The agony of weekend loneliness: ‘I won't speak to another human until Monday’

For growing numbers of people the weekend is an emotional wilderness where interaction is minimal and social life non-existent. What can be done to break this toxic cycle asks Paula Cocozza in The Guardian?

On Saturday morning, Peter got up and went to the supermarket. He carried his shopping home, and took care of his laundry and ironing. In the afternoon, he browsed a few record stores and later he cooked himself dinner; always something adventurous on a Saturday night. Afterwards, he hit Netflix. And in all those hours, in common with many of Peter’s Saturdays, not to mention his Sundays, he had no meaningful interaction with another human being. “The only person I spoke to,” he says, “was the lady who came over to verify my bottles of beer at the supermarket self-checkout.”

During the week, Peter, 62, is too busy to be lonely. His commute from Brighton to London means that his working life is “a tunnel” he enters on a Monday and from which no daylight is glimpsed until Friday. But just when Peter re-emerges, he is stymied by an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Instead of providing respite from the stress of office life, a chance to reconnect with family and friends, the weekend looms as a vast emotional and social wilderness that must be traversed before work takes hold again.


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Peter dreads the weekend. But he is far from alone in this. He is one of nearly 200 respondents, from Falmouth to Jakarta, who replied to a request on the Guardian’s website for readers to share their experience of weekend loneliness. The youngest respondent was 16; the eldest in her 70s, and between them, the pain and isolation recurred in countless iterations.

Despite all this, the phenomenon of weekend loneliness has scarcely been studied. “It’s not something that’s been researched at all,” says Pamela Qualter, professor of psychology for education at the University of Manchester. She led the BBC’s Loneliness Experiment last year, and “found that there didn’t seem to be a time of day [nor] a season when people felt especially lonely. But we didn’t ask about the weekend.” So what does weekend loneliness look like, who experiences it – and what might be done to alleviate it?

“We define loneliness as the difference between the desire or expectation of what life should be like, and the reality,” says Kellie Payne, research and policy manager at the Campaign to End Loneliness. For those who experience loneliness primarily – or only – at the weekend, this painful discrepancy is intensified by the sense of being at odds not only with the world outside the door, but with one’s capable, sociable weekday self.

A personal, internal division emerges. Liz is 41, with a rewarding job and family nearby – but she is living two lives. “In the week, I am a contented, fulfilled person. At the weekend, I feel like a lonely outcast,” she says. Increasingly, she finds herself out of step with her social group where she lives in Somerset. She runs her own training business from home, so weekdays are busy. But this is exactly when her married friends want to meet for coffee “and a moan about their husbands”.

Liz would like to see these friends at the weekend, too, but when Saturday comes, “it’s unsaid – but it’s like they’ve closed the doors to me. Weekends are for couples. It would be unheard of to invite me to a dinner party, because I’m single,” she says. “I wake up on a Saturday and feel down. It’s a struggle to pull myself out of bed if I have nothing planned.” When Monday dawns, “it is always a relief”.

For Liz, the loneliness of the weekend is exacerbated by an additional, painful sense that she is not only alone but locked out – “banned from the weekend”, as she puts it. Between Monday and Friday, she enjoys her neighbourhood, but at the weekend, the streets and parks seem to transform. They become questioning, forbidding, to the extent that Liz wonders if she has “absorbed” her loneliness from her environment, now full of couples, families, groups.

“What’s interesting to me is that I’ll sit on my own in a cafe easily in the week,” she says. But the same cafe at the weekend is a space she cannot enter. Even walking the dog takes on a different cast. “I don’t feel conscious at all during the week” – but on a Sunday morning, the same walk feels acutely sad.

“As psychologists we talk about the looking-glass self,” Qualter says. “How your feelings about yourself are influenced by how you think others see you. The public space changes, becomes occupied by other people … It’s no longer your space. You feel uncomfortable because you don’t fit.”

“I hear this a lot,” says Sally Brown, a life coach and counsellor. “It’s like people have two personas. The weekday persona is busy and confident. But the weekend persona is lost and vulnerable.”

But is Liz really projecting her loneliness on to others, and imagining the way they see her – or does society read people who are alone in too predictable a manner? Peter believes he passes through his Brighton weekends undisturbed because he is regarded as a harmless eccentric. “The bachelor is something of a social misfit, but an acceptable one,” he remarks.

A person who enters a public space alone will often be read as best left alone. Mark is 32 and recently returned to London after a couple of years travelling. Going to the pub to watch football one weekend, he took a seat at an empty table for six. Quickly the pub filled. But Mark sat alone and undisturbed for 20 minutes before anyone asked if they could take one of the five free seats around him. “I guess they think you are going to be bringing extra people, or you’re weird,” he says wryly.

