Olga Gumanova - Women's Loneliness. How to get out of it. Olga Gumanova Women's loneliness. How to get out of it Female loneliness how to get out of it read

Olga Tumanova

Female loneliness: how to get out of it

Approved for publication by the Publishing Council of the Russian Orthodox Church

IS R14-417-1569

Loneliness: a solution to the problem

Causes of loneliness: find and neutralize

You are already 25, 27, 30 years old, and your cherished dream - to have your own happy family - is in no hurry to come true. Birthdays and New Year's celebrations are increasingly becoming reasons for sadness - another year has passed, but I still haven't got married, nothing has changed, there is no light in sight. And how to be?

Finding a way out of loneliness can be compared to repairing a home. Someone likes to glue wallpaper and lay tiles with their own hands, someone hires a master - it all depends on the capabilities and preferences of the hostess. But even if you entrust the repair to others, sooner or later they will finish the work and leave your house, and you will live in it. So, turning to a professional - a psychologist - does not guarantee a solution to the problem: in any case, you will have to act on your own.

For me, the search for the causes of loneliness was like going through the next level of a computer game-rpg. There are such passionate players who are looking for ways to capture a castle or extract an artifact for hours. So I once decided: let the search for “keys” from loneliness become my main work, and whether it is worth opening the lock and moving to a different level of life - I will decide later.

And I went to look for myself: using the examples of the heroines of literature, cinema and real life, I tried to understand the reasons that made the girl stay lonely. I avidly read and watched any movie where the heroines were old maids, abandoned lovers and independent single ladies trying to fulfill themselves in work. And one day I managed to look at myself from the outside and see the main reason that was blocking my path to family happiness like a heavy barrier.

The reasons for loneliness are as follows.

I don't respect men.

For example, a girl grew up in a family where her grandfather was a weak-willed and wordless henpecked under a domineering grandmother, her mother and father divorced shortly after her birth, and he was called nothing more than a "scoundrel" and "bastard", and an aunt who lost count of her husbands and lovers , did not speak flatteringly about any of them. Where can a girl who grew up in such a family get respect for men? After all, from childhood she firmly learned that all men are either weaklings or traitors.

If this is your case, try the following exercise: at the sight of familiar and unfamiliar representatives of the stronger sex, repeat to yourself: "men are good."

I do not allow myself to be happier than my mother, grandmother, sister, girlfriend, work colleagues.

Katya came to work at the school at the age of 22 and, being a young and inexperienced specialist, tried in every possible way to win the love and recognition of older colleagues. It was important for her to enter this new teacher's world of the school - joint gatherings in the teacher's room during a big break, long conversations.

But here's the problem - as is often the case in teaching staff, most of the teachers were either single or divorced. And Katya, as luck would have it, had a beloved fiancé, and a wedding was planned in a few months. But any joyful stories about happiness in personal life were "punished" here by stony expressions on the faces of the listeners. On the other hand, complaints that the groom did not call on time, was not kind during dinner with his parents, did not give the desired roses for his birthday, aroused strong emotional support: “Yes, yes, men are like that, only frustration from them.” And Katya, being an obedient girl, got used to talking only bad things about her personal life at work. The result was not long in coming - a few weeks of such "psychotherapy" and the wedding was upset, and she broke up with her fiancé. Katya worked at this school for about ten more years, remaining single. In order to get rid of the influence of the teaching staff and happily marry, she had to do a lot of work on herself.

I suffer - it means that I am good and will go to heaven.

Girls with such an attitude are quite common in the church environment. They like to emphasize their other-worldliness, out-of-dateness and numerous virtues. “I am not like this modern youth. I don't go to nightclubs, I don't have intimate relationships on the first day of meeting, I can't stand even the smell of alcohol, so it's hard for me. I should have been born in the last century. I wear long skirts and closed blouses, listen only to classical music, in the evenings I sit at home and cross-stitch, every Sunday I go to church, and after the liturgy I help my sick grandmother and bake pies. Am I destined to meet my happiness without sacrificing my principles? Only shameless harlots marry in our day, who attract men by agreeing to sexual perversions.

A familiar portrait? Have you met? There are two lies here at once: firstly, not all modern youth go to terrible brothels and indulge in sophisticated debauchery. Secondly, there are many men who dream of marrying a modest homebody virgin with needlework and pies. But for girls of this type, it is very important to pay for their “virtues” with suffering and loneliness, otherwise their life loses all meaning. If tomorrow it is by no means a “drunken libertine from a nightclub” who woo her, but a modest domestic young man who loves not noisy parties, but reading books in the country or helping his parents, he will also be convicted of many vices and rejected. For true virtue must suffer! Alone…

I am so afraid of the pain of a possible rupture of relationships that I do not enter into them at all.

