Loneliness is not solitude: the difference that changes everything

Friday evening, two flats in the same block. In the first, someone silences their phone, makes a cup of tea and settles on the sofa with a book. They have been waiting for this evening all week. One floor up, someone is sitting on a very similar sofa, the television on but unwatched, opening the same chat for the third time to see whether anyone has replied. From the outside the two scenes are almost identical: one person, one flat, no visitors. From the inside they have nothing in common.

The first person is in solitude. The second is lonely. If someone who counts social contacts walked in on them, they would write down the same number for both: this evening, none. And this is where the confusion begins that makes well-meant advice miss so often. We tell the first person they really should get out more, although nothing is missing. We tell the second the same thing, although they were out among people yesterday and came home emptier than before.

In this post I would like to separate three things that we throw into one basket in conversation: solitude, loneliness and social isolation. Not for the sake of being precise, but because what will actually help you depends on which of the three describes your situation.

Three words we mix up

Social isolation is a fact that can be counted. How many people you see in a week, how many you talk to, whether you live alone, whether you are part of any group. It says nothing about how you feel about it. A lighthouse keeper is socially isolated whether he likes it or not.

Loneliness is a feeling. In 1981 the psychologists Daniel Perlman and Letitia Anne Peplau described it as the unpleasant experience that arises when a person’s network of relationships is deficient in some important way, either in quantity or in quality. In other words, loneliness is the gap between the contact you have and the contact you need. This definition is more than forty years old and has lasted because it explains something counting cannot: that someone with a single good friend can be fully satisfied, while someone with thirty acquaintances goes hungry. You will find more on the concept itself in the knowledge base under loneliness.

Solitude is a state in which you are alone and that is fine with you. Sometimes more than fine: you need it to gather yourself, to hear your own thoughts, to rest from being available to others. Slovenian has a lovely word for it, samota, which also names a place. A house “na samoti” is a house that stands far from any other, and anyone who grew up in one knows it can be peace and burden at once. The entry on solitude is described separately in the knowledge base.

All three can of course appear together. A person left without people will often be lonely too. But not necessarily, and the reverse does not hold either. What it looks like when the circle of people is wide and the feeling is still empty, I describe in the post Loneliness in the middle of a full life: alone among people.

What shows up when we measure them separately

That these are not just fine points of language becomes clear when researchers measure each of the three on its own. In 2015 Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues published a meta-analysis of 70 studies that followed people over time. They looked separately at loneliness, at social isolation and at whether a person lived alone. Each of the three was linked to a higher risk of earlier death: loneliness by about 26 per cent, social isolation by 29 and living alone by 32 per cent.

I am not quoting these figures to frighten anyone. They describe averages in large groups and an association, not an individual’s fate, and they say nothing about what will happen to you. They are interesting for another reason: they show that the feeling and the fact each count in their own right. Someone who is objectively seldom among people but does not mind is not exempt. Nor is someone who is surrounded by people and feels alone. What we know about this link, and what we do not, I have gathered in the post Loneliness and health: what the research shows and what it doesn’t.

Loneliness is a signal, not a fault

The American neuroscientist John Cacioppo, who studied loneliness for decades, compared it to hunger and thirst. Hunger is not a malfunction. It is the body’s message that something is lacking and that it is time to go and find it. Loneliness, in his understanding, is a similar message: a warning that the bonds we have always depended on as a species have worn too thin.

I find this view valuable because it takes away shame. A lonely person almost never says “I am hungry for contact.” They are more likely to tell themselves that something is wrong with them, that they are boring, hard work, that people simply do not like them. The feeling that should point them towards others turns against the self. I wrote about that turn in the post Shame: the emotion that whispers “There is something wrong with me”.

If you read loneliness as a signal, the question changes. Instead of “what is wrong with me” it becomes “what am I missing”. And that question has a surprisingly precise answer.

Two kinds of loneliness: emotional and social

In 1973 the sociologist Robert Weiss published a book that is still one of the foundational works on the subject. He listened to people after divorce and to people who had moved to a new place, and noticed that they were not talking about the same thing, although they used the same word.

