Frequently, we leave the topic of loneliness unmentioned.

Those without anyone to hold feel shame.

Those with someone a background degree of guilt.

But the pains of loneliness are an un embarrassing and universal possibility.

We shouldn't on top of it all feel lonely about being lonely.

There are few greater experts on the importance of love than those who are bereft of anyone to love.

It's hard to know quite what all the fuss around love might be about until and unless one has somewhere along the way, spent some bitter unwanted passages in one's own company.

When we're alone, people may well strive to show us kindness.

Maybe invitations and touching gestures, but it will be hard to escape from a lingering sense of the conditionality of the interest and care on offer.

We're liable to detect the limits of the availability of even the best disposed companions.

And since the restrictions of the demands we can make upon them, it's often too late or too early to call.

In bleak moments, we may suspect we could disappear off the earth, and no one would much notice or care.

In ordinary company, we can't simply share whatever's passing through our minds too much of our inner monologue is overly petty or intense.

Random or anxiety laden to be of interest are acquaintances have an understandable expectation, which it would be unwise to disabuse them of that their friends should be normal.

We must operate with a constant degree of politeness as well.

No one finds rage or obsession peculiarity or bitterness especially charming.

We can't act up or rant.

A radical editing of our true selves is the price we must pay for conviviality.

We have to accept to that much of who we are won't readily be understood.

Some of our deepest concerns will be met with blanking comprehension, boredom or fear.

Most people just won't give a damn.

Our deeper thoughts will be of scant interest.

We'll have to subsist as pleasant but radically abbreviated paragraphs in the minds of almost everyone.

All these quietly soul destroying aspects of single life.

Love promises to correct in the company of a lover.

There need be almost no limits to the depths of concern, care, attention and license were granted.

We will be accepted more or less as we are.

We won't be under pressure to keep proving our status.

It will be possible to reveal our extreme vulnerabilities and compulsions and survive.

It will be okay to have tantrums.

To sing badly or to cry.

Will be tolerated.

If we are less than charming or simply vile for a time.

We'll be able to wake them up at odd hours to share sorrows or excitements are smaller scratches will be of interest.

We'll be able to raise topics of or inspiring minute.

Nous, it won't have been like this since early childhood the last time.

Kindly others expended serious energy discussing whether the top button on our cardigan should be done up or left open.

We will feel immense gratitude to this person who does something that we had maybe come to suspect would be impossible.

No, us really well and still like us.

We would have escaped from that otherwise dominant and devastating sense that the only way to get people to like us is to keep most of who we are under wraps.

We will start to feel like we exist.

Our identity will be safe.

We won't be the only guardians of our story when the world's disinterest chills and erodes us, we'll be able to return to the lover to be put back together again, reflected back to ourselves in terms that reassure and console us, surrounded on all sides by lesser or greater varieties of coldness.

We will at last know that in the arms of one extraordinary patient and kindly being worthy of infinite gratitude, we truly matter at the school of life.

We believe that confidence is a skill.

We can all learn our confidence.