Just as I begin to write this, with the sort of grim synchronicity that I've begun to get suspicious of recently, I hear a thunderous door slam, across the courtyard from me. It sounds like someone's trying to kick a door in. I hear a man shouting "Get out!"

Within a few seconds, the forlorn figure of a woman, carrying a load of things in her arms, walks slowly out of the passageway opposite, with her head down and long hair in her eyes; and within a moment she allows herself to fall onto one of the seats in the courtyard, and she cries. It's the cry of despair, that wail when it's all over, when the defeat is final. I can't watch her, but can't not.
She surveys the jumble of things that have spilled on the table in front of her, and begins to put some of them toiletries, brushes, and things like that, into her handbag. She's trembling, and her cries have become like hiccoughs. When she's done, she puts her hands to her face for a couple of minutes, and then stands up and leaves, hugging her bags.
I considered going out to her, to somehow show a gesture of solidarity with the broken-hearted, but decide that the last thing she needs is to cope with a strange man, however well-intentioned, saying he knows how she feels. How could anyone else know how she feels, in that moment?
Romantic love, when it is over, is about one thing: the realisation that you are utterly alone in the world. In the throes of heartbreak, it is impossible to accept that there is anyone else in the world that hurts like you, that feels like you.
After Romance is the time when you most clearly see yourself, like that cruel moment at 3am in a nightclub when the fluorescent lights come on, and you catch sight of your drunken face in a mirror. It's when all your illusions and pretences about yourself have been stripped away, when the fantasy that you are an evolved 21st Century human being, above such Neanderthal forces as rage and revenge and hate, collapses around your ears.
It's when you realise the myth that you have for yourself has to change, for although you thought you were being nice and pleasant and accommodating, you were hiding such a desperate need for intimacy that it affected every move you made. You become aware of how readily you were willing to sacrifice your pride in favour of a relationship. And you didn't see it. You can't see it.
Romantic love is about dreams, longings, wishes; not about really seeing someone as they are. Everything switches into a state of potential, of imminence what is reflected back in each other's eyes is the essence of hope, of optimism, of expansiveness, a future yet unlived. It's an act of faith, that trust is possible, that someone is interested in you, that someone cares. That someone is ready to catch you should you fall. It's a blissful state. Some people manage to keep it going for years.
The deeper you fall in romantic love, the more you are willing, on some level, to neglect yourself. Perhaps it's a sign of how much you have been neglecting yourself, not loving yourself, not enjoying life. As Charity Hope Valentine says in the film Sweet Charity, when her fiance jilts her with the words "I'd destroy you": "Well, that's OK, I'm not doing much anyway".
James Hillman, in his marvellous book, The Soul's Code, writes about the "pool of loneliness" after relationships have ended. "We feel ourselves curiously depersonalised, very far away. Exiled. No connection anywhere. The spirit of loneliness has taken over."
Far from seeing loneliness as pathological, Hillman sees the way we have defended ourselves against it as being highly suspect. We can blame society, and see it in political terms; if society were different, then people wouldn't feel this pain of loneliness. That's been one way I've worked with it; if gay men were more open about their feelings, and not ashamed of them, then the next generation will be spared the loneliness that I have endured. It's illogical, but it's what has driven me anyway.
We can look to therapy to cure us of it; if I understand myself and how I relate better, then I will become more lovable. Build up a circle of friends, join groups of like-minded people, think positively, meditate, hug trees. After nine fucking years of therapy, I'm still single. There's always Prozac.
We can see it in theological terms; loneliness as a sign that we have been cut off from God, the wages of sin for living a life corrupted by materialism and sexuality. Loneliness, in so many ways, is a sin, proof that you are a non-believer. Mea culpa.
The existential way seems most attractive to me now: "build the project of your life with your own heroic hands" as Hillman so eloquently puts it, when you forge a life out of the deepest feelings of meaninglessness. The challenge is to turn loneliness into individual strength. But fear cannot be permitted in the rigorous wasteland of existentialism. Fear is weakness. And who isn't afraid? To live life truly existentially is to disallow interdependence and relationship, for each moment must be lived to the full without reference to any other being, trust being impossible.
Hillman says that to be alive is to feel lonely. Desperation grows worse when we seek ways out of despair. The archetypal quality of loneliness is not necessarily a painful experience; it has flavours of nostalgia, sadness, and a yearning imagination for "something else" not here, not now.
Each of us finds ways of coping with this sense of loneliness as best we can. Some take more numbing routes, such as drink, mindless sex, and other drugs. Some take the religious route: seeking redemption for the original sin of self-consciousness, of the exile from the Garden of Eden, by a life of penance and service to a God of certainty. Some put it into their work, their art, their music. Some become super-rational, flying from their feelings.
And some just fumble their way through life like a child searching in the dark for some big strong hands to reach down and make it alright.