Dating lonely friends

There is a clear distinction between feeling lonely and being socially isolated (for example, a loner).

In particular, one way of thinking about loneliness is as a discrepancy between one's necessary and achieved levels of social interaction, while solitude is simply the lack of contact with people.

Furthermore, once the alone time was over, people's moods tended to increase significantly.Loneliness has also been described as social pain—a psychological mechanism meant to motivate an individual to seek social connections.Loneliness is often defined in terms of one's connectedness to others, or more specifically as "the unpleasant experience that occurs when a person's network of social relations is deficient in some important way".Many people experience loneliness for the first time when they are left alone as infants.It is also a very common, though normally temporary, consequence of a breakup, divorce, or loss of any important long-term relationship.