The funny thing is I have a wife and four kids so I am never alone, but painfully lonely.
Remove religion to create a church-like experience and you have nothing to hold people together.
Also worth noting that in most churches people have a reason greater than their own selfish interests in socializing to hold them together.
Unfortunately the median age in UU seems to be about 80. I'm not sure 20-somethings looking for community are going to find it among grandparents.
What we really crave is a place for discussing ethics, morals and general life guidelines.
Church has many interesting properties that have been abandoned (due to obsolescence of the content, but not the form!): you can be just a passive observer in Church. You're with other people, which generally act supportively in this environment, and you can just be there amongst others without speaking, only hearing both comforting and hopefully useful ethical guidelines. You're hearing that you're loved and that everyone should love eachother -- which is usually true in the first case, and generally accepted in the latter -- but sometimes a reminder is really due.
Then if you have a problem you don't feel like sharing with anyone else, you have this guy, the priest, which has essentially a confidentiality agreement that you can safely tell him whatever. If you have a problem you can ask for guidance. The priest can usually pull some strings to get other churchgoers to assist you if necessary too (especially easy but important things like emotional support).
What we have today as non-religious individuals are for the most part psychologists, which have many issues:
-- You don't get the participation feel from joining a large group of people, and interacting with the ones you are interested in that group;
-- They tend to view your problems as disorders, when sometimes all you need is the presence of a group of people for alleviating light emotional distress;
-- They don't feel too confident giving advice, and they probably shouldn't, since they may not have experience with your situation (whereas some churchgoers might);
and very important:
-- They are expensive, while church is completely free.
In a web jargon, psychologists don't scale very well. Suppose everybody went to see a psychologist, and each psychologist had 10 patients. Then at least 10% of the population needs to be psychologists. Instead you could get k -- a lot better than 1 -- mutual confidants by connecting with a k person subgroup out of a larger meeting. And when you can't find a suitable subgroup, you have a speaker giving general advice for a very large number of people.
We need non-religious churches.
I've never gone, but I've thought about it.
(I'm not a Christian, so can't say too much.)
If you want something that's certified to be Christian-free, you might want to look up the humanist branches of the Freemasons. Or some of the humanist Quakers.
Or just pick any random hobby like swing dancing for a community around it.
There's a good site for this kind of thing though, if someone just wants to talk something over - https://www.7cups.com/. Not a group thing like church, but a pretty good stop gap until something better comes along I suppose.
In some countries. In other they're free.
Not to be rude, but how can that be ? Isn't your wife supposed to be your best/closest friend ?
I'm a loner myself and have no experience with relationships so I have no idea what it's like to be in one but you make it sound kind of pointless.
A partner is different than a friend. I have wonderful times with my girlfriend and I love hanging out with her. But I can't bitch to my girlfriend about how my girlfriend drives me up the wall when she leaves her crap everywhere, or how annoying it is when her allergies act up and the constant sniffling makes me want to claw my brains out.
Bitching/venting about your partner is important, you need friends for that.
My girlfriend will also never understand just why it's so important to be the fastest out of a random group of guys down a hill on a bike or akateboard. Yeah it's dangerous and dumb but I can't let the other fuckers beat me in a pointless competition now can I?
Need guy friends to do atupid guy things. Women don't get it.
No, although that's a common misconception; it can turn out that way, but rarely does, and there's nothing of necessity wrong with a relationship in which it does not.
I was married myself for about a decade, and also painfully lonely through most of it despite being nearly never physically alone. I've operated under the impression that this had to do with the abusive nature of that relationship, and wasn't representative of any general case. Now I'm starting to wonder if I might not have been wrong about that. Certainly I still hesitate to draw any kind of general conclusion from my own experience of marriage - but I'm hearing a lot more lately from men whose experiences in this regard are similar, despite their relationships generally not appearing to be so.
No, although that's a common misconception; it can turn out that way, but rarely does, and there's nothing of necessity wrong with a relationship in which it does not.
Just to provide a counter anecdote. My wife is very definitely my best and closest friend.
Quite aside from that, though, I'm still not seeing any reason to assume that relationships in general exhibit this problem - only that it's not quite as uncommon as the highly atypical nature of my own experience led me to surmise.
(Or what I hope to be the highly atypical nature, anyway. If marriages like mine are anything except vanishingly uncommon, that's a serious problem. There are so many improbable circumstances around the way mine started that I've seen no reason to assume many similar relationships exist - but on reflection it occurs to me that I've failed to account for the possibility of stochastic convergence.)
You're not required to have kids.
I guess what I'm trying to figure out is why even start a relationship if you don't get anything out of it. Never mind getting to the point where you start producing kids.
No, but a lot of people want to. (A lot of people have kids without the formality of a relationship, too, but that's a whole 'nother kind of problem.)
I guess I'd say that for most people there are a lot of reasons to want to be in a relationship - good reasons and bad ones alike. With rare exception, nobody goes into a relationship expecting that it won't improve their life in some way, and if you're not seeing what you might get out of one, then I can't see any reason why you should start one.
It seems like a lot of people do eventually discover that they don't get out of a given relationship what they hoped they might, or what they previously did - but that's also a whole 'nother kind of problem, and because it often involves strongly felt responsibilities to people other than oneself, a kind that is rarely easy to solve even if there's no clear way to incrementally improve upon the status quo.
I don't think I've done a very good job explaining it here, but I'm not sure how I might do a better one.
> Not to be rude, but how can that be ?
I have heard this many times. A marriage can be lonely. A wife can also be your best friend. Chances are, you will feel both throughout the same marriage.
The same is true of friendship too. I have felt close and far away, pleased and angry, with the same friend at different times. That's how all relationships are. They are living things. They can be one thing one day, and different the next, all depending on what each of you do.
We seem to think that success in a relationship depends mostly on choosing the right person at the outset, and then the rest is automatic. If we choose the right person, a lifetime of effortless happiness. If we choose the wrong one, a lifetime of grief no matter how hard we try.
The truth is that relationships, like all living things, must be daily cultivated, by each of you. You can do everything right, but if the other person chooses to do bad things, the relationship will sour. That's the beauty and the terror of independent wills.