I was surprised when the results struck a chord for me, a near 43-year-old working woman with three children, plenty of friends, and a network of extended family. How can it be that I feel lonely? Shouldn’t I be at the peak of my social powers? 

I certainly give less of a shit about what people think of me. I’ve achieved some of my life goals. I’m healthy and, for the most part, happy.

I have had plenty of periods of being alone in my life, but it’s only recently that I’ve begun to feel lonely. I was the first of my friends to have babies and then I made it even more challenging by living abroad. I spent many mornings trying to chat up fellow mums in playgrounds, pretending to be fascinated by their children’s sleeping patterns.

The lonesomeness of an expat is a very different type of loneliness because you are constantly caught between two worlds — it’s a kind of hollowness that can only be sated by a plane ticket.

I know what it is like to feel alone. Feeling lonely is different. 

I feel it most acutely now when I want to talk to someone and I blame my reliance on WhatsApp for it.

I have a good number of friends on WhatsApp. I have a book group, a writers’ group, a music group, a podcast group. I even have a gardening group. My phone is always pinging. I enjoy it, don’t get me wrong. 

My WhatsApp groups provide comfort, the odd belly laugh, and a sense of camaraderie, particularly with friends who live away. I wouldn’t and couldn’t do without them.

But WhatsApp is limited. It keeps us in contact, yes, but it doesn’t provide real connection. It doesn’t replace the beauty of familiar voices and faces. It tricks us in a way, into thinking we’re not missing out when we are. I have so many friends now who only exist in message form. And because of WhatsApp, it would be really strange of me to pick up the phone and call them.

I know this because I react with horror when someone calls me. Often, I won’t answer.

Isn’t that odd? 

That it is strange for friends, in regular WhatsApp contact, to call one another? I might message someone every few days and yet, if they were to call me, I’d watch the phone ring out. Then I’d message, asking if they were okay. If they meant to call. 

As if some life-altering event must have occurred for them to actually press the call button. As if a phone call has somehow become an act of emergency.

What has happened? Is this just me? I have spent hours upon hours building friendships in the actual company of friends and they have somehow been reduced to little pictures, texts, emojis and gifs.

Life has happened I guess, and we are all just too busy.

I’m busy too, but I’m also lonely because I know that in my heart of hearts there are only two people I can conceivably call if I need to hear someone’s actual voice. 

Of course, I can call my parents any time of day, but it is not for them to hear my worries, not at their stage of life.

No, the only two people I can call to chat through a mood or a problem, a whim or a fancy, are my sister and my husband. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m endlessly grateful to have them. My dad always says if you can count your good friends on one hand you’re doing well. 

But the people on my hand or either legally bound to me or related to me. Is that right? 

My husband is subjected to my ramblings on a daily basis anyway and probably doesn’t need a 3pm phone call at work about my latest social faux pas. 

My sister lives in another county, so the phone calls make more sense as I don’t see her every day.

Maybe I feel a loss because I remember my mum’s Friday night phone calls so clearly. I can see now, her bum resting on the kitchen stool, the glass of white wine slowly, gloriously descending on the countertop, marking the end of her week with us four, savouring the chats with her sisters and her many friends. How lucky she was.

And still is, as it turns out. 

My mum, though limited in her mobility and well into her 70s, talks to her friends at length on the phone every day. My phone might be pinging but hers is actually ringing. 

They meet up on a weekly basis too and know the intricacies of one another’s lives in a way that myself and my friends simply don’t, beyond the odd photo or update. I know a lot of that has to do with being past mid-life responsibilities, but the difference between us is perhaps starker than it needs to be.

Truthfully, I think I’m on the cusp of staging my own small rebellion. 

I’m going to start calling the amazing friends I have on my phone. It might feel to them that a gun is cocked in their faces but I am turning up fully loaded, ready to say that brave little word. Hello.

I actually tested it out last week, but it was a kind of dummy run because this one friend has always maintained a commitment to the old-fashioned phone call. She was that one person in school who would buck against the trend, and she never fell into the WhatsApp trap like the rest of us, not fully. 

Last Friday, I rang her to check in. She thanked me for calling and I think she meant it. I finished our call with a completely different feeling than I would have if I had just sent a smiley face emoji.

Unlike Stevie Wonder, we don’t have to call to say we love anyone. In this odd age of WhatsApp the act of calling might just say it for us.