It’s hailed as the best night of the week. Whether it’s a hot date, a night out with friends, or a takeaway with the family, Friday night marks the beginning of two glorious days of freedom.
So it begs the question: why does it feel so damn lonely sometimes?
While the phrase that ‘Friday feeling’ is meant to signify a joyous end to the working week, it can actually feel like the total opposite.
One TikToker shared these exact feelings in a vulnerable video which hit nearly a million views on the platform.
She said: ‘I just cried for the last 30 minutes. I feel like it always hits me on a Friday night when I have to make plans because I didn’t do it earlier in the week and I feel lonely as f**k because everyone is coupled up.
‘You usually have a buddy who is single but that gets more scarce as you get older.’
She added that making friends is harder as you get older, and that you can’t see your old friends every day like you used to because many of them have moved away.
‘It’s f**king hard and it makes me depressed. I hope somebody else is feeling this way and it’s not just me. I don’t even know how to explain it,’ she added.
‘I just didn’t think at this point I’d be where I am today. Here I am, crying about being alone.’
In another TikTok she said: ‘The way that we define being alone can be vastly different from one another. You can be in a relationship and feel alone, you can be married and feel alone, you can be single and feel alone, you can have plenty of friends and feel alone.’
Clinical psychologist Marianne Trent says that social media is partly to blame for making us feel like everyone is having a wild Friday night – apart from you.
She tells Metro.co.uk: ‘The tricky thing with the digital age is that it is possible to be virtually surrounded by lots of people and yet never have felt lonelier.
‘There’s always been water cooler chat on Mondays and Fridays around what we are doing at the weekend and what we might just have done.
‘However, social media now means that not only are we seeing what other people have planned, but that it might be beautifully curated and therefore appear much more gratifying than it actually was or will be.’
The can also be a pressure to have fun at the weekend.
‘Sometimes, perhaps especially when work or study mid-week isn’t feeling that enjoyable there can be a focus on making the weekends count,’ says Marianne.
‘This can then feel like an incredible amount of pressure especially if the things we plan fall through or aren’t like we hoped they would be.
‘Maybe we hoped that a certain activity would lead to a sense of being emotionally connected to those we spent time with but for a variety of reasons that didn’t pan out.’
So how do we prevent such an acute feeling of loneliness from creeping in?
Marianne believes the answer lies in believing we are ‘good company’ and ‘worthy of spending time with, even if we do it alone’.
‘The ideas discussed by Francesca Specter in her book, Alonement, about lifting our head high and doing things by ourselves and to meet our own needs for culture, enjoyment and connection are so powerful and can be life changing,’ she adds.
‘Claiming back the power given to others to make us happy and firmly instilling this within ourselves is a great declaration of self-worth.
‘When we begin to live in this way, we can find ourselves in an empty room but feeling connected, fulfilled and worthwhile.’
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