This is a feeling many single women over 40 know well, even if they don’t mention it.
She arrived at the holiday party just after eight. The host’s living room glowed with candles and string lights, the air thick with wine and perfume and competing conversations. She handed over her bottle of red, accepted a glass of white, and moved into the crowd.
For twenty minutes, she stayed in motion. Smiled at the right moments. Laughed when the group laughed. Made small talk with a woman she half-knew from yoga. The conversation was pleasant enough—travel plans, a new restaurant downtown, something about a podcast they’d both heard. Then the woman’s husband appeared with her coat. “We should get going,” he said, his hand already on her lower back. They were gone within minutes.
She stayed another hour. Long enough that leaving wouldn’t seem abrupt. Long enough to seem like she’d had a good time.
Walking back to her car, she passed house after house strung with lights. Through uncurtained windows, she could see the interiors: couples loading dishwashers, families collapsed on couches, the remains of their evening. All those enclosed worlds, held together by their own closeness.
She drove home in silence. Put her keys in the bowl by the door. Hung up her coat. Her home looked exactly as she’d left it three hours earlier—tidy, quiet, waiting for no one.
And she understood, standing there, what this season made impossible to ignore: she wasn’t the point of anyone’s evening. Wasn’t the person anyone’s plans were built around. She had a life—work, friends, a full life she’d created—but she didn’t have this. Being essential to someone’s holiday. Being missed if she weren’t there.
No one had been waiting for her to arrive at the party. The host was warm, the conversations pleasant. When she left, people said goodbye. But no one needed her there. She was there, part of the evening, but not important to anyone’s night.
She didn’t need a spotlight. She wasn’t looking for attention. But she felt the difference between being welcomed and being central. And once you feel it, it becomes hard to ignore.
What holidays sometimes make clear is this: you can have a meaningful life of your own, and still be peripheral to everyone else’s celebration. Not excluded. Not forgotten. Just not the person anyone had come specifically to see.
You see it in how other people move through their days. The coordination, the planning, the way they talk about obligations. Their lives pull them toward specific people. They’re expected somewhere. Needed at a certain time. Part of something that doesn’t work without them.
You go to the gatherings, talk, join in — and then you go home, and it’s silent. No one’s waiting. No one’s expecting you.
Why This Loneliness Feels Hard to Name
There are people she could call. Friends who would listen. But saying it out loud feels off.
“I’m lonely during the holidays” sounds like she has no one. Which isn’t true. She has people.
“I wish I mattered more to someone” feels like she wants something she’s supposed to be past wanting.
So she doesn’t say anything. She keeps it to herself, partly out of pride, partly because she’s genuinely not sure how to name something that exists alongside a life that looks perfectly functional.
When you’re single and over forty, people expect you to have outgrown wanting this. You’re supposed to be evolved. Independent. Beyond needing anything as ordinary as being someone’s priority. You’ve had decades to figure yourself out, to build a life that works without waiting for someone else to complete it.
And maybe you have done that. Maybe your life is genuinely full and meaningful. But that doesn’t erase the loneliness of moving through the holidays untethered. A good life doesn’t cancel out that ache.
Talking about it risks being misunderstood. People hear “I’m lonely” and assume you’re falling apart. Or they try to solve it with things that miss the point. “You should join a group.” As if the loneliness is about having nothing to do.
When Loneliness Needs Permission
Loneliness doesn’t announce itself. It sits in the room with you — the stillness, the untouched glass on the counter, the way the night ends, and there’s no one else in it with you.
You don’t have to dress it up or reason it away. You’re simply living through a season that sharpens exactly what’s missing.
There’s no failure in admitting that. It’s a simple truth: wanting to matter to someone is part of being human, not a lapse in independence.
You don’t have to broadcast it. You don’t have to explain it. But you can see it for what it is, without pushing it away. Some feelings deserve your attention.
And when you come home at the end of a long day — keys in the bowl, coat on the hook, your home exactly as you left it — the emptiness comes through clearly. Wanting to deeply matter to someone is natural.
Saying that to yourself isn’t weakness. It’s clarity. It means being honest about what intimacy is for you.
Feeling it this clearly—without minimizing it or explaining it away—can make you willing to fight for what you want.
A Choice You May Not Have Given Yourself Yet
You know you want something different from your love life than what you’ve lived so far. And something in you knows it’s time to give this part of your life the same priority you give to everything else that’s genuinely important.
This is a moment you don’t want to lose.
A year moves fast. Beginning now gives you the best chance of having the relationship you want because it gives you more time.
I work privately with accomplished women who want a more intelligent, effective way to approach love and attraction.
Our work is discreet, personal, and designed to help you make choices that lead to the relationship you want.
You can contact me directly here if you’d like to be in touch.