Such girls are the first to leave potential suitors, because they are too afraid of being abandoned themselves. Often they are beautiful, surrounded by fans, but they do not go into a serious relationship with anyone.

To cope with the problem, you need to learn how to take risks. Neither vows of love, nor weddings, nor weddings, nor the birth of children guarantee long-term family happiness. In addition, even loving spouses have to go through separation by death - everyone, without exception. Therefore, it is worth learning to enjoy life and be happy here and now.

I find family life boring and romantic suffering interesting and exciting.

At the age of 18–20, I had a wonderful company in which several happy couples formed, they got married, many became fathers and mothers. And every time for some reason I was amazed by the news about the wedding of a friend. “Are you getting married? For whom? For Dima? Who is Dima? And then I remembered that many times I sat at the same table with the same Dima, prayed next to him, went on a pilgrimage, but point-blank did not see in him a young man, a possible groom. The problem was that he was looking for a wife and kids, and I was looking for someone to fall in love with and then suffer from his lack of attention.

Olga Tumanova

Female loneliness: how to get out of it

Approved for publication by the Publishing Council of the Russian Orthodox Church

IS R14-417-1569

Loneliness: a solution to the problem

Causes of loneliness: find and neutralize

The reasons for loneliness are as follows.

I don't respect men.

If this is your case, try the following exercise: at the sight of familiar and unfamiliar representatives of the stronger sex, repeat to yourself: "men are good."

I do not allow myself to be happier than my mother, grandmother, sister, girlfriend, work colleagues.

I suffer - it means that I am good and will go to heaven.

I am so afraid of the pain of a possible rupture of relationships that I do not enter into them at all.

I find family life boring and romantic suffering interesting and exciting.

When various social networks appeared, I decided to find men there with whom I had been deeply in love in different years. I was in my thirties, they were also in their thirties and forties. And it turned out that none of them ever created a family. Someone got married and quickly divorced, someone in his almost forties never got married. But everything is very simple - I aspired only to those who, in principle, refused the prospect of creating a family, and, of course, making me suffer as a potential bride. I realized that it was suffering that attracted me, and not specific people.

Of course, many more reasons for female loneliness can be added to this list. But the most difficult thing in overcoming them is to honestly admit to yourself: “Yes, I am running from my happiness - I recognize myself in the behavior of the heroines of films and books. But I don't want to be like them."

One has only to understand and accept this, and happiness will overtake you.

5 ways to become a sad girl

There are girls in the world who are not bad in appearance, and are well dressed, and will not go into their pocket for a word, but they are not drawn to them, they are not drawn. There is, as they say, no raisins, no peppercorns, no other spices or spices in them. They are cute, but bland, like diet bread without yeast and salt. Useful, correct, but boring.

Let's figure out what makes beautiful girls dull.

A persistent set of rules that are not subject to revision

A towel should hang on a hook, tea and coffee are served after dessert, a business suit requires stockings even in summer, and pink is not worn with green. That's what my mother and grandmother taught me. However, behind the usual set of standards, we do not notice that the world has changed. We are still standing under the umbrella and do not dare to fold it, although the sun has long been shining in the sky. Or we walk along the green grass in felt boots with galoshes.

Moreover, following the rules without reasoning is fraught with frustration: we expect others to follow these rules and are disappointed if they do not consider them generally accepted and important. For example, men do not give you tulips on March 8, which means that something is wrong in the world.

Current page: 1 (total book has 10 pages) [accessible reading excerpt: 6 pages]

Olga Tumanova
Female loneliness: how to get out of it

Approved for publication by the Publishing Council of the Russian Orthodox Church

IS R14-417-1569

Loneliness: a solution to the problem

Causes of loneliness: find and neutralize

The reasons for loneliness are as follows.

I don't respect men.

If this is your case, try the following exercise: at the sight of familiar and unfamiliar representatives of the stronger sex, repeat to yourself: "men are good."

I do not allow myself to be happier than my mother, grandmother, sister, girlfriend, work colleagues.

I suffer - it means that I am good and will go to heaven.

I am so afraid of the pain of a possible rupture of relationships that I do not enter into them at all.

I find family life boring and romantic suffering interesting and exciting.

One has only to understand and accept this, and happiness will overtake you.

5 ways to become a sad girl

Let's figure out what makes beautiful girls dull.

A persistent set of rules that are not subject to revision

repressed sexuality

You - oh horror! – sometimes look at men as a woman. And then you start to reproach yourself for it: well, how could I, I… I wanted him! Perhaps at some time in childhood or adolescence, your parents scolded you for being interested in boys, took away and defiantly threw a romance novel into the trash, and your passion for a young teacher plunged them into horror. Studying and helping with the housework was considered “the real thing,” and romance was considered “nonsense and nonsense.” As a result, any sexual desires are associated with prohibitions and a painful sense of guilt.

