Loneliness (the book)

[flexagon]

I'm reading a book on loneliness (title: Loneliness). There's a UCLA Loneliness Scale that I found an online quiz for... it's not even a great quiz (different people might easily have different ideas of what "Rarely" and "Never" mean, for instance) so it's interesting how well it correlates to a whole host of life situations.

The quiz confirms that I'm not subjectively lonely, though I have been in the past (I'm either not-lonely or on the borderline of low-normal, depending on my answer to one question). Lioness apparently is lonely, way into the high range, and chronically so. Clinically speaking, that fits really well with her tendency to feel threatened and also to push people away. Fits for two of my other friends, too. I really hadn't realized. What I'm learning is that long-term loneliness can seriously mess a person up, from reading a social environment as more hostile than it is to premature aging (wow). And the opposite, that feeling grounded in companionship can have good ripple effects.

Most interesting nuggets from the book so far:

• Very lonely people are more sensitive to social cues than most, but they misinterpret them (generally as being more hostile / negative than they really are).


• The English language doesn't have a good simple word for not-lonely, or for not-thirsty.

Now go chat your friends.

Comments

[rye]

It's interesting to me that these sorts of tests tend to emphasize responding as knee-jerk as possible (I recently took a similar sort of eval in which they explicitly told me "the more you think about your answers, the less valid the result will be") -- in that it's really the self-perception that matters more than either objective things or even a more thinking-brain thought-out comparison between one's want and need.

I imagine also not being able to adjust that self-perception after circumstances/times change could lead to that disconnect between the subjective sense and the objective social support, too. (Maybe I should just read the book. :) Sounds really interesting.)