We do not know how to love: an elegy for the civilisation that forgot.

There is a metric no government tracks. No GDP figure captures it. No productivity report measures it. No Surgeon General has yet declared a national emergency in its name — though one came close.

And the metric is this: how well do we love?

Not how much we feel. Feeling is easy. Feeling is the passive weather that comes and goes.

I mean how well we show up — in the moment when another person needs us to be larger than ourselves. How well we set down the heavy luggage of our own narrative and actually enter the room where someone else is standing.

By this measure, we are failing. We are failing in ways the data has been screaming at us for years, in ways that are now so ordinary we mistake them for the human condition.

They are not the human condition. They are a civilisational pathology. And I am tired. I am grieving. And I am angry.

The Numbers We Should Be Ashamed Of

In 2025, the American Psychological Association surveyed over 3,000 adults. They found that nearly seven in ten — 69% — said they needed more emotional support over the past year than they actually received.

There is a crisis of showing up. People surrounded by other people, drowning in plain sight.

More than half of those surveyed reported feeling isolated. Half reported feeling left out. Half said they lacked companionship.

Half.

This is not the data of a fringe population. This is the median experience of a modern adult life.

The US Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. By early 2024, 30% of adults reported experiencing loneliness at least once a week. One in ten, every single day. And the loneliest of all — the demographic you might least expect — are the young. Adults aged 18 to 34. The most digitally connected generation in history. 79% of adults aged 18 to 24 report feeling lonely. They have more ways to reach people than any humans have ever had, and they have never been more alone.

We built infrastructure for contact and called it connection. We were wrong.

The Self That Cannot Step Aside

Here is where I need to say something harder, because the loneliness statistics are the wound, but I want to talk about the instrument of the wound.

We are a civilisation in love with ourselves.

Not in the healthy, boundaried, self-respectful way that the wellness industry has tried to sell us. I mean something older and sadder and more corrosive. I mean the kind of self-absorption that has been slowly rising in the data for decades, so normalised now that we barely notice it — like the water temperature rising around the frog.

In 1963, 12% of adolescents agreed with the statement “I am an important person.” By 1992, that figure had risen to between 77 and 80%. Narcissism scores on the standard psychological inventory rose 30% between 1979 and 2006 among American college students. By 2009, twice as many students answered the majority of questions in a narcissistic direction compared with their 1982 counterparts.

This is a cultural curriculum. Individualism, taught as virtue. Self-optimisation, sold as enlightenment. The language of our era is a language of the first person singular.

And here is the grief of it: you can love someone deeply and still be so occupied with the storyline of your own life — your wounds, your needs, your tiredness, your righteousness — that you simply are not there when they need you.

I am not speaking about narcissists in the clinical sense. I am speaking about all of us. About the way we half-listen because we are already composing our response. About the way we make someone else’s pain a supporting character in our own emotional narrative. About how we mistake self-awareness for presence and call it growth.

Self-awareness without the capacity to leave yourself is still just a more sophisticated form of self-obsession.

What We Do Instead of Showing Up

We have become extraordinarily creative at love’s simulacra.

We send the message. We react to the post. We ask how they are and are already scrolling before the answer arrives. We say “I’m here for you” and mean it — in the abstract, in the version of ourselves we prefer — but when the specific, inconvenient, poorly-timed moment of another person’s need arrives, we are busy. We are tired. We are processing our own things. We will circle back.

We have outsourced intimacy to performance and called it enough.

A 2024 study found that 72% of couples lack daily intimacy. Not physical intimacy specifically — intimacy in the full sense. The being-known-and-knowing. And it is not simply time that erodes this. Researchers found that emotional disconnection is cited as the primary cause in over 70% of cases of relational withdrawal. We are not absent because we are busy. We are absent because we have quietly forgotten how to be present.

The research on intimacy avoidance is meticulous in its despair. When shame is high — and it is high, it is extraordinarily high in a culture that monetises aspiration — the self-concealment, the perfectionism, the fear of being truly seen, compounds into patterns of avoidance that researchers describe as particularly damaging in close relationships. We protect ourselves from the intimacy we are dying for.

This is tragic. And it is everywhere.

What Love Actually Requires

Love — not the feeling, but the act — requires something we have systematically under-developed: the capacity to make yourself temporarily smaller than another person’s need.

Not erased. Not martyred. Not pathologically self-abandoning. I am not speaking of the old wound-language of codependency. I am speaking of something precise and dignified: the moment of genuine self-transcendence in which you recognise that this, right now, is not about you, and you rise to meet it.

And this is practised. It is the thing that atrophies when it is never exercised, and the thing that deepens when it is brought to the mat, over and over, in the ordinary moments of ordinary relationships — the conversation you stay present for when you are exhausted, the grief you witness without rushing to resolve it, the need you meet when meeting it is inconvenient.

We have confused feeling love with doing love. And feelings, left to metabolise on their own, evaporate.

The Elegy

I am not angry at people. I am angry at what we have made.

We made a world that rewards self-promotion and calls it confidence. That celebrates personal branding and calls it authenticity. That built a thousand platforms for performance and forgot to build a single one for witness.

We made a world where the deepest thing we can ask of another person — stay with me, be here, let my reality matter to you — has become somehow too much. Too needy. Too exposed. Where vulnerability is a podcast topic and an actual liability in lived relationship.

We measured our advancement in GDP and technological output and longevity statistics and the sheer volume of information we can transmit in a second.

We forgot to measure how well we love.

And by that measure — the only one that determines whether a life is actually livable — we have regressed.

This is the grief of our era. Not that we do not feel love. We feel it. We feel it intensely, in the private rooms of ourselves, for the people who matter to us.

We just cannot seem to get out of our own way long enough to deliver it.

This essay is part of The Soft Body Revolution — a Substack exploring the somatic, relational, and esoteric dimensions of what it means to be human.

By Sigourney Belle