“He had supposed that when you dissolved a joyless marriage, you opened yourself to the return of joy, but he discovered himself open instead to loneliness.
“In matters of loneliness, Chris was a novice. He had never in his life been lonely. Indeed, during the last and most trying years of his marriage, when Karen was in treatment for alcoholism and Kay was in treatment for drugs and Billy’s rock group was practicing in the basement, he thought of himself as suffering from the opposite of loneliness–which, he was amazed to discover, didn’t have a name. Why, of the 600,000 words in the language, was there no word for the opposite of loneliness?”
Jon Hassler, The Love Hunter