Lay your head on your “girlfriend’s” lap. Soft plush pillow comes complete with red miniskirt. Great for bachelor parties or actually quite functional for reading in bed. Polyester velvet with plump polyfill. 23″ x 13″ x 13″

Boyfriend Pillow

Feeling lonely? Here’s the solution for a gal whose boyfriend or husband is away on a trip! A pillow with an arm and soft, fleecy hand wraps around you while you sleep or relax. No more lonely nights when you snuggle with the “boyfriend pillow”! It makes a humorous gift for single pals. The polyester pillow is filled with foam and “dressed” in a cotton shirt. Hand washable. Imported. 20″ long.

These Japanese inventions were not created as a joke, but to assuage loneliness or at least the craving for physical comfort.

A brief glance at the literature suggests that there are 5 different types of loneliness with generous amounts of overlap.

• State loneliness. This type of loneliness is found among people who have lost an important attachment. It can be short lived like a day long separation or lengthy as in the break-up of a love affair. Most people experiencing this type of loneliness can be proactive and take measures to correct the situation or ameliorate it by finding a way “to amuse” themselves until the feeling dissipates.
• Trait loneliness. Those experiencing this type of loneliness are often people who have difficulty forming attachments or creating social networks for themselves. they badly wish to have an important person in their life but are often too frightened to let down their defenses.
• Emotional loneliness. This occurs, like state loneliness, due to the loss of an attachment figure such as a husband, mother or friend.
• Social loneliness. this occurs due to the lack of a viable social network
• Existential loneliness. This is the recognition that we are all alone in facing our selves and death. This spiritual phenomenon can be the seed of dread and/or a spiritual awakening.

By Robin Lloyd, Special to LiveScience

posted: 31 March 2006 10:14 am EST

It’s true—you might die of loneliness, but not until you’re older.

In a new University of Chicago study of men and women 50 to 68 years old, those who scored highest on measures of loneliness also had higher blood pressure. And high blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart disease, the number one killer in many industrialized nations and number two the United States.

Lonely people have blood pressure readings as much as 30 points higher than non-lonely people, said the study leaders Louise Hawkley and Christopher Masi. Blood pressure differences between lonely and non-lonely people were smallest at age 50 and greatest among the oldest people tested.

Richard Suzman of the National Institute on Aging, which funded this research, said he was “surprised by the magnitude of the relationship between loneliness and hypertension in this well-controlled, cross-sectional study.”

Nothing worse

The researchers separated loneliness out from depression, age, race, gender, weight, alcohol consumption, smoking, blood pressure medications, hostility, stress, social support and other factors.

Also, loneliness does eat at you. The morbid health effect of loneliness accumulates gradually and faster as you get older, the study found. Loneliness was worse for blood pressure than any other psychological or social factor the researchers studied.

Weight loss and physical exercise reduce blood pressure by the same amount that loneliness increases it. Hawkley said this finding especially surprised her.

“It’s comparable to the effects you see for the health benefits that are so often advocated such as exercise [to] keep your blood pressure under control,” Hawkley told LiveScience.

Who is lonely

About one in five Americans is lonely, a gnawing emotional state that is a patchwork of feeling unhappy, stressed out, friendless and hostile.

The main psychological difference between lonely and non-lonely people is that the former perceive stressful circumstances as threatening rather than challenging and cope passively and withdraw from stress rather than trying to solve the problem, said study co-author John T. Cacioppo.

Lonely people who are middle-aged and older tend to also have problems with alcoholism, depression, weak immune system responses to illness, impaired sleep and suicide.

Some psychologists think that associations between loneliness and health or physiology are just part of a generic stress response, but this new research suggests loneliness has a unique impact.

More to come

Social trends in the United States suggest a recipe for greater loneliness and thus higher blood pressure and risk of heart disease. The population is aging and more people move around and live alone than ever, contributing to greater separation from caring friends and family.

Data for the study, announced this week and published in the journal Psychology and Aging, were collected in 2001. Future research could demonstrate if loneliness causes higher blood pressure, or is simply associated with it.