Brown, who sees many clients in their 30s and 40s, thinks this disconnect is “related to those transitional times when your peer group may have moved on to a stage you haven’t yet reached”. And, of course, may not wish to reach. Mark’s friends, like Liz’s, are mostly in relationships. “It can happen really fast. All of a sudden, your group isn’t there any more. You are second-tier friendship, relegated to week nights. You’re not in the couples’ dinner party or playdate scene. You start to lack confidence in connecting, so hesitate to suggest things. You assume you are not welcome at the weekend and withdraw … It becomes a toxic circle.”

Brown’s belief that loneliness at the weekend arises out of life’s transitions resonates with Kate. At 61, hers is a different kind of shift to Mark’s or Liz’s. Kate sees herself moving “from motherhood to single life again”. She uses the word “transition”, especially when she reminds herself, while she sits alone on Saturday nights, that she has raised her girls well, that the loneliness is just another challenge to overcome.

Kate, who lives in Cardiff, has two grown daughters whom she raised alone. Her weeks are busy with work and friends, and sometimes her children, if they happen to be nearby. But her weekends, like Peter’s, are “very long and quiet … I will not use my voice or speak with another human until Monday.”

For Kate, the silence of the weekend is wrapped in another sort of silence. She cannot speak of her loneliness to anyone, least of all her children.

“They would be devastated,” she says. “In a way, promoting their education, encouraging them to be social and confident … That has been to the detriment of me. The more they achieve, the further from home they have moved. But I wouldn’t change it, because it was my duty as a mother.”

Seven times during the course of an hour-and-a-half’s conversation, Kate worries that sharing her loneliness with her children would “burden” them. The word feels heavier each time it lands.

While silence protects her daughters, and preserves their sense of Kate, and Kate’s sense of herself, as “strong and capable, someone they can talk to”, it compounds her remoteness. Although she exchanges WhatsApp messages with both children every weekend, these seem to make no impact on Kate’s underlying isolation.
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘The idea of being retired is horrific – then all days will be like weekends.’ Illustration: Monika Jurczyk/The Guardian

She has a “wonderful relationship” with both daughters, but their closeness makes the pain worse – because how can they not see?

I wonder if Kate’s daughters ever ask her what she did at the weekend, and Kate says she has been wondering about this, too. They don’t. “At some level – not consciously – they are worried about the answer.” In the meantime, her children’s absence weighs “like a bereavement” and the loneliness hits hardest at certain predictable moments.

Just as Peter sits down to his adventurous dinner, picks up his cutlery and feels instantly lonely – despite his efforts in the kitchen – so Kate reels from her plate.

She is at the opposite end of the culinary spectrum to Peter. “One of my favourite go-to meals is a couple of boiled eggs and a piece of toast,” she says. It’s a classic comfort meal that Kate routinely enjoys. But last weekend, she sat down, cracked open the egg, “and I thought: ‘I can’t do it.’ I have had that meal so many times, I just couldn’t eat it.” She threw the food into the bin.

Kate is approaching retirement. “But the idea of being retired is horrific – because all the days will be like weekends.” So what can she, or anyone, do to try to stem their weekend loneliness?

Sarah, who is 44 and lives in Surrey, asks herself this very question. “What can you do to alleviate your loneliness? We’re all struggling. Everyone I know has less money to spend.” She, too, is a single parent; and as her daughter, 18, becomes more independent, Sarah feels increasingly lonely at weekends. “What exacerbates the loneliness is that I’m a very sociable person,” she says.

To counter this, she keeps herself in a state of perpetual readiness for last-minute invitations. “It’s good to be seen as someone who will say yes – because you get asked again. I’ve been very lucky to be an emergency plus-one in quite a few situations,” Sarah says. She is aware that this won’t sound lucky to everyone.

She has filled in for her best friend on a trip with her friend’s husband to Secret Cinema. And she has made up the numbers at a wedding. “There is a kind of currency to being a couple,” she says. “That’s the word I want to use – a currency that makes couples worth more in social situations.” (Conversely, of course, the cost of living is lower for them, too.) So does being available at the last minute represent a kind of personal devaluation?

“I think that’s fair to say,” she says. “I’d much rather be turning up with someone. But I really appreciate it when I’m included. I love it. I think it’s important to be the person who says: ‘Yes, sure, I can sit next to whoever.’”

Sarah and I are speaking on a Saturday afternoon. If she were not talking to me, she says, she would be writing an email or doing housework. She has a natural positivity and a bright voice that belie the sadness she feels on her most solitary weekends. If her daughter goes to university next year, the weekends, and weekdays, will further quieten. Like Kate and Peter, Sarah is conscious of the life change that looms.

So she is quietly hatching plans – to move, maybe, depending on her daughter’s movements. And in the meantime, she offers to babysit for friends, hopes for a leisure revolution for single people, and says yes to as many invitations as possible.

