“I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness,” wrote the poet and critic Maggie Nelson in her 2009 book Bluets. When I read these words, they struck a chord. I’ve been thinking a lot about loneliness over the last few years as I’ve drifted in and out of various forms of it myself, the most extreme form coming, unsurprisingly, in 2020. Is there dignity to be had in it? Perhaps not, and perhaps that’s why we find it so difficult to talk about or admit to. A few months into the Covid-19 outbreak, people started to talk about a corresponding “loneliness pandemic”. Pages appeared on the NHS and Red Cross websites advising how to cope with the isolation thrust upon us by the global health crisis and its accompanying lockdown. But before this year, various reports claimed that loneliness had reached dangerous and even life-threatening epidemic levels, and in 2018 Theresa May launched a UK government “loneliness strategy”. Such concerns have always been particularly heightened during winter and around Christmas, a time when charities and politicians frequently urge festive revellers to think about and reach out to the lonely and vulnerable. There isn’t much talk in all this, though, of what loneliness actually is, what it feels like or where it comes from. In these scenarios it is an affliction: distant, othered and slightly frightening, coming to us in the form of elderly people at Christmas, the recently widowed, those who are unloved or forgotten about. But thinking about it as some kind of disease is wrongheaded. The historian Fay Bound Alberti, who has written a “biography” of the condition, argues that this way of thinking suggests “that it’s coming from the outside, rather than being something that is a social problem”. Loneliness, then, is partly produced by the way we organise the world – and to address it we need to seriously rethink how we approach our public spaces, housing arrangements and relationships. This includes questioning our dependency on certain forms of relationship – the couple and the nuclear family – as units of social organisation. I first started properly thinking about all this around the summer of 2017. I had recently come out of a 12-year relationship and, not unrelatedly, had moved to Ireland to work on my PhD, that most solitary of endeavours. After years of coupled domesticity, I was living alone. Solitude is not the same as loneliness, of course – as Nelson puts it, “loneliness is solitude with a problem” – and some of this was OK: I read, I walked, I wrote, I went out and made new friends. But my isolation, coupled with the rawness of a recent heartbreak, frequently was a problem. At such times I would message friends and family back home, filling my phone screen with three, four, five WhatsApp chats, and in these exchanges they described their own struggles: too much to do, not enough time or space for themselves, an excess of people and stuff to look after. The contrast in our predicaments seemed, at times, completely absurd and, above all, wasteful. I often wondered whether it wouldn’t make sense to bolt my household on to one of theirs, to redistribute some of my caring resources and they, in turn, to share some of the human company that I often craved. That “bolting on” was, I suppose, a kind of pre-Covid version of the “support bubble”, though there was a greater flexibility in my vision. The “household” has taken on particularly rigid meanings this year, as we have been forced to spend practically all of our time in our homes and been severely restricted from mixing with others. This has made all of us consider the realities of our living arrangements in new ways. Feminists have long pointed out that the burden of housework and childcare overwhelmingly falls on women – and lockdown has made these inequalities more stark. For me, as somebody living alone, lockdown has meant dealing with a relentless and often grinding solitude and so I’ve returned to the alternative living arrangements I pondered back in 2017 with a new seriousness. At the age of 41 I have decided that I no longer want to live alone, but what do I do about this? I’ve had some extremely rewarding cohabiting relationships in house and flatshares in my life, but in reality this form of living is not taken seriously or supported by our society’s approach to housing. Too often houseshares exist in the context of the precarious rental market and are perceived as stopgaps on the way to the more permanent and “adult” arrangements of homeownership, a family, marriage, or at the very least cohabitation with a romantic partner. But I don’t want to depend on a romantic partner to avoid solitude and I don’t think anybody – single or partnered – should have to. Many second-wave feminists thought hard about how to organise homes and communities in a way that uncouples caregiving from essentialist ideas of family and distributes it across communities; there have also long been efforts in the LGBTQ community to develop alternative family models on similar principles in response to the challenges they have faced. These ideas are revisited and updated in the recently published, collectively authored Care Manifesto, which imagines more expansive models of kinship than traditional family models and aims to reclaim “forms of genuinely collective and communal life”. The experiences we’ve all weathered in 2020 have shown how important and urgent this project is. Such considerations should not be seen as optional add-ons when we talk about the world we want to live in after the pandemic. Let’s imagine ways of doing things differently that enable us all to live in more communal, less isolated and more pleasurable ways. Eli Davies is a writer and academic researcher, and the co-editor of Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, an anthology of women’s music writing