Participant ID: P09
Pseudonym: Priya
Age: 31
Gender: Woman
Occupation: Family medicine resident
Living situation: Lives alone in a studio in Kitsilano
Relevant context: Single, never married; second-generation Indo-Canadian; family in Surrey; on dating apps
Interview date: 2025-11-17
Interview length: 33 minutes
Interviewer: R1
Location: Hospital cafeteria, between her shifts

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I: Thanks for fitting me in, Priya. Tell me a bit about yourself.

P: Yeah, sorry, I have like 35 minutes before I have to be back. I'm a second-year family medicine resident at VGH, my parents live in Surrey, I'm 31, I live by myself in Kits. I'm single. That's actually relevant. I think that's why I signed up for this.

I: When you hear the word loneliness, what comes to mind?

P: Coming home from a 13-hour shift and there being no one to tell about your day. That's it. That's literally what it is. I had a patient die today. Like, two hours ago. And I'm going to go back upstairs and finish my shift and then I'm going to go home and there's no one there. And tomorrow morning I'll text my friends, like, "rough shift", and they'll send a heart emoji, and then I'll get on with my day. But that — that moment, of walking into the empty apartment after something like that — that's loneliness for me.

I: That's a lot, and recent. Are you okay?

P: Yeah, I mean — yes. I'm okay. It's part of the job. But thanks. Yeah, let's keep going, I think it's useful for me to talk about it actually.

I: How does it feel in your body?

P: Tired. Hungry but not for food. There's a — there's like an ache. I read about heart-broken people having actual physical chest pain and I think I get that. I get the chest thing. Sometimes I want to be hugged so badly that I'll like, stop in the hallway of my building and just — close my eyes. It's that physical.

I: Is it different from being alone?

P: Yes. I lived alone in med school and was fine. The thing that's different now is — I'm 31, I'm a doctor, I'm financially secure, I'm done with school. I'm at the stage where I expected, you know, all the social architecture of life to be assembling around me. Partner, maybe kids, the friend group consolidates, you build a community. And instead it's the opposite — my friends are partnering up and disappearing, I'm watching everyone get coupled, and I'm just here. Alone. So it's not the being alone that's the problem. It's the being alone at a moment in life where I expected not to be.

I: Tell me about a recent time you felt lonely.

P: Last weekend. My best friend got engaged. I was so happy for her. I am so happy for her. And after the engagement party I came home and I just — okay, I'm going to be honest, I cried for like four hours. Which I'm embarrassed about because nothing bad happened, my friend got engaged, that's a good thing. But I sat on my bathroom floor and I sobbed because I felt like I was getting left behind. And then I felt guilty for crying. And then I was lonely AND guilty. So that was a fun Saturday.

I: Have you tried things that worked?

P: The thing that has helped most, weirdly, is my residency cohort. We have a WhatsApp group, and one of the senior residents has us doing these group dinners every other Sunday. And there's something about doctors being doctors together that — there's a shorthand. We get each other's lives. So that has been the most reliable source of connection in this period. But it's, you know, it's friendship. It's not the partnership-and-kids thing.

I: What about dating?

P: [laughs] Oh god. So I've been on Hinge, Bumble, the South Asian app Dil Mil, all of them. For about three years now. I have — I have a lot of thoughts about dating apps. The short version is they have made loneliness worse for me. Because they give you the illusion of access to thousands of people, and you have these little flirtations that fizzle, and you end every week feeling like you've been rejected by ten strangers, and the cumulative effect is — bad. So I'm currently on a dating-app break.

I: Anything else that didn't work?

P: My family. So my parents are great, I love them, but my mother has decided that what I need is to meet a nice boy through their network, and so every few weeks there's a Suresh or a Karan whose mother knows my mother and would I like to meet him. And — okay, I don't want to be ungrateful, but the boys are not — they're not quite right, usually. Or I'm not quite right. The whole thing makes me feel like merchandise. I've told my mother to stop. She has not stopped. Last week she gave my number to a guy without asking me. So that's a stress.

I: Has the loneliness affected how you see yourself?

P: Yes. And this is the part that's, like, hard to admit. I've started wondering if there's something wrong with me. Which, logically, I know is not how this works. I know that not being partnered at 31 is just — that's statistics, that's life. Lots of people are like this. But emotionally, in the late-night version of my thinking, I'm like, what is it about me. Am I too intense. Am I too much. Am I too career-focused. Am I not pretty enough. Am I — and I know this is all the wrong way to think but I think it.

I: Have you sought help?

P: I see a therapist. Once every three weeks. She's great. She has me working on, like, not flattening myself into something palatable for the apps, which is good work to be doing. I'm also, um — I'm on a low-dose SSRI for anxiety, which my supervisor recommended I consider given the workload. Both of those are helping. The thing they can't do is, like, manufacture a person who loves me. So.

I: What do you think your loneliness is telling you?

P: That I want partnership and family, and that I'm at a stage where I'm scared it won't happen, and that I have to figure out how to live a good life whether or not it happens. Which is, like, philosophically a fine answer. Practically, every Friday night, it doesn't feel philosophically fine. It feels like a hole.

I: Anything that helped that surprised you?

P: Two things. First, I started a Friday-night cooking thing where I cook a real meal for myself, like a proper one, plated, candle, glass of wine. And I treat it as a date with myself. It sounds cheesy. It helps. The second thing — there's an aunty in my parents' neighbourhood who never married. She's like 68. I started visiting her on weekends. And she has the most amazing life — she travelled, she has her own business, she has nieces and nephews who adore her, she has friends who are like sisters. And she doesn't seem unhappy. She is a — she is a model that the structure I was raised in didn't show me existed. Just spending time with her has been clarifying.

I: If you could change one thing about how society handles loneliness?

P: I think the cultural pressure on women in my community to be partnered by 30 is brutal and we should talk about it. The number of women I know in their thirties who feel like failures because they're not partnered, who would otherwise have wonderful lives — it's a lot. And nobody's writing about it. It's such a specific gendered cultural loneliness. I'd love it to be visible.

I: Anything I haven't asked about?

P: Just — yeah, just to say, the loneliness is real and it's also not the whole story. I love my work, I love my friends, I love my apartment, I love my Friday-night dinners. There's good in this life. I want both things to be true at once.
