I lived with loneliness. It was a long and happy relationship. We had our routines, our "in" jokes, mementos from trips we'd taken together. We adopted cats, and cooked really great dinners. We spent most of our evenings in each other's company. We had friends and enjoyed ourselves at parties, but at the end of the evening, I always went home with her. I loved her. I often defended her presence in my life. I was happy living with loneliness. One day she whispered to me, "I am just a messenger."

"What?" I cried, incredulous, when I saw her hand on the door. Loneliness didn't love me. She was leaving me. "But, I'm fat, I'm over forty, I'm moody as a teenager. I'm, I'm…"—it's not that I like the word, but I knew it would have the most impact—"I'm crippled!" My rant had no effect on her. She left me anyway. I cried for days. And my future spouse moved in.

When I met Asha, she seemed happy in her coupledom. She and her husband had just moved in upstairs from me. The night they came downstairs to meet me, I was tired from a long day at my social work job. I invited them in and chatted, hoping they wouldn't stay too long. She was pleasant and interesting. I had a terrible thought, "Oh God, someone else who wants to be my friend!" They were so cozy together on my sofa, Asha and her husband. Little did I know that she lived with loneliness too. Her husband left town a week later to finish some business in the state they'd moved from. I got a call from Asha asking if I would spend her birthday with her. So we had dinner. A really good dinner. And we laughed. A lot. In fact, fast forward—we fell in love.

The truth is that I had been somewhat unfaithful to loneliness. That's why she left me. I had been asking the universe to help me change my life. And as it so often happens, the universe answered in its own time and in its own way. I had to be ready to let loneliness go. I had to be ready to accept that the love that completed my heart was from a woman and not a man. Four years later, we have the daughter we dreamed of, with another on the way. We sold our first love nest for a rambling old farmhouse where our children will grow up and our healing center will be. There have been moments since my marriage that loneliness has come to sit next to me quietly, like the night I had to come home from the hospital without my wife and newborn daughter. The extra hospital days were just a precaution, but I could feel and I could see what it would be like to live with loneliness again, my home just a house, my soul lost without that anchor of love. I literally wept for all those people who must face loneliness again following the loss of a child or a spouse.

We are not meant to live with loneliness. The abundant universe lavishes us with opportunities not to, but often we must heal enough to recognize them. Often we must heal to accept love. Loneliness wants us to know she is just a messenger. She will seek to leave us in the hands of enduring love when we least expect it.