What is the difference for you?
The difference, over years of discussing related stuff, seems to be: loneliness is when you wish other people are around and being alone is a comfortable state. I’m an only child and find that other only children are generally comfortable being alone. Whereas, people from large families are lonely because they’re not accustomed to being alone.
Maybe I should expand…I’m asking in your life are there times when you feel lonely when you think others wouldn’t feel the same way in the same circumstance? Is there times when you’re alone, but you feel content, and maybe someone else would feel lonely in the same situation? Or maybe, there’s not a difference to you at all, between the two…
No, there are times when I’m alone that I feel others in my position would be lonely, though. I quite enjoy being alone. I don’t think, ever in my life, have I ever actually been lonely. Bored perhaps, but never lonely.
I don’t know that it’s something I can necessarily articulate. I’m hardly ever lonely when I’m alone, but I’m quite often lonely around other people. It’s…I guess it’s as much a feeling of connection as anything else. When I’m puttering around by myself, I feel connected to me, because I’m free to let all my most natural tendencies come out. I can metaphorically (and often physically) sit around in my underpants watching crap tv, quilting, and talking to the dogs in funny voices. Around people I don’t know well or connect with, I have to watch what I say and do all the time, and it’s kind of oppressive. I feel like I’m not being me, but rather what other people want to see from me. So I don’t have any connection to them, and I’ve lost my connection to myself. That’s loneliness.
Very interesting, ladies. Catlady, you articulated that very well.
CanadianGirl, you’ve never felt lonely? If you haven’t, how do you know what it is? I’m not doubting you, of course. I’m just very interested.
Similar to CrazyCatLady, but I often do feel lonely when I’m by myself. I can be alone without feeling alone (I absolutely reveled in that one day between my roommates going home for break and me leaving. Peace!) and I can also feel alone while in a room full of people–usually in a bar-type atmosphere, which I don’t particularly like and it seperates me from my friends who enjoy that kind of place.
RE: Canadiangirl’s only-child thing–I’m an only child but I’m still often not comfortable being alone. I don’t mind it, but I guess I feel like I spend too much time alone. I need to have friends around me, and if I spend too much time away from them it drives be batty. This is a little different from the alone/loneliness debate, since I’ve been spending a lot of time away from them this year, but still around people (namely, my roommates, and I love it when they’re out), but if I’m alone most of the time, obviously I’m not with my friends, and it bothers me.
Illness has caused me to have little contact with the outside world (except for the medical sectors of it). Thanks to the Internet, I have no problem with loneliness.
Being in a group of people with whom I have nothing much in common makes me feel very lonely. I went to a Christmas party last year where I felt as if I were a fish gasping for air. If I can’t enjoy conversations on interesting subjects, I’d rather be alone. Standing around with a bunch of vapid, shallow people who are interested mainly in sucking up cocktails while blathering about social status and ostentatious displays of wealth, well, that’s a whole heckuva lot more lonely-making than being in my own home doing something I want to do.
Bang on! CrazyCatlady absolutely correct. I am usually lonelier at a party than say, right now, home alone.
Being alone = no one else around.
Lonely = no one cares about me as an individual.
I can be alone without being lonely. As a husband, father of 3, softball coach, working stiff, and youth volunteer I sometimes crave time alone. I may get bored if I’m alone too much, but seldom do I get lonely.
I can be lonely in crowd of people. In fact, that’s when I’m most likely to feel lonely. A bunch of people all around, interacting with each other but I don’t know a soul and not a soul knows me.
Put another way, IMHO, alone is a state of being, lonliness is a state of mind.
I’ve spent a lot of my life lonely, if not alone. It’s really difficult to desire having people around while distance, time and money conspire to keep me here in this old shack.
Because of lack of motivation? Or what? Why does being in the shack stop the desire?
I am very rarely lonely when I am alone, and frequently feel lonely when I’m around people, especially (but not only) people I don’t know well. And even when I’m enjoying it, being with people usually wears me out pretty quickly. I need alone time to recharge in an almost preposterous ratio to social time. What can I say, I’m a textbook introvert…
Actually, perhaps this is an interesting thing to put here: one of the reasons I like my current boyfriend so much is that when I’m with him I feel like I do when I’m alone. By which I mean I have the same perfect comfort when I’m with him as when nobody else is around. And that’s pretty damn impressive.
This describes me to a T.
I could literally get married and be content with separate living arrangements! It’s cool that you’ve become comfortable with your SO though. 
I’m a diabetic with complications, and I have a choice: stay here in this low-population area and be near my family, or leave the area for new opportunities- on my own. There is a lack of motivation from having no energy to speak of- I’m tired almost all the time, and it’s a Catch-22 situation. If I had the energy I would get out and be happier, but I need the energy to get started in the first place and a day when I’m relatively pain-free.
There’s more, but suffice it to say that the whole situation is depressing to me. I have the “gift” of driving people away when I’m depressed. Hence, the lonelinesss.
To be being lonely has nothing to do with other people, it has to do with whether you feel connected to and comfortable with the people you are around. You can feel lonely and alone while surrounded by people if you can’t connect to them.
Being alone just means you don’t have people physically around you. I guess the difference to me is mental vs physical. Lonliness means you don’t connect to the people you are around, alone means there aren’t any people around.
I was *dreadfully * lonely through a large portion of my teen years. From one reason or another I suffered a great deal of emotional and psychological abuse from my parents, and that is guaranteed to make you feel lonely I think. I hate being lonely; it’s one of my fears, actually.
Alone? I do like having my own space sometimes.
When I’m lonely and alone, there’s usually boredom involved. Like, I will want to do something–like go to the movies or out to eat–that is much better when shared with someone else. I rarely feel lonely when I’m preoccupied with something.
But as CrazyCatLady said, I can also be lonely when I’m not really alone. I usually feel this way when I’m “home” for the holidays and trying to reconnect with my family. Sometimes, when I’m around a bunch of couples (whether they be romantic partners or friends), I feel like the odd man out and it makes me feel lonely.
My default setting is alone. I crave aloneness, and seek it out. However, I know that I am surrounded by people who love and care for me, and who are there for me when I don’t want to be alone. My experiences of loneliness have been fleeting and transitory, and they have been specifically about times when I have felt that it was impossible for other people to understand what I was going through.
For me, loneliness is a mental rather than a physical state: if I was catapulted into a new city where I knew no one and had nothing in common with the people around me, it probably wouldn’t make me feel lonely simply because there are people in the world who love me, even if they aren’t physically with me.
I don’t feel lonely, as I have a network of friends and family and colleagues to be with on a regular basis.
I don’t mind being alone. I often eat alone, see movies alone, and travel alone because I just enjoy the autonomy. I don’t mind traveling with a friend if our travel habits are more or less compatible, but it’s nice not to have to wait on someone else or to deny myself an activity just because it’s not something they would enjoy or want to pay for. Maybe that sounds selfish in a way, but it’s the way I’ve gotten to be over the years.