Loneliness

Two causes are named and they are not the same, which is why the definition lists both. Unrequited connections means conduits exist and nothing comes back, so energy goes out and does not return. Lack of opportunity means no conduits could be formed in the first place. The first is a person surrounded by people and still depleted, which is why loneliness is common inside marriages, workplaces and crowds and is not solved by proximity. The second is the case ordinary usage recognizes. Both produce longing rather than emptiness, and longing is directed, which is what makes loneliness a state of reaching rather than of absence. That places it close to hope in the framework, since hope is conscious striving for exosocial connection and loneliness is what that striving feels like when it is not met. Losing it entirely would mean the striving had stopped. The energy account also accounts for why loneliness has physical consequences rather than merely unpleasant ones. Unrequited conduits produce deanimation, and deanimation shortens the life of those with a broken heart or with unrequited anima conduits, so what is happening is depletion rather than discomfort. The remedy the framework implies is not company but balance, since an interaction that does not settle leaves a person lonelier the more of it they have.

Loneliness research distinguishes it from objective social isolation and measures it as the gap between desired and actual connection, following Perlman and Peplau, and the health literature after John Cacioppo has documented substantial effects on mortality, immune function and cognition. Weiss separated emotional from social loneliness, which maps closely onto Marsh's two causes. Public health bodies now treat it as a population-level concern. The convergence is notable, since the research arrives at the finding that quality rather than quantity of contact determines loneliness, which Marsh derives from the requirement that interactions balance rather than from survey evidence.