The Person Alone | Alone in The Presence of Others: Loneliness

The huge, dark wall of loneliness. . . encloses and presses in upon him, and he cannot escape. . . . Time flows by him like a river, and he waits in his little room like a creature held captive by an evil spell. And he will. . . feel that he has been forgotten, than his powers are wasting from him while the river flows, and that all his life has come to nothing.

                                From Thomas Wolfe’s essay, “God’s Lonely Man.” In The Hills Beyond.

                                                                                                                Harper & Row, 1941, p, 159.

Within the last several years, social psychologists have begun to do some pioneering work in the study of loneliness. (Indeed, enough research has now been conducted in this area to justify the publication of a sourcebook [Peplau and Perlman, 1982].) Whereas “aloneness” or “solitude” describes an objective state of affairs—denoting which persons, or how many persons, an individual has relationships with—“loneliness” is subjective; it refers to the person’s experience of his or her relationships with others. The experiences of aloneness and loneliness often coincide, although they need not do so. One can be alone without being lonely, as well as lonely without being alone(Rubenstein, Shaver, and Peplau, 1979). Anne Peplau and Daniel Perlman (1979) have defined loneliness as existing “to the extent that a person’s network of social relationships is smaller or less satisfying than the person desires” (p. 99). Loneliness, then, is the response to this personal, subjective sense of social deficit.

                Loneliness is a surprisingly common experience. A recent survey of Americans indicated that 26% had recently felt lonely or remote from others, and the problem of loneliness has been shown to be not exclusively American (Bradburn, 1969; Weiss, 1973). To understand the nature of loneliness better, Carin Rubenstein and Phillip Shaver published a “loneliness questionnaire” in several north-eastern American newspaper. The questionnaire asked readers to judge their own loneliness, to provide information about their childhood and family life, to describe the feelings they associated with loneliness, the reasons for loneliness, as well as ways of reacting to it. More than 25,000 people, from all races, ages, and economic backgrounds, responded.

                Shaver and Rubenstein (1979) found that respondents who described their parents as warm and helpful were less likely to report feeling lonely at the time of the survey than those who described their parents as unhelpful and disagreeable. The loneliest people of all were those whose parents had divorced, particularly when the respondent was less than six years old. Interestingly, the death of a parent had no effect on loneliness, whereas the loss of a parent through divorce had a profound impact. In explanation, Rubenstein, Shave, and Peplau (1979) write: “It is as if children regard divorced parents as having chosen to reject them and are tormented by their parents’ inaccessibility. But most children come to understand that a parent’s death is not their responsibility” (p. 62).

                When asked to describe the feelings they associate with loneliness, people applied in ways that Rubenstein and Shaver (1979) categorized into four sets: most people equated loneliness with “desperation,” using such words as “passive,” “helpless,” “afraid,” and “desperate” to describe their feelings. A second set used terms such as “bored,” “uneasy,” and the “desire to be elsewhere” to describe an apparently milder form of loneliness—what the researchers called “impatient boredom.” A third set of respondents equated loneliness with “depression,” using terms such as “melancholy,” “isolation,” “emptiness,” and “sadness” to describe their feelings. A fourth and final meaning of loneliness was “self-deprecation,” characterized by feeling “unattractive,” “stupid,” “ashamed,” “insecure,” and “down of myself.”

                When asked to describe the possible reaasons for loneliness, people tended to give one or more of five different answers: “being unattached” (having no spouse or sexual partner) was the most common answer, followed in turn by “alienation” (feeling different, misunderstood, not needed), “being alone” (e.g., coming home to an empty house), “forced isolation” (being housebound, hospitalized, or without transportation), and “dislocation” (being far from home, in a new job or school, moving too often). Finally, when asked to describe what they do when they feel lonely, Rubenstein and Shaver found that people reported they were most likely to read, watch television, listen to music, or call a friend.

How UCLA Students Explain Their Loneliness and React to It

	Stable (Chronic)	Unstable (Temporary)
Internal (personal characteristics)	Example: Due to physical appearance or defect in personality. Reaction: Depression and resignation.	Example: Due to lack of effort in meeting people. Reaction: Confidence, determination to change own behavior.
External (due to the situation)	Example: Due to racism or sexism in the university. Reaction: Anger, hostility.	Example: Due to large classes or busy work schedule. Reaction: Optimism, hope that things will change over time.

(Source: Raven, Bertram H., Rubin, Jeffrey Z. SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY. 1983. John Wiley & Sons, Inc: United States of America. 2nd Edition)

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