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Capacity to Love

Ran into this quote about the capacity to be alone while looking for reviews of a book on Goodreads. It starts with these lines:

 "The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it's not."
It made me think about what it means to have capacity to be alone. Does it imply capacity to be able to lose hour and days reading, tending to a garden, making music or talking long nature walks? Or does it need a more productive pursuit that results in things being made - a person losing all sense of time as they work on their passion project - restoring a car, writing software, making a piece of art, repairing or remodeling their home? Something of tangible value comes out of such time spent alone. 

And there are many among us who are quite capable of doing one or more of these things and finding it a blissful way to spend time. So, it could be argued they do have the capacity to be alone and indeed they love the thing they are spending that alone time on. I am not sure that always translates into the capacity to love others. Its more likely that such people are capable of intense feelings and can love a few others in their life with a great depth of feeling.

The converse is about those who do not have the capacity to be alone - they need to be with others. In modern times, social media connections can replace real ones to the point such a person is never truly alone. The burden on a specific other to be companion to a person incapable of being alone is largely absent today. The hundreds and thousands of far-flung friends and followers spread out this weight. It seems that there is a convergence of the two types - those who have capacity to be alone and those that do not. And if there is any truth to this quote that would imply the overall capacity to love is greatly diminished in the world today

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