You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan and his wife, Becky Allender, continue their conversation about loneliness

by looking at the particular ways it shows up in marriage and other intimate relationships.

Becky and Dan remind us that even when it's the last thing we want to do, naming and

engaging the loneliness in ourselves and each other is an essential part of our healing.

Well, I'm not sure I want to talk about loneliness in our marriage, but I do think it's

a important category because where we're going to feel most lonely is in the absence of intimate

relationship. Whether you're married or not, the experience of loneliness will always be that sense

of exclusion, that somehow I'm not with you, or I'm not with, or others are not with me. And in that

sense of then isolation, exclusion leads to isolation. And what I want to underline is that isolation in any

form is the place of great susceptibility to evil's assault of judgments. You know, you will always

be alone. No one will ever choose you. Who would want to be with you anyway?

People really don't enjoy you, or they only want this from you, but knowing you, they don't.

So from exclusion to isolation to judgment, those are hard things to deal with as a whole, even harder to address in at least our marriage.

Absolutely.

Judgments will just take me down every time.

And if I'm on a path of looking to how often you talk and I talk when we're with other people, I can condemn

myself for being quiet or I can condemn you for taking too much affection from the people

around us. I mean, it's just wacky how once you start going down that slope of judgments and just envy is a killer of joy in every way.

And it's crazy how it comes up even as a married couple.

Well, just thinking about the first podcast after we finished.

I mean, what did you say?

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