Attraction to the opposite sex is a natural feeling. It does not depend on you, and you should not blame yourself for it. It is only in your power to decide what to do with this feeling - immediately fall into the arms of the man who caused it or refrain, and spend energy on washing windows. It is worth blocking this energy channel, and from a living woman you will turn into a sour old maid, causing irritation not only in men, but also in your sister.

Fear of appearing intrusive

You do not dare to be the first to approach a stranger, express your opinion in a company, come to a birthday party to someone who did not call you very insistently? This happens with people whom their parents brushed off in childhood: “Don’t get in the way, now it’s not up to you.” As a result, the girl grows up confident that everyone and always has no time for her. She huddles on the cold landing, not daring to press the bell button, while fun reigns behind the cherished door.

What to do in this case? Convince from your own experience that there are people who are happy to see you and places where they want to see you. If you do not accept the first invitation "to the world" and patiently wait for the second, then you risk not waiting for it and missing a lot of interesting things.

Over-obsession with appearance

Even the path from the entrance to the nearest dumpster you do not dare to do without first putting on a complete make-up. No one should see you without the perfect haircut, so you're doing your hair in the train bathroom at 4:00 in the morning. Let there be ice in the yard, anyway you courageously wander to work in stiletto boots. On vacation in a Turkish hotel, you insistently ask the maid for an iron in different languages - you cannot go down to breakfast in unironed shorts!

No, I do not urge you to treat your appearance with disregard and in crowded places to appear unkempt, in faded jeans and a stretched T-shirt. But, think, what terrible thing will happen if others notice a slightly peeling varnish on the tip of your nail? A girl who spends a lot of energy on maintaining impeccability often looks like a museum porcelain doll - it’s scary to touch her, touch a hair, and she will crumble.

Lack of interest in people

Do you complain about the lack of close friends and loved one? But when you find yourself in a place where you can easily find both a loved one and friends, you are interested in everything, but not in people. You are absolutely not interested in what others think, what they feel, what is going on in their souls. In the company, such girls monotonously broadcast about something of their own, not really listening to the reaction of others.

If you want to be noticed and appreciated, then learn to listen to others. Believe me, people are very interesting. Letting them share their thoughts and feelings with you is more fun than scrolling through the Internet or watching a series. And they can also answer you the same if you stop being discouraged and show interest in them.

I got married at the age of 32, so I know firsthand the entire arsenal of advice listened to every day by a single girl who is “already over”. Unfortunately, experience has proven that you should not follow them: this will lead to even greater failures, and by no means turn you into a blooming enviable bride with an endless series of admirers. So if you hear any of the following, listen and do the opposite.

1. What are you all alone and alone? Go walk people

Many single women consider themselves obliged to attend various public events, to be, as they say, in plain sight. Today is the opening of an exhibition of icons. Tomorrow - a bus tour to Pereslavl-Zalessky. The day after tomorrow - a meeting of Facebook users in a cafe on Mayakovka. Not a moment of peace, not a moment of loneliness. After spending one evening at home in the company of an e-book, a blanket and a cup of tea, the girl already feels like a deserter: “What! Today I didn’t go anywhere and I didn’t meet anyone! Life is passing by!

Remember, the most important acquaintance in your life is getting to know yourself. If you don’t meet yourself, you won’t meet your happiness either: you simply won’t know what happiness means for you.

Crowded parties, acquaintances and excursions are, of course, good, but find at least a little time to be alone with yourself. Go to a cafe - where you like the view from the window and the interior, and not your company. Choose exactly what you want to eat from the menu - perhaps the very fact that you have completely different addictions than those of the people around you will become a discovery.

A city park, a museum, a bike path are all great places to get to know yourself.

2. The more time you spend with your girlfriends, the less likely you are to meet the right man.

Of course, we all read women's magazines and watched talk shows for housewives, and therefore we learned from our youth: girlfriends are rivals who only think how to beat off the emerging gentleman, and you need to get to know men in places where they congregate - somewhere at a football match or in a drink shop near the Kursk railway station.

In fact, a society of feminine girlfriends is what a single girl needs in the first place. Girlfriends are by no means enemies, but batteries from which you are charged with positive energy. It doesn’t matter if they are married or not, whether they have children, the main thing is that they look and feel like attractive women and have traditional female interests: among other things, they were interested in fashion news, nail polishes and discussed social gossip.

After meeting them, you will walk down the street feeling more like a woman than Mother Eve. Now you can go to football and to the conference on nuclear physics. Believe me, potential suitors, forgetting about everything, will be ready to follow you to the ends of the world.

3. Do you feel lonely? Go help those who are much worse: abandoned children, grandmothers in a nursing home, the homeless, prisoners

Advising a lonely girl, who, even without the load of someone else's pain, is incredibly difficult to “go help some unfortunate person” can be just as successful as doing a dozen squats and fifteen push-ups to a patient with a temperature of forty. Following this recommendation, the patient runs the risk of earning a heart complication, and a lonely girl - severe psychological burnout and, as a result, either a physical or mental illness.

