Loneliness Definition: Three Kinds, Not One

Loneliness has one working definition and at least three forms. The definition is a shortfall: what your relationships supply comes in under what you want from them. The forms are emotional, where one attachment is gone; social, where no group holds a place for you; and existential, where nothing another person could do would close it.

Key Takeaways:

• The working definition is a shortfall rather than a headcount, which is how a person with four evenings booked reports more of it than a person with none
• Weiss built the first two categories in 1973 out of what people told him: emotional isolation, which follows the loss of an attachment figure, and social isolation, which follows the loss of an engaging network (Weiss, 1973)
• Existential loneliness comes out of philosophy and the clinical writing in that tradition, not out of loneliness research, and no standard instrument measures it
• The questionnaires in general use return a score. A score is a level, not a kind, and never a diagnosis (Russell, 1996; Hughes et al., 2004)

The Standard Loneliness Definition, and What It Leaves Out

Across nearly all of the research, the loneliness definition runs about a line long: the distressing shortfall a person feels between what their relationships supply and what they want from them. For the ground-level version of what loneliness is, what causes it, and what helps, that shortfall is the whole starting point. Two consequences follow at once. It is subjective, so nobody can inspect your week and tell you whether you have it. It is relative to what you want, which is how two people in identical circumstances land in completely different places.

Then the definition goes quiet on the part that decides everything. A gap exists, it says. Which relationship sits on the far side of that gap it does not say, and that is the entire practical question. Someone missing one particular human and someone missing a whole room both satisfy the definition exactly, and their situations have close to nothing in common.

The instruments inherit the silence. Version 3 of the UCLA scale asks how often you feel isolated from others and how often you feel in tune with the people around you (Russell, 1996), and the three-item version written for national surveys compresses the same thing further (Hughes et al., 2004). Each returns a number. Neither returns a kind, and neither returns a diagnosis, which is worth stating outright, because a high score gets read as one about as often as not.

Advice built on the definition alone is therefore aimed at the average of three different problems, and an average of three problems is nobody’s problem. Work out the kind before you take any of it.

Emotional Loneliness: One Person Missing

Emotional isolation was Weiss’s name for the first form, and he defined it by what is gone: an attachment figure, the person whose presence settles you. Social activity does not resolve it, he observed in 1973, and that is exactly the tell (Weiss, 1973). You come home from a good evening with six people and feel it more sharply than you did on the way out.

From the inside it is rarely sadness about numbers. It is a specific unavailability. There is a thing you would say, there is nobody you would say it to, and the sentence sits in your head for eleven days. Widowed people describe it. So do people two months out of a relationship, and people whose closest friend took a job three time zones away.

The version that catches everyone out has no loss in it. Nobody died. Nobody left. The attachment thinned across four or five years while both parties were busy, which produces the identical shortage with no story attached, and a shortage with no story is much harder to take seriously.

If your loneliness has a name attached to it, this is the kind you have. Adding people will not close it. One restored or newly built attachment can close it surprisingly fast.

Social Loneliness: A Room Where You Have No Place

Social isolation, in Weiss’s sense, is the loss of an engaging network: no set of people among whom you have a role. He kept it apart from the emotional form because it answers to different things. It eases when a network takes you in, and it survives intact in people who have a devoted partner and nobody else (Weiss, 1973). Marriage is famously not a treatment for it.

Visibility from outside is the single most useful property this form has. It shows up as a calendar with nothing recurring in it, a weekend with no default, a move to a city where the work is fine and the Saturdays run long. You can count it. Somebody else could count it for you, which is not true of the other two.

Because it is countable, it is also the form all the standard advice was written for. Join something. Keep saying yes for eight weeks and see what sticks. None of that is wrong. It is simply aimed, and it hits when the target is social loneliness.

Watch what a good Saturday does. A full one that leaves you satisfied means the shortage was social and you have just treated it. A full one that leaves you flatter than the empty one did means it was something else.

Existential Loneliness Is Philosophy, Not Research

The third form comes out of a different literature, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Existential loneliness is the old idea that a person is finally separate from every other person, that your experience cannot be handed over whole, and that no degree of closeness closes that particular distance. Philosophy owns it, along with clinical writing in that tradition. There is no standard instrument for it and no agreed measure, and the evidence base behind the first two forms has no counterpart here.

