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Key points
- This is the first year I haven’t been afraid of being alone on the holidays.
- Fear of being alone on the holidays is more about attachment than actually being alone.
- A good relationship matters, and so does healing from the pain of childhood.
In the past, I’ve worried that I wouldn’t have something to do on Christmas, and I’ve felt like everyone else—everyone but me—was sitting around in their nice warm houses having fun, being joyous, celebrating with their families.
I didn’t have a family, any family that I can say I was attached to, when I was a kid. I lived with a foster family down the road because I was afraid of my mother, whose post-partum psychosis scared me so much as an infant and toddler I never got over it. When I grew up, I never managed to get into a stable, secure, this-feels-like-family partnership. Being single didn’t feel like that much of a problem most of the time—I had lots of friends, two cats, and a community. I was hardly ever lonely. It only became a problem when the holidays were approaching.
I told myself my fear of being alone on the holidays was all about not having a family. But then my friend Mary Beth told me that even though she has a family she still feels somehow alone and unattached, separated from others in some existential way, around the holidays. So maybe it’s not just about not having a family. Maybe it’s about feeling like you need to have a particular kind of family, the kind you see on holiday-related TV ads and on sitcoms and other cultural outlets. Maybe that’s all it is—longing for the ideal family-Christmas image we Americans of a certain age have been presented with all our lives.
That’s part of it, I’m sure, but I have a feeling it's something much deeper, too, something that cuts right to the bone of what it is to be human. That it might even go back to our earliest origins, to sitting around the fire with the others in the Paleolithic era, or not—being outside the fire in the dark and cold, surrounded by wolves.
I’m familiar with the psychological concept of attachment, the idea that the attachments we form with our caregivers as infants and children affect how we feel and act for the rest of our lives, but I’ve never felt the truth of it so deeply as I do now, when I contemplate my fear of being alone during the holidays. I want to be attached. I need to be attached. And this year, finally, I am attached.
At an age when most people have lost interest in romance, either because they think they’re too old for it or because they’ve been in a marriage so long they take their partner for granted and are more interested now in their grandkids, I find myself firmly attached as part of a couple. I’m not afraid of being alone during the holidays anymore. I know that whatever happens, barring disaster or sudden death, I’ll be with my partner. We’re going to spend the holiday with good friends, but even if something gets in the way of that—the weather, for example—I’ll feel safe, warm, loved. I’ll feel like I’m at the center of something, sitting around the metaphorical fire with the others, rather than left out in the cold and dark.
I know that this is not just happening because of luck, the incredible good fortune of meeting someone and getting firmly attached in a romantic relationship at last, but that it’s happening because of all the work I’ve done on myself over the years. All the EMDR therapy and other healing treatments I’ve pursued, which have made it possible for me to attract, get into, and stay in a viable, attached relationship. But the relationship itself, the particular wonderful person I’m sharing this holiday with, definitely helps.
Better late than never.