Emotional loneliness arises when one close bond is missing: a person with whom you are safe, whom you can tell everything, and who would notice if you did not come home at night. Weiss linked it to attachment, and so described it as a restless, anxious emptiness, similar to the distress of a small child looking for a parent. It is common after a break-up, after the death of a partner, and also in a relationship where two people have fallen silent beside each other.

Social loneliness arises when a circle is missing: a group of people you share something with, who expect you and among whom you belong. The feeling is different, closer to boredom, to being left out, to not being on anyone’s list. It is common after a move, after a change of job, after retirement, in the first months of parenthood. In the language of the knowledge base, what is missing is belonging.

Weiss’s most important finding, though, is that one does not make up for the other. For a woman who has moved to a foreign city with her partner, a loving husband does not change the fact that she has no one to go for coffee with. For a widower with a house full of friends, they do not replace the person who sat opposite him every evening. Later questionnaires that measure the two kinds separately have kept this distinction.

This is why the advice “get out and meet people” so often fails with emotional loneliness. The person goes, makes polite conversation, comes home and finds the hole is exactly the same size. The conclusion they draw is usually the wrong one: “Even this doesn’t help, so there really is something wrong with me.” There is not. They simply ate bread when they were thirsty.

Why loneliness tends to prolong itself

If loneliness is a signal, we would expect it to push a person towards others, the way hunger pushes us towards food. At first it does. When it lasts a long time, something odd happens. In a review article in 2010, Louise Hawkley and John Cacioppo described how a lonely person becomes more alert to signs of rejection. The social world seems more dangerous, they expect less good from encounters, and what stays in memory is mostly the awkward moments.

This is understandable. Anyone who has been without shelter for a long time learns to watch out. But the caution has a price. A person who expects coldness arrives at a gathering reserved, short of words, with one eye on the door. Others read this as lack of interest and respond accordingly. The expectation is confirmed, although the fear of it helped to create it.

The same authors also summarise a review of attempts to reduce loneliness. Programmes that merely offered people more opportunities to socialise, or taught them social skills, did less well than those that worked with these automatic expectations: with the thought “they won’t like me anyway” before anyone has even opened their mouth. This does not mean loneliness is “all in your head”. It means that with long-standing loneliness, opening the door is often not enough. You also need to look at what a person carries through it.

Solitude that nourishes

Now to the other side. Solitude in this post is not a consolation prize for those without company. It is something most people need, including those with the warmest relationships.

In 2018 Thuy-vy Nguyen, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci published a series of experiments in which participants spent fifteen minutes alone, without a phone and without tasks. Afterwards their strong emotions had settled, pleasant and unpleasant alike: less excitement, but also less tension and anger. The authors called this a deactivation effect. Whether that calm was pleasant or flat depended mainly on one thing: whether the person experienced the solitude as something they had chosen. When they did, they felt more relaxed and no lonelier.

Choice, then, is the line between solitude and loneliness, but the line is not always sharp. The same Sunday at home can be rest one week and punishment the next. Sometimes solitude also begins as a choice and slips unnoticed into withdrawal: you cancel one meeting because you are tired, then another because it is easier, and six months later you realise you are no longer choosing but avoiding. A useful question is: if someone I love invited me out right now, could I go? Solitude you can step out of is solitude. The kind you cannot step out of is something else.

There is also the opposite difficulty: people who cannot bear solitude at all and fill every empty hour with anyone available, just so as not to be alone with themselves. That is not a sign of a rich social life but often a flight from one’s own silence. I wrote about this in the post Relationship addiction: why some people cannot be alone.

How it sounds in conversation

The difference between the three concepts shows best when someone says it aloud. A conversation like that might go something like this (composed; this is not a real person):

“Everyone keeps telling me to get out more. I do. On Saturday I was at a barbecue with fifteen people.”
“And how were you when you got home?”
“Worse than before. As if I’d talked all evening and nobody had heard me.”
“What would someone have needed to hear?”
“… That it’s been hard since my father died. Nobody asked. And I didn’t say.”

This person is not socially isolated; fifteen people in one afternoon is more than many see in a week. Nor does he want solitude. He is missing one bond in which he could say what he is carrying. Until he knows that, he will keep going to barbecues and wondering why they do not help.

Exercise: which of the three is mine

For this exercise you need a sheet of paper and about fifteen minutes. You can do it today. The aim is not to diagnose yourself but to turn the fog of “I’m sort of alone” into a more precise picture.

1. Count the facts. Write down who you spoke to for longer than five minutes in the past seven days, in person or on the phone. Names only, no judgements. This is your measure of isolation.
2. Mark the hours you were alone. Beside each, add a plus if you felt well or at least calm, and a minus if it weighed on you. The pluses are solitude, the minuses loneliness.
3. Ask Weiss’s question. Am I missing one person I could tell everything, or a circle of people I would belong to? Perhaps both, but almost always one more than the other.
4. Finish the sentence. “What I miss most is someone who would …” Write whatever comes first, even if it seems childish.
5. Choose one small step that fits the answer. If a close bond is missing: this week, tell one person on your list one thing a little more honestly than usual. If a circle is missing: find one activity that repeats every week with the same people, and go three times before you judge it.

If the page stays almost empty at the first step, that is not a verdict on you. It is information: it tells you that isolation comes first in your case, and that the first steps are more practical than emotional.

Where this distinction does not help

Separating the concepts is useful, but it would be dishonest to claim it settles everything.

Isolation often has very tangible causes. Illness, reduced mobility, hearing loss, a remote place with no transport, caring for a relative, lack of money. For a person who cannot leave the house, no amount of thinking about kinds of loneliness replaces a lift or a visit. When the cause is outside, so is the solution, and sometimes that is a matter for the community, not the individual.

Loneliness can overlap with depression or social anxiety. If, alongside feeling lonely, you have had weeks of low drive, poor sleep or a sense of worthlessness, or if meeting people frightens you so much that you avoid it, that is worth telling your GP. I do not make diagnoses and this post cannot either; what I can say is that in such cases loneliness rarely lifts until what lies beneath it has been addressed.

Solitude is not a remedy for everyone. The research on its benefits is about solitude that is brief and chosen. Someone who is alone because they have no other option gains little from the advice “learn to enjoy your own company”, and may well be hurt by it.

And it is not always two clean kinds. Weiss’s distinction is a map, not the territory. Many people are lonely in both ways at once, or in a third way that is harder to put into words: that nobody knows them as they are.

If loneliness is joined by thoughts that it would not matter if you were not here, do not wait. In Slovenia you can call the mental distress line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day), and in an emergency 112. Calling when there is “just nobody to talk to” is a perfectly good reason too.

Where therapy comes in

Therapy does not replace friends or a partner; how a conversation with a therapist differs from one with someone close to you, I wrote about in the post What psychotherapy is and what it isn’t: a talk with a friend, coaching, or something else?. But it can be a place to explore why closeness keeps stopping at the same point.

As a therapist in training in marriage and family therapy under supervision, I am studying relational family therapy, which looks at loneliness through relationships. It is interested in where you learned that it is safer not to need anyone, or that you have to be entertaining, useful or quiet in order to be allowed to stay. Such patterns are often older than present circumstances, and hard to see for yourself because they feel self-evident. Once you see them, loneliness does not dissolve, but it stops being proof that something is wrong with you. It becomes a trace that shows where you once had to manage alone. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

What to remember

• Social isolation is a fact (few contacts), loneliness is a feeling (the gap between the contact you have and the contact you need), solitude is a choice.
• Loneliness is a signal, like hunger, and not proof that something is wrong with you.
• Emotional loneliness means a close bond is missing; social loneliness means a circle is missing. One does not make up for the other.
• Long-standing loneliness makes a person more alert to rejection, which is why more opportunities to socialise are often not enough on their own.
• Solitude nourishes when it is chosen and you can step out of it. Once it becomes avoidance, it is no longer solitude.