There are aspects of grief that make loneliness seem inevitable and unsolvable. If you’re grieving, you may feel this has become the story of your life. So whether a person has 100 great family and friends, if they long for something or someone they don’t have –like an intimate partner, a friend they can open up to, a group of people who “get them,” a family, etc. Individual loneliness is defined by what a person wants in relation to what they have. Based on this definition, prototypical characterizations of “loneliness” seem misguided. Loneliness is dependent on what a person “needs and desires,” and this measure is personal and varies drastically from one individual to the next.

Instead, that loneliness is a feeling of discomfort that arises when a person subjectively feels unfulfilled by their social relationships.

In other words, loneliness occurs when a person’s social relationships don’t meet their interpersonal needs or desires. I want to note the above definition says nothing about the state of being alone. “ The subjective psychological discomfort people experience when their network of social relationships is significantly deficient in either quality or quantity.” In the Encyclopedia of Mental Helath (1998) researchers, Daniel Perlman and Letita Anne Peplau define loneliness as, The trouble is that loneliness is subjective (i.e., different from person to person), so there’s no way anyone can truly know what it looks like. We equate loneliness to the very definable concept of being alone, which means “without other people,” and thanks to “lonely people” archetypes - like the spinsters with ten cats and misunderstood teenagers - we think we have a good idea of how loneliness looks. Though loneliness, as a concept, is one I think many assume we understand. The intersection of grief and loneliness is complicated.

Alone Together by Robert Hill