Talking Up Temporal Contrasts

Abstract

This chapter deals with the students’ constructions of time in relation to their stated experiences of loneliness. More specifically, it addresses the contrasts that they talk up in relation to former, or present, feelings of loneliness. It is found that by deploying temporal contrasts, students are able to mitigate the disclosure of lonely episodes by locating them discretely within an historic context. Retrospective disclosures imply that they are no longer experiencing loneliness in the present, and thus students reduce the interactional risk of their disclosure in the moment of the interview. The chapter also highlights a striking pattern which emerged across the student interview data. It was found that the students regularly talked up their first year of university as the isolated site of such experiences, though when first year students were being interviewed, they deployed mentions of their college/sixth form days as the site of their historical disclosure. Finally, the chapter also deals with a small number of cases where the temporal contrast is reversed, whereby students compare a lonely present with a sociable past.