Helping others and not destroying yourself is an art that future psychologists, educators and doctors have been teaching for years. And even far from all specialists manage to preserve the boundaries of their own personality - some will dissolve in patients and burn out, while others choose cold cynicism as protection.

If you want to help others, be happy yourself first. Only in this case you will be able to bring effective benefit to others.

4. You just don't know how to dress and make up! Come on, let's go shopping, and then we'll go to the beauty salon

Not a single woman in the world has ever been left alone because of being overweight, vulgar manners or bad taste. Come to any registry office and you will see that a variety of brides are in the application queue - beautiful and ugly, tastefully and vulgarly dressed, fat and thin, lively and quiet. Nevertheless, they all found their mate.

So we return to point 2, take a pencil and once and for all cross out from the list of girlfriends everyone who says so. To give such advice is to humiliate. By the age of 14, any girl knows perfectly well what color eyeshadow suits her, what clothes and hairstyle. And by graduation, she knows perfectly well how to behave in order to please a young man.

If a girl, knowing full well that in this terrible yellow blouse or in that shapeless gray hoodie, a man will definitely not like her, but chooses this yellow blouse or gray hoodie, then “to please a man” at this stage of life is not included in her plans. She made a choice in favor of loneliness, and it must be respected.

5. Petya is such a wonderful young man, and most importantly, unmarried. You should definitely introduce yourself. Come to my birthday, he will be there too

A lonely girl is lonely not because she has not yet met the beautiful Petya, but because she is simply not ready for any kind of relationship. A fateful meeting can only be when a person is open to it. In addition, arranging dates if they are not asked for is, again, a humiliation of human dignity. It is better to refuse such "care" delicately.

6. Give birth to a child for yourself or, in the Orthodox version, adopt

This phrase is periodically heard by every unmarried girl from the age of 23, as she gets older, such advice sounds more and more insistent.

Women who have consciously made the decision to become a single mother are usually treated favorably in the Orthodox environment: after all, she is not looking for pleasures in life, but for maternal achievement! It is not difficult to meet a priest who easily forgives the sin of having a relationship with a man outside of marriage in order to conceive a child. But let's be honest: it is impossible to give birth to a child “only for yourself”, “only for yourself”. Half of the father will always be present in the child, there is no escape from this, unless, of course, your baby is conceived naturally, and not created by cloning only maternal cells.

One sin - sexual intercourse with a man, married or single, but not going to marry you - will be followed by a web of other sins, from which you risk not being freed until death. What do single moms usually say when a child starts asking about their father? For example: "He was a military pilot and died saving his comrades in an air battle." But children, even the smallest ones, acutely feel lies and do not know how to forgive them. They can hold a grudge against their mother for deception for life. In addition, the child has the right to know the father. He has every right to his surname, attention, inheritance, communication with relatives from his side - grandmother, grandfather, half-brothers and sisters. And to deprive this child means to sin very strongly with a lie.

What if you tell the truth? In this case, a single mother finds herself in an extremely difficult situation. Instead of a legal marriage, where everything is clear and simple: father, mother, children, she becomes part of a conflicting and confusing system. Judge for yourself: a woman will be forced to communicate and build relationships with the father of her child, who may have other children and a jealous wife or parents who have a negative attitude towards the “suddenly” grandson.

It is not by chance that God has established a certain order of things - first you need to learn how to be a wife and only then a mother. Trying to be a mother with no experience of marriage is like going to eighth grade without finishing third.

As for the adoption of a child by a single mother, see point 3.

Before trying to help the unfortunate, you first need to heal your spiritual wounds and become happy yourself. The union of two unfortunates is by no means a guarantee of happiness - on the contrary, it is a misfortune squared.

7. How can you complain! Don't anger God. Compared to the life of a great-grandmother who survived the Leningrad blockade, yours is just golden

But this is not advice, but a reproach. In this case, to your bouquet of emotional traumas and experiences, “well-wishers” add another “flower” - a sense of guilt.

And, nevertheless, after such “advice”, many people have a question: where is the place for heroism in my lonely life? They don’t offer me to pray all night long, making a thousand bows, or go to the hospice for children dying of cancer, only pleasure and entertainment - friends, walks, cafes ...

A feat is to honestly admit to yourself: yes, I have a problem. I can’t do what others do easily and naturally: start relationships, get married, give birth and raise children. Your ascetic feat is to understand the reasons for your loneliness and find a way out of it, to work hard so that there is one less lonely woman in the world and one more happy woman.

Current page: 1 (total book has 10 pages) [accessible reading excerpt: 7 pages]