“It comes down to keeping the communication lines open, and initiating,” Brown, the life coach, says. Some of her clients have resolved their divided lives by adding structure to their weekends. Loneliness creates passivity in friendships, Brown warns. “There is a sense of ‘I can’t make this happen … It has got to happen to me’”, which can make people who are lonely less inclined to make an effort.

With some clients, Brown has mapped on paper their social circles and groups. “It’s amazing how many people they come up with.” Others’ “proactive approach” include cultivating regular haunts (because being among fellow regulars can feel a bit like being among friends) and attending groups or clubs through the website Meetup.

“That journey can involve some extra loneliness if you find a group you don’t fit with,” Brown warns. I think of Peter, who dropped out of a walking group after a woman berated him for describing himself as “a sad old bachelor”. (“You mustn’t say that,” she told him. “You must say you’re alone and happy.”) Or Kate, waiting for her children to ask what she did at the weekend. Or Mark, who sometimes finds Meetups “a group of lonely, desperate guys”.

“It’s about keeping going,” Brown advises. “If after two weeks you’re not connecting, move on.” Loneliness is complex, she notes. “It can impact those who crave time to themselves after a week at work”; a double bind in which company is both a salve and an impediment.

Peter, for instance, used to volunteer, but, he says, “it cut into what little weekend time I had”, which makes me suspect that as well as hankering for connection, he also cherishes his time alone. “People talk about the difference between being alone and being lonely,” he says. “I am slap bang in the middle of that.”

Meanwhile, Kate is thinking of fostering children. When Peter retires, he might travel the UK and explore a new culinary continent: veganism. Liz has been broadening her group of friends, “meeting new people who aren’t so stuck in the couple thing”. Mark is considering a move to a livelier part of London. And Sarah reminds herself, on her loneliest Saturday evenings, when no last-minute invitations materialise, “to look at all the positives. It’s really hard, but try to embrace the aloneness, the solitude.”

The final offer made to junior doctors was too generous – they should stop striking and get on with it

Mary Dejevsky in The Independent

You know things have reached a pretty pass in any dispute when the combatants start to invoke the spirit of deceased politicians. But when two men who have reached the top of their political trees also start invoking their own mothers – as Jeremy Corbyn and David Cameron did at Prime Minister’s Questions – well, the possibility of any agreement looks remote indeed.

Yes, after a merciful, but all too brief, period of remission, we are back in the heat of the junior doctors’ dispute. The Labour leader accused the Government of showing bad faith and “misrepresenting” statistics (about hospital deaths at weekends); the Prime Minister returned to his mantra about people not getting sick only on weekdays. Whatever else the Government may be ready to compromise on, it appears not to be a “seven-day NHS”.

And quite right, too.

“Our” NHS is not run for the benefit of the staff, however long they have spent in training, however mountainous their student loans, however arduous and responsible their work. A great many people would probably like to work only Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, especially if highly-paid overtime for additional hours comes virtually guaranteed. But this is not the reality for most people, and there is no reason, when so much in this country now functions 24/7 – with the staff on rotas and little, if any, overtime paid – why it should still be such a struggle to get the emergency services to do the same. Yet it is here the overtime culture has proved most resilient.

There will be those – and I admit to being among them – who saw the final offer to the junior doctors as too generous. By preserving a system of overtime, for Saturdays after 5pm and all Sundays, it leaves in place the idea that doctors can expect to work something like traditional office or factory hours with additional rewards for anything else. Those expectations need to be scotched.

Junior doctors, and their many vocal supporters, have tried to turn the contested statistics about weekend fatalities to their advantage, suggesting that a “cut-price” seven-day NHS would simply raise death rates around the week. Anyone who visits hospitals on weekdays and at weekends, however, will be familiar with the glaring disparity in staffing – at every level, and what sometimes appears to be a surfeit of employees, especially in the least skilled jobs, during standard working hours. There is surely money to be saved here, that could offset the cost of more staff at weekends.

Nor can the junior doctors’ dispute be seen in isolation. Their new contract is just one part – if a large part – of reform of the NHS that is yet to come. If next in line are to be the consultants, for whom the junior doctors are often deputising at nights and weekends, you can understand why the Government might be keen to hold the line.

What occasioned the latest sword-crossing in the Commons was the announcement by the British Medical Association earlier this week that the junior doctors would hold three more days of strikes, and would fight the Health Secretary’s imposition of the new contract through the courts. In the first instance, this means seeking a judicial review.

On precisely what legal grounds the BMA intends to fight is not yet clear. For all the perception that the English judiciary has become more politically engaged in recent years, it is hard to see a judge ruling that an elected government is not within its rights to set the terms of a contract for public sector employees, particular when in line with a manifesto commitment. Going to court is only going to inject more poison into this already toxic dispute.

