Common types
Loneliness can be summarized as falling into these categories:
- Situational / circumstantial - loss of a relationship, move to a new city
- Developmental - a need for intimacy balanced by a need for individualism
- Internal - often including feelings of low self-esteem and vulnerability
Common symptoms
Loneliness can evoke feelings that 'everyone else' has friends, and that one is socially inadequate and socially unskilled. A lonely person may become convinced there is something wrong with them, and that no one understands their situation. Such a person will lose confidence and will become reluctant to attempt to change or too scared to try new things for fear of further social rejection. In extreme cases, a person may feel a sense of emptiness which may become a state of clinical depression.
In modern society
Loneliness frequently occurs in heavily populated cities; in these cities many people feel utterly alone and cut off, even when surrounded by throngs of other people. They experience a loss of identifiable community in an anonymous crowd. It is unclear whether loneliness is a condition aggravated by high population density itself, or simply part of the human condition brought on by this social milieu. Certainly, loneliness occurs even in societies with much smaller populations, but the sheer number of random people that one comes into contact with daily in a city, even if only briefly, may raise barriers to actually interacting more deeply with them and increase the feeling of being cut off and alone. Quantity of contact does not translate into quality of contact,
Loneliness appears to have become particularly prevalent in modern times. At the beginning of the last century families were typically larger and more stable, divorce was rarer and relatively few people lived alone. Today, the trend has reversed direction: over a quarter of the U.S. population lived alone in 1998. In 1995, 24 million Americans lived in single-person households; by 2010, it is estimated that number will have increased to around 31 million.
A 2006 study in the american sociological review found that Americans on average had only two close friends to confide in, down from an average of three in 1985. The percentage of people who noted having no such confidant rose from 10 percent to almost 25 percent; and 19 additional percent said they had only a single confidant (often their spouse), raising the risk of serious loneliness in case the relationship ended
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