Loneliness: rebuilding connection

1. Before you begin

On Friday evening, you watch other people leave to meet someone. Sunday never ends. Your phone stays silent, and you don't dare write, for fear of bothering people. Or you are surrounded — colleagues, family, a partner — and yet you feel alone, because nobody really knows what you are going through.

Perhaps it began after a move, a separation, a bereavement, retirement, time off work. Perhaps it has been like this for a long time.

Three things, straight away.

Loneliness is a signal, not a flaw. Just as hunger or thirst signal a need of the body, loneliness signals a need for connection. Almost everyone feels it at some point in their life. There is nothing shameful about it, and it says nothing about your worth.

It changes the way you see others, and that is what keeps it going. When you feel lonely, you become more alert to signs of rejection, you expect to be poorly received, you dare less. Other people pick up on it, and the circle closes. Understanding this mechanism is the first step out.

Loneliness can ease. Not in a weekend, and not just by "getting out more". The approaches that have worked best combine a change in the way you see relationships with repeated opportunities for contact, chosen and on a scale that suits you.

2. What loneliness is

A feeling, not a number of contacts

Researchers define loneliness as the painful gap between the relationships you have and the ones you would like to have. It is a feeling. You can see a lot of people and feel lonely; you can see few people and not suffer from it.

It needs to be distinguished from two things:

• Isolation, which is an objective situation: living alone, seeing few people, having few contacts. Isolation makes loneliness more likely, but does not always produce it.
• Chosen solitude, those moments when you are alone because you want to be: reading, walking, creating, resting. It can be precious, and this guide does not try to get rid of it.

Two forms of loneliness

The sociologist Robert Weiss distinguished two forms, which are not remedied in the same way:

• Emotional loneliness: the absence of a close relationship, of a person to whom you really matter, with whom you can say anything. It often follows a break-up, widowhood, or a lasting absence of an intimate bond.
• Social loneliness: the absence of a network, a group, a sense of belonging — friends, colleagues, a community. It often follows a move, a change of job, retirement.

A new friend does not replace a partner who has died, and a partner does not replace a network of friends. Knowing which form dominates for you helps you choose where to act.

Passing or entrenched

Passing loneliness goes with transitions: the first months in a new town, after a separation. It often prompts people to reconnect, and it fades.

Entrenched loneliness, which lasts months or years, tends to keep itself going. It is mainly this kind that this guide is about.

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