Loneliness in itself is not a bad thing. It becomes a problem when you start to depend on things outside yourself to cure it. Chronic loneliness can be a symptom to a much bigger problem that needs to be healed BEFORE you go out looking for an external cure.

Curing your loneliness with love for example and not realizing the core of the problem (why you feel lonely ultimately not superficially) is akin to curing sleeping disorders with Excedrin PM Pills where by the problem is drinking 18 cups of coffee one right after the other all the way up until your bed time and expecting to sleep.

The pills will knock you out but the acetaminophen (a trademark used for the drug Tylenol), will weaken your stomach lining, damage your liver and long term problems will result that you can not easily if at all remove. Do I really have to give the example of the relationship resulting in seeking love out of loneliness? Good, moving on.

If you feel lonely and desperate it can mean that you don't have enough respect for yourself, who you are, and what your worth. What your contribution to the world is worth. If you can't stand your own company and demand to have others fill the needs you yourself should be content in fulfilling, then their may be a problem in your self esteem.

This doesnt mean your not a great person with alot of amazing qualities that others see right away, it just means that you aren't content being alone and this could he a bigger problem thatn it seems. This is ONLY ONE idea of what it could be. The truth is only can figure it out but below I will show you a trick to extracting it.. it could be as simple as you need a creative outlet and you normally get that when your in a relationship.

Chronic loneliness is often a symptom of the wrong mindset. If your generally confident and can be alone most of the time without the "need" to be in a relationship, then loneliness is just a yearning to be around people, or to feel the bliss of love.

If however you're feeling loneliness all the time, and feel desperate to be with someone, this can be a very dangerous kind of loneliness. If you cannot confidently be alone you are in danger of leeching something from a potential lover or relationship (romantic or non-romantic).

The cure of course then is to discover why you feel lonely. If you write down your thoughts about it, and just flow all of your ideas onto paper, you will discover the real reason you feel lonely and can cure it safely without risking a broken heart (broken heart syndrome is the focus of the second half of this hub, and shows why you should NOT cure loneliness by entering into a relationship).

I find when I run into a problem like this I start a hub on it, in the process of writing the hub I elicit the answers and format my findings in a way that enlightens others and helps me unlock my brain. The answers to most of your problems are already in your head you just have to set them free from their prisons behind the belief systems and all the massive amounts of data you've learned since you last thought of this issue. What you end up with is a formatted answer to your problem and a hub to publish (hence make money problem solving and helping others hehe).

You can also use the technique I use to write a hub that I wrote about where by you record (into your microphone) yourself asking all these questions and as the potential answers pop into your head you say them, at the end you play it back and this probes you even deeper into the answers (have a pen and paper ready or type it into a text file).

You can keep going by making a new recording with all your new insights and so on to extract all the data from your subconscious. YOU KNOW why your lonely but you may not be consciously processing the real reason (i.e. you see a jewelry commercial with love as the theme and miss that, feel lonely but think its because you want love, when really its what love represented or stimulated in you that made you happy that is the real reason for your loneliness!). If you make the mistake of chasing love to cure this you may miss out that its simply you