“I feel loneliness in my chest.” “Just a heavy weight on your back.” “My career has isolated me.” “I don’t have a partner. I don’t have kids.” “Right after I got married, people just fell away.” “As a single parent, there are these —” “Then I retired.” “My greatest fear is dying alone.” “It’s a doozy, loneliness. It’s a bad one.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “The feelings of loneliness and isolation that I feel stem from losing my dad to suicide at 12 years old.” “I feel like I’ve always felt lonely. What did I do to run everybody else away? I feel like I — just something that makes people scatter.” “I feel like if I don’t try to be successful, I’ll always regret not having tried. My loneliness ends up kind of being my punishment.” “Does everybody feel like this? There must be something wrong with me.” “Surrounded by people but yet you’re still feeling like you’re not even around anybody.” “I’m at this wedding, and kind of like on reflex, I open up my phone. I pull up a dating app, and I start swiping. And then I look around, and there’s just so many people around me laughing and having a good time, just being loving with each other. Yeah, that was a moment of feeling deep loneliness.” “You might try to do everything possible to find a life partner, but you might be single forever.” “People cannot imagine that you’d be so lonely that you would dread Thanksgiving and thinking like, ‘Gosh, I hope somebody invites me.’” “As a single parent, I feel like it’s the most important and biggest thing I will ever do in life. And I just keep it to myself because there’s no one to share it with.” “I decided deliberately not to have children, while all my close friends decided the opposite. And as they were focusing more and more of their time on family life, I became deprioritized.” “I would have never told you that I would work this many hours as I do and I wouldn’t have a group of friends surrounding me.” “When my spouse comes home” “and she just kind of goes off into her corner. And she’s the first person I want to talk to, and I’m the last person she wants to talk to.” “I’ve been a single mom for almost 14 years. And I just sometimes feel like I want someone to reach out to me and take care of me.” “Friends don’t want to hear about how lonely I am.” “It’s just too much burden to put on.” “You don’t want to add to their burden.” “— on other people.” “I’ve been trying to go to lunch with a colleague of mine on my campus for eight years, and it still hasn’t happened.” “I thought I was building a family that was going to be close and connected and doing things together, and that hasn’t happened.” “I was important, right? I mattered to people. I thought I did. And then I retired. And the isolation was deafening.” “I was diagnosed with a very rare bone marrow cancer. I have had certain friends and family disappear from my life. Such a deep disappointment over those who abandon you.” “The experience of cross-dressing and keeping it secret marked me with loneliness during my entire life.” “You look at the time, and you go, “It’s 3:00,’ and you have so much of your day, and the phone doesn’t ring. No one’s connecting with you, and you wonder how you can make the day go by. For retirement, they used to tell you it’s the golden years. Well, how can it be golden if there’s no one in it?” “I start to feel as if this is my punishment for not having children. And I think when you see Ellen — in a sense, I find myself saying, ‘You asked for it.’” “And she said, ‘Bob, we’ve been married for 66 years, and we have so much to say to each other. Do you suppose other people married this long have so much to talk about?’ And the next night, she was gone.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “Try to remember to pick up the phone. You have no idea how that unexpected phone call can change their day.” “It’s the children saying, ‘Dad, I love you’ and ‘How are you?’ And it’s also a good friend saying, ‘Bob, I don’t like the sound of your voice. I’m coming over. We’re going to talk.’” “If I can get myself to pick up the phone and call somebody, somebody else will say, ‘I’m feeling exactly the same way.’ And then — poof! — you’re part of the human race again.” [MUSIC PLAYING]