The Hidden Strength in Missing Someone

Missing someone close to us—whether they've moved to another country, gone up north for a course, or embarked on a hiking trip with friends—is an unpleasant emotion. It may seem odd to suggest that this feeling is, on a deeper level, an extraordinary achievement and an important sign of emotional maturity. For many adults, it's not simple to miss someone, and we often engage in complex maneuvers to avoid this feeling altogether.

Small children, for better or worse, miss people intensely. They show us, without any filters or defenses, what missing someone looks like in its rawest form. Their cries can be heard across the street. "Don't leave me," a small child will scream with heart-wrenching intensity as we try to explain that we just need to pop out to the shops and will be back in ten minutes. "Why do you need to go?" they beg, holding onto our sleeve, their face streaked with tears, and we watch our plans fall apart in the face of their despair.

As children grow up, they start to feel ashamed of their early outbursts. Over time, they internalize the many lectures they receive about the need to be reasonable and let others live their lives. They begin to accept the logic that, yes, it makes sense that the people we love have to leave us, sometimes for long stretches—like a quarter of an hour, or, God forbid, a day, a month, or even years.

This seems like progress, but it hides the dangers of growing up to be the model adult who everyone is proud of for calmly playing with their toys when those they cherish disappear. The risk isn't just that we become more patient, but that, in the name of reason, we stop feeling anything deeply. In the process of growing up, we might lose our capacity to love. We could become so averse to the pain that genuine attachment brings that we build emotional barriers to protect ourselves.

One way we might protect ourselves is by reinterpreting who any person who leaves us really is, so their absence bothers us less. On the eve of a departure, we might suddenly realize that the person we’re losing is actually quite disorganized, chews their food in an annoying way, and never has anything interesting to say about the latest novels or scientific discoveries. It starts to seem like we don’t have much reason to miss them. Why would we lament the absence of someone who wasn’t that special to begin with?

Alternatively, we might go through the motions of missing someone while not fully registering that they’re gone. When they call us from another continent late at night, we might find ourselves thinking about a crack in the ceiling we need to fix or an email we have to send to a supplier at work. We might find it impossible to give them much thought because we’re so preoccupied with a dispute with a neighbor or an odd new twinge in our knee.

It’s a significant achievement to both care deeply for someone and endure their absence, to feel that wound without resorting to numbness, rage, or distraction. To miss someone without reinventing what they mean to us is a sign of true emotional maturity. We reach this maturity when we rediscover the courage to be hurt by those we love, when we can acknowledge, with some of the honesty of our younger selves, just how much it hurts when someone we adore crosses an ocean or, indeed, has the audacity to go off to the shops for an afternoon with their friends.

To truly miss someone is to stay connected to our feelings and to the person we care about, without letting our defenses shut down those emotions. It’s about holding onto that bond, even when it hurts, and recognizing that this pain is part of what makes our connections so meaningful. By embracing the discomfort of missing someone, we allow ourselves to experience the depth of our love and the importance of our relationships, showing that we’ve grown not just older but more emotionally mature.