The Stigma of Loneliness: Why We Stay Silently Lonely

We all experience loneliness but still feel ashamed to admit it. Why is that, and what can we do about it?

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“I don’t believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it’s about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion which can and should be resisted.”

— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

I’ve tried it many times, but I can’t.

When people ask me what I write about, and I say I write about loneliness, I can’t resist the weight of that word. There’s no pride. No confidence. Instead, my voice falters into a somber, shameful tone — as if someone cast a spell of stifling vulnerability on me. As if the mere statement that I write about loneliness implies that I feel lonely when I say it — and as if that expresses something fundamentally wrong about me.

It’s ironic. Having researched, explored, and experienced loneliness for years, I should know there’s nothing to be ashamed of. I should know that, in many countries, more than half of the population feels lonely regularly. I should know that loneliness is an inherently human emotion.

And yet, the stigma of loneliness seems to be tattooed on my synapses. During the loneliest periods of my life, the L-word felt smeared on my forehead like a bold, flashy warning sign. I was constantly terrified of people finding out about my isolation, of being called a lonely loser.

Where does this stigma of loneliness come from? Why do stigmas make us even lonelier than we need to be? And what can we actually do about it?

How Stigmas Induce Loneliness (and Vice-Versa)

The term “stigma” originated in ancient Greece and means something like “mark” or “tattoo.” But unlike today, Greek stigmas weren’t just figurative. They were actual, physical marks on the body to highlight something unusual and shameful about a person’s moral status.

As Erving Goffman writes in his seminal work Stigma: Notes on the Management of…