recommend that as a way to stave of loneliness, since there’s not much that’s lonelier than playing with yourself.
All right. It doesn’t have to be a cooperate game. What about a Lego kit that you can both work on? I find that extremely rewarding.
Another good game is the old “Rock Band” game with the guitars and drums.
I do both of these with my kids even now, and they are 16 and 15.
Another good game is the series of “Exit Room” games you can get. There are several levels of difficulties, I’d suggest starting with the easy ones to see if your kid likes them.
Hang in there, man. Being with my kids is the greatest thing in my life, and making the best of every minute you are together is a nice goal to work towards.
I’d only played it once, several years ago, and had forgotten that, so thank you for the correction. I’d googled a list of top co-op games, to give some examples for my post, and it was on that list.
I think you need a dog.
I’m still recovering from a pretty hard-hitting breakup that caught me by surprise a few months ago.
What I do to cope: Talk to people online, listen to music, and most of all, write in a journal. I just write page and page of self-analysis and thoughts. My journals are sprawling long things.