“ 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.
