ABSTRACT
Loneliness carries a significant social stigma. In our culture, lack of friendship and social ties is socially undesirable. Lonely people have, often, very negative self-percep tions, and great difficulty to establish social ties, which often suggests that the alienated person may have personal inadequacies, or socially undesirable attributes (Lau ampentity Gruen, 1992). “Lonely people are perceived as less psychologically adjusted, less achieving, and less intellectually competent in relating to others” (Lau ampentity Gruen, 1992, p. 187). Research has demonstrated that the seriousness of the social stigma of lone liness is very much affected by the gender of the lonely. Loneliness, just like for instance depression, tends to be regarded by the public as unmasculine and conse quently more undesirable for men (Lau, 1989). Furthermore, men may hesitate to admit that they are lonely because of those very same negative connotations (Borys ampentity Perlman, 1989). A recent study about the prevalence of social isolation, in the dawn of the twenty first century, revealed that Americans are far more isolated than they pre viously were. The social network seems, now, to include less and less people: it is the family, or our spouse, or no one at all. Unfortunately, a growing number of people appear to have no one in whom they can confide, resulting in an increasingly frag-mented society, where social ties, that were such an integral part of daily life in past generations, are weakening or disappearing all together (McPherson, Smith-Lovin ampentity Brashears, 2006).