Meanwhile, it’s probably a good idea to nurture those special friendships, marry, or at least get a decent roommate if you want to keep your blood pressure down and beat down your odds of getting heart disease.

 http://www.livescience.com/health/060331_loneliness.html

I imagine that the Japanese in this video is as bad as the English and the dancing.

This is for those who like fluff, incoherence and faux naivete.

But it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.

This photograph was found on deviantart.com. It nicely mirrors Alice Neel’s painting Loneliness but it takes the subject, the red chair out of a barren, almost wistful domestic setting and puts it into a decimated industrial environment that looks like a blasted cathedral. Personal sorrow is transformed into post-apocalyptic nightmare; yet the subject matter stays the same.

http://saligia.deviantart.com/art/about-loneliness-28563772 

THIS IS A LINK TO AN EXTREMELY ACTIVE YAHOO GROUP THAT ACTS AS A SUPPORT GROUP FOR THE LONELY.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/webofloneliness/

Alice Neel painted this evocative picture when her soon left home to marry.

 

At the time it was painted in 1970, “Loneliness” was the closest Neel had come to a self-portrait. Patricia Hills writes that “Loneliness” “gave concrete substance and image to the desolation that [Neel] felt when [her son] Hartley left home to marry Ginny.” The painting expresses this desolation in part by the absence of a human subject, but also visually through the separation of the composition’s various geometric shapes from one another.

Discounting the chair, which because of its coloring and angle takes on a type of animation, the painting is composed of isolated rectangular plains–the walls, the windows in the foreground and background, the shade, the molding. These distinct shapes abut one another without actually touching, creating the effect of separation, disconnection, and, most aptly, “Loneliness.” Neel acknowledged that this effect was the reason she liked the composition: “I really like the divisions in the painting. In its formal aspects, it approaches abstraction.”

For deeper insight into Neel’s self-image, it is beneficial to examine her painting, Self-Portrait painted ten years later in 1980 (see this database). This bona fide self-depiction lends greater understanding to the lonesome chair in “Loneliness,” for “Self-portrait” features Neel sitting in a similar armchair, albeit of a different color, in the same three-quarter view. In my annotation of that painting I wrote that Neel “responds to the traditional idealized female nude with her own form–one that celebrates the soul’s beauty rather than the beauty of surfaces.” This observation, that Neel celebrates the soul of a thing rather than its superficial characteristics, dovetails with “Loneliness,” a self-portrait of sorts that, despite its lack of a human subject, still manages to convey Neel’s own emptiness.

http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=10400

Jennifer Aniston was looking forward to working with Owen Wilson for the first time on the family drama Marley and Me.  But of course the film was derailed when Owen attempted suicide in August.  Life & Style Weekly is reporting that they have learned the movie’s back on and will begin shooting next spring.   Some of Jen’s Oregon friends are fighting back against reports that she was ’sad and lonely’ in Oregon while working there.

Loneliness Report Disputed: Jennifer Aniston & Owen Wilson, It’s On!

The report seemed rather odd at the time as it came at a time when the local press in Oregon was reporting that the 38-year old California beauty often referred to as America’s Sweetheart was having a grand time in the state and hitting the local hot spots enjoying herself and even mixing and visiting with the locals.

***

According to a report from the Madras Pioneer.  Wyck Godfrey, the producer of “The Management,” countered a story in a national movie magazine that claimed that Aniston was “upset and lonely,” a report from the paper states.

Aniston, who stayed at the Inn at Cross Keys Station, along with other members of the cast, had a good time in Madras, he pointed out. “The crew has had a fantastic time,” he said. “I mean every night, they have gone to … Silverado, the bowling alley three times, eaten at Mazatlan, Ding Ho, Mexico City.”

***

The cast and crew enjoyed the local Mexican food, he said, and ate at Mexico City regularly. “We ate there almost every night,” he said, adding that Aniston even signed a few autographs there.

Besides visiting restaurants and lounges, the cast spent money at grocery and hardware stores, gas stations, the liquor store — all over the community.