It is beyond time that the BMA called it a day and recognised that the junior doctors have won as much as they are going to – more than they could have expected at the outset and more, indeed, than may be wise for the future health of the NHS. The BMA’s continued insistence a “safe” seven-day NHS is somehow beyond the country’s means is defeatism of the first order, and really not junior doctors’ call to make. It is the stated policy of an elected government.

That said, the extent to which this dispute has become politicised has made it infinitely harder to resolve. Jeremy Hunt has not just been defending his government’s policy of a seven-day NHS, he has been engaged directly in negotiating the small print of a new contract. This has enabled junior doctors, and the BMA on their behalf, to cast the project as a heartless Tory plot.

The most senior non-politicians – the chief executive of NHS England, Simon Stevens, and the medical director, Sir Bruce Keogh – have both been conspicuously absent from the fray. This may be because, if heads had to roll, the Health Secretary is deemed more dispensable than either of them. But here, perhaps, also lies the key to change. For 10 years or more – most recently in the Conservatives’ 2010 election manifesto – proposals have been mooted to separate the NHS from politics by placing it under an independent board. Policy, such as the creation of seven-day service, and the overall NHS budget would be set by central government, leaving the rest to professionals. Each time, however, a consensus evolved to the effect that the NHS was so integral a part of national life and the sums of money allocated so vast, that there had to be direct political accountability. The scandal at Mid-Staffs augmented that view.

But the downside of the argument is again before us. Junior doctors and a Conservative government at loggerheads; there is talk of relations blighted for a generation. One solution might be for the Government to return to its election manifesto of 2010 and divest itself of managerial responsibility for the NHS. If junior doctors can cast that as a victory, so be it. But there is no reason why the sort of hands-off arrangement that is considered good for the BBC and – increasingly – for schools should not be good for the NHS, too.

Saturday jobs ‘can damage exam grades for teenagers’

Tracy McVeigh in The Guardian

There was widespread praise for millionaire parents David and Victoria Beckham when it was revealed that they had sent their eldest son, Brooklyn, to do a few weekend shifts in a west London coffee shop. And Jamie Oliver won approval for insisting that he’ll be keeping his eldest two daughters “real” by encouraging them to work in his new pub on Saturdays.

However, new research suggests that teenagers who take on a Saturday job could be damaging their GCSE grades – an effect especially noticeable in girls – even while they earn extra cash they might spend on risky behaviours like drinking or smoking.

Taking a part-time job – gaining work skills and pocket money for those teenage essentials – while studying for exams has an impact on the end results, according to the study, from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex.

In December the Conservative minister for business, Matthew Hancock, urged employers to create more Saturday jobs and said teenagers were missing out, after figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that the numbers of schoolchildren with part-time jobs had fallen to a record low.

The proportion of 16- and 17-year-olds working in shops, waiting on tables or having a paper round had fallen from 30% in 2000 to 15.5% in 2014. “A paid job while you’re in school can go a long way with a prospective employer and makes it easier to get a foot on the career ladder,” Hancock said.

But this latest study, Youth Employment and Academic Performance: Production Function and Policy Effects, written by Dr Angus Holford, has cast doubt on the wisdom of working and studying. It used the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, which followed a cohort of teenagers aged 13 to 14 in 2004. Holford looked at the hours they spent working and the impact this had on the time they spent doing other things – including risky behaviour and sport – as well as their study time and subsequent exam grades at GCSE.

“Around a quarter of all 13- to 16-year-olds in England take some formal paid employment during school term time,” said Holford. “This can be a good thing – they earn their own money and can pick up useful skills, which might help them find full-time work in the future. However, they may spend that hard-earned money on less than useful things, or fall in with a different group of people. We did find that schoolchildren who worked became more likely to drink alcohol regularly, smoke or consume cannabis.”

However, the biggest impact of part-time work was on the school grades of girls. For teenage girls, an additional hour of paid employment per week in school year 10 reduced their final GCSE performance a year later by approximately one grade in one subject. This was in part caused by the girls spending less time studying outside lessons.

Holford said he suspected another factor influencing their grades could be explained by girls in employment becoming less motivated by school and less interested in the work they did in their lessons.

Girls who have a job at the age of 15 work on average six hours a week, which means their part-time work is likely to reduce their results considerably – a grade lower in six subjects.

“The long-term effect of this would be particularly bad for borderline students at risk of not achieving the target for progression in education, of five A*-C grades – including English and maths. Given that academic results at 16 have such a significant influence over our future life outcomes, these findings should worry policymakers and parents who want young people to achieve their potential at this crucial point,” said Holford.

“It’s inevitable that having a job gives teenagers less time to study. That alone might be a small price to pay given the potential benefits of having a part-time job for all-round development. What concerns me instead is how it causes teenagers to lose sight of the importance of their education for their longer-term opportunities.”