Loneliness and Love

Lately, I’ve been going through a different phase of life. One where I feel physically and emotionally alone. I’m far from my friends and the usual places that made me feel connected. In that solitude, I found myself reaching for an old book—White Nights by Dostoevsky. A story I once read as a romantic tale, but now… now it feels different.

Back then, I saw it as a melancholic yet tender love story between Nastenka and the narrator. But this time, I saw something else. Something deeper, heavier—loneliness. A hunger for companionship. A desperation that neither of them could admit out loud.

The narrator speaks of “the goddess of Fancy,” who dwells in dreams and illusions. Are we all not, at some point, her disciples? Dreamers looking for a perfect connection in an imperfect world? When we are lonely, it doesn’t just echo in our rooms—it echoes in our hearts. It hollows us out slowly. And when someone crosses our path during that hollowing, we cling to them—not always out of love, but out of the fear of being alone again.

In White Nights, the narrator is a lonely man. Nastenka is a lonely woman. And what brings them together is not just affection, but desperation. He pours his soul into their first conversation—not because he trusts her, but because he needs someone to see him. She listens—not because she’s in love, but because she too needs to be seen.

We humans often sugarcoat our loneliness. It’s easier to say “I’m in love” than to say “I’m with her because I’m lonely.” But that’s what makes the story so brutally honest. It forces you to ask: Was it love? Or was it loneliness dressed up in affection?

I don’t think White Nights is a love story anymore. I think it’s a story about what we do with our loneliness. Sometimes we transform it into love. Sometimes we lose ourselves in it. Sometimes we meet someone who mirrors it so well, we mistake it for fate. Sometimes, what we call “romance” is just a conversation between two lonely hearts trying to make sense of the silence.

But what happens when the night ends, and dawn arrives?

That’s a question I’m still sitting with.