Living at college is like living in a place of its own, a bubble. When you populate a town with a bunch of inexperienced, young adults, who are fresh out of the nest, the town evolves into a unique setting.

We, newborn adults, rely on Snapchat and Buzzfeed as reliable news outlets, cook many of our meals in the microwave, and calculate out exactly how late we can sleep in without being late for class. With all that aside, we sure do know how to create a one of a kind environment. You could use a broad spectrum of words to describe the aura around college life and the towns that home countless students. With the nonstop party scene, all hour of the night studying, and as many 24/7 food services as possible, not many places give the vibes that you receive when you step into a college town. No matter how long you sit and ponder, you cannot find one specific word to sum up the entirety of college living.

College living is quite frankly the opposite of loneliness.

The two best antonyms for loneliness are sociable and populated. Despite what the thesaurus says, I have been places that were both populated and sociable yet felt lonely. How someone missed creating a word for the opposite of loneliness is quite astounding. I mean experiencing loneliness can, without a doubt, be one of the most depressing and desolating emotions.

On the other hand, the opposite of loneliness is one of the best feelings. Personally, I would put the feeling of being in love on the same level as the feeling of the opposite of loneliness. Perhaps this has something to do with why people claim their years at college to be some of their best. College consists of thousands upon thousands of diverse students, just like us, from all corners of the country and even the world wherever the sun touches. All these individuals, with their own ideas, their own opinions, and their own stories, integrate together in the same town. We all cluster into our own circles and crowds through the organizations we are apart of.

Organizations like fraternities, sororities, teams, groups, the places we work, the classes we sign up for, and more. The people we connect with in these groups relate to some part of our being in one way or another.These clusters we gather with then overlap and intertwine with other circles of people. What this produces in the end, in our own bubble of college life, is full and complete inclusion. Although inclusion still is not a perfect word to describe the opposite of loneliness, it still gives you a sense of warmth in your heart to think about. It is a sense of community but not even just the comfort of community. There is also a part that is feeling accepted, but even deeper than that sense of belonging. Maybe there are just too many feelings in the single emotion that is the opposite of loneliness to have one sole word. Basically, it is just the state that exists when everything fits together to make you undeniably secure and safe in who you are.

As disheartening as this is about to sound, maybe we do not have a comparable antonym for loneliness because the problem lies within us and that we do not think about it enough. 10/10 human beings are pessimistic. Hopefully not too pessimistic, but nevertheless at least a little here and there. The thought of an opposite to loneliness never crossed my mind until a few weeks ago. As cliche as this sounds, I sometimes just lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling, contemplating the complexity of what the feeling to the opposite of loneliness entails. Even reading about it, I am still unsure of what it is exactly. Maybe I will never be able to pinpoint the exact feelings to the opposite of loneliness. As Marina Keegan explains it, in her final post for Yale Daily News,

"It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team."

Take all this as you will. Sit in traffic contemplating the thought of the opposite for loneliness over in your mind. Think what you want. Use what you know through your personal experiences to form your own opinion. What would you describe as the opposite of loneliness?