Friendlessness and loneliness: Cultural frames for making sense of disconnection

This article is based on 21 interviews in an Atlantic Canadian city with people who identified as having few or no friends. With all the talk of a modern loneliness epidemic, we might easily assume friendless people are lonely, yet here we take an interpretive approach to analyze how they alternately claim to experience and not experience loneliness. We argue that claims to loneliness or its absence are never merely personal stories or problems of individual health or wellbeing, but are shaped by larger cultural resources and meanings. We found that friendless people both lament and celebrate their disconnection, a duality that we theorize through competing views of the modern self as both autonomous/self-reliant and fundamentally in need of connection and community. We show how our interviewees struggle to find meaning in their disconnection and self-respect in a society where being friendless is open to stigma or pity.