Family Minister: Lisa Paus: Many appointments do not protect against loneliness

According to Family Minister Lisa Paus (56), the feeling of loneliness does not necessarily mean that you are alone. “A busy schedule doesn’t protect you from being lonely,” said the Green politician in an interview with “Spiegel” magazine. In it she talks, among other things, about the time after the death of her partner. As a politician, she is “constantly among people and at many receptions.” “But the quality of relationships plays an important role, especially when it comes to loneliness,” she explained. She also tries to pass on this experience to young MPs.

Pau’s partner died of cancer in 2013. After his death, she was aware of her responsibility towards her child to ensure that family life continued stably. Among other things, she turned to an advice center for relatives of dying people, says Paus. “I then realized that I didn’t want to be alone at home. That’s why I founded a single-parent shared apartment.”

For her, loneliness is “a gap between what I or how I live at the moment and what I feel, what my needs actually are,” says Paus. “Feeling this painful gap is initially a healthy feeling. The difficult thing is then to take action, to create something, to tackle it.”