Be nice and gently welcoming to the curmudgeons you meet. Invite them to share coffee. Don’t push for reciprocal invitations, perhaps. And if you happen to be the curmudgeon, accept that invitation. It isn’t coming from a predator out to devour you. The lonelier you are, the more your attention is drawn toward negative social information, says one of the researchers, John Cacioppo, whose colleague and wife, Stephanie, led the study, which appeared in the journal Cortex. Lonely people seemed inadvertently hypervigilant to social threats. To read more, click here.
My first job out of undergraduate school was at a large medical center in the Midwest where my job was to help hospitalized children adjust to their hospital experience. I also provided supportive counseling to the parents. It didn’t take long to notice something interesting about the parents of these very sick and sometimes terminal children. Having a very sick child took its toll on the parents’ relationship. My informal observation noted that probably half or more of the parents who started the hospital experience as an intact couple actually ended their experience still intact. It was far too often that the parents ended up either divorced or separated. I started asking a lot of questions about “Why?” Why could one set of parents make it and another couple, that was in similar circumstances, could not survive this ordeal? I have carried that question with me for a very long time. Only recently did I find answers. 