Some of the loneliest people in their sixties are the ones who spent forty years being described as easy, low-maintenance, and never a bother, because the description was true and no one thought to ask what it cost

Some of the loneliest people in their sixties spent forty years being described as easy, low-maintenance, and never a bother. What the paper does suggest, plainly, is that loneliness in later life is not a soft feeling. Why the easy child, the easy partner, the easy colleague is at particular riskThe Big Five personality framework gives us a useful vocabulary here. What forty years of being easy actually buildsConsider what the description “easy, low-maintenance, never a bother” is really describing. The pattern does not medicalize neatly, and it should notIt would be easy to reach for clinical vocabulary here.