None of which makes it imaginary. People recognize it the moment it is described, and it carries a signature the other two do not: it arrives after the good conversation rather than instead of one. Four hours of being genuinely understood, then the drive home, then the fact that the understanding was partial and always will be. Nothing was missing from the evening.

Take what follows as description rather than finding. Existential loneliness appears to answer to different things from the other two, not company and not one particular person, but work or attention that puts you in contact with something larger than the conversation you just had. That claim rests on philosophy and personal report. Nobody has measured it, and anybody presenting it as science is dressing it up.

Name it accurately when it turns up. Read as the emotional form, it sends people hunting for a person who was never going to fix it.

The Three Kinds Side by Side

Six tests separate them, and only one of the six has anything to do with how many people are within reach.

Test	Emotional	Social	Existential
What is missing	One attachment figure	A group with a place in it for you	Nothing another person could supply
Visible from outside	No	Yes	No
What company does	Little, and can sharpen it	Reduces it	Neither helps nor hurts
Usual trigger	A loss, or a slow thinning	A move, a new job, a changed schedule	A good conversation, oddly enough
Covered by the standard scales	Partly, through the closeness items	Partly, through the companionship items	Not at all
First move that fits	Restore or build one tie	Repeat contact with one group	Not a contact problem

The commonest failure in the whole subject is prescribing the social answer to an emotional shortage. It happens because the social answer is the one everybody has to hand. Delivered to a person missing one specific attachment, it produces a busier week and no change whatsoever, and then it produces something worse: the conclusion that they tried the fix and the fix does not work on them.

Sorting yourself takes about a minute. Picture next Saturday completely full, people you like, morning to midnight. Then ask whether you would still want to make one particular phone call at the end of it. A yes puts you in the emotional column regardless of what your calendar says. If the imagined Saturday sounds like enough on its own, you are looking at the social form, and more of that Saturday is a real answer rather than a distraction.

None of the three is a diagnosis, and none is a category anybody can assign you. This article describes experience and mechanism, not care. If things have turned toward not wanting to be here, that belongs with a clinician or a crisis line; in the US, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Sort first, act second. Nearly all of the wasted effort in this subject comes from doing it the other way around. The mix also shifts with age; loneliness at 25, 45, and 65 leans on a different one of these three by decade.

FAQ

What is the actual definition of loneliness? The distressing shortfall a person feels between what their relationships supply and what they want from them. It is a subjective judgment rather than a count of people, which is why researchers keep it separate from social isolation, and nothing in the definition refers to how many hours you spend on your own. Two people with the same Saturday can honestly give opposite answers.

Is loneliness the same as social isolation? No. Social isolation is countable from outside: how many people you live with, how often anyone gets in touch, whether your week contains anything standing. Loneliness is a private appraisal of how close those relationships feel. They overlap without matching, which is why large studies carry them as separate variables, and why somebody with barely any contacts can report none of it while somebody with a packed week reports a great deal.

Which type of loneliness is the most common? There is no clean figure, because the standard instruments return a level rather than a kind and the two forms Weiss described were not built to be counted separately (Weiss, 1973). What can be said is that the emotional form is the one most often missed, since it leaves no trace on a calendar and the person carrying it frequently has plenty of company.

Can you have more than one kind at the same time? Yes, and after a big change it is the normal case. A breakup removes an attachment and a shared social circle inside the same month, which produces two shortages at once and needs both answers. Sort them anyway, because the two repairs run at very different speeds and expecting one to close both is how people decide they are getting nowhere.

One word covering three states is an accident of language rather than a discovery about people, and it costs more than it looks like it costs. The person missing a group and the person missing a name land on the same page, read the same advice, and only one of them was ever the intended reader. Asking which kind you have is not an academic exercise. It is the difference between a plan that could work and eight weeks of doing something correctly that was never aimed at you in the first place. Once you have sorted which kind you are carrying, the fixes diverge, and Lona fits only a narrow slice. It is company for the ordinary hours. It is not the one particular attachment the emotional kind is missing, and no software is.

Sources

• Weiss, R. S., “Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation,” 1973
• Russell, D., “UCLA Loneliness Scale (Version 3),” Journal of Personality Assessment, 1996
• Hughes, M. E. et al., “A Short Scale for Measuring Loneliness in Large Surveys,” Research on Aging, 2004