This is an interesting article. I found myself agreeing with it most of the time. At the same time, as someone who has overcome a lonely path, I can't help but put a lot more emphasis on culture than on the others.
American culture is a lonely culture, as my wife is always pointing out. We send our kids to college alone. We retire alone. We look at social problems like poverty as if they are held by the individual alone. Loneliness is the price of freedom but it is also the price includes lack of real social and physical support.
When I moved to Indonesia two years ago, things went downhill with my marriage fast. My wife was always threatening to send me back to the States (every couple weeks) and I couldn't develop a sense of place in the midst of the uncertainty. I felt like I was half-way around the world from anyone who cared about me except for the kids. It was a very dark, depressing, and crippling place to be (business-wise, personally, and more). And so things continued for most of two years. Eventually we did overcome our problems (in no small part due to me eventually deciding I had to ignore her threats).
Here's the basic thing. It doesn't take many people to combat loneliness. Quality matters far more than quantity. Getting out there and meeting people is a smallish part of the battle. A much larger issue is building real friendships with a small number of people.
Having two or three close friends makes a world of difference.
Sounds like if your spouse is threatening to "send" you out of the country a more significant problem than loneliness might be an emotionally abusive and dysfunctional relationship. I only say this (as a reality check) because I've been there, and one can become so numb and codependent that you cease to be aware that this type of behavior is not loving, not normal, and not what you deserve.
One thing one has to learn in an intercultural relationship is how culturally defined abuse actually is. Additionally one has to understand that far from what we like to think, patterns in interpersonal relationships are more cybernetic in nature (i.e. arising from feedback systems) than anything else and when you cross cultural barriers it takes a lot of work and effort to make things work.
Was it dysfunctional? Absolutely. Is that a good idea to break up the family where there are three kids and separate everyone by the diameter of the planet? Not so much.
What I can also say though is that for all the problems I have learned so much I could not have learned otherwise by being willing to work on understanding a perspective of another culture. The cost has been great but the rewards have as well.
American culture is a lonely culture, as my wife is always pointing out. We send our kids to college alone. We retire alone. We look at social problems like poverty as if they are held by the individual alone. Loneliness is the price of freedom but it is also the price includes lack of real social and physical support.
When I moved to Indonesia two years ago, things went downhill with my marriage fast. My wife was always threatening to send me back to the States (every couple weeks) and I couldn't develop a sense of place in the midst of the uncertainty. I felt like I was half-way around the world from anyone who cared about me except for the kids. It was a very dark, depressing, and crippling place to be (business-wise, personally, and more). And so things continued for most of two years. Eventually we did overcome our problems (in no small part due to me eventually deciding I had to ignore her threats).
Here's the basic thing. It doesn't take many people to combat loneliness. Quality matters far more than quantity. Getting out there and meeting people is a smallish part of the battle. A much larger issue is building real friendships with a small number of people.
Having two or three close friends makes a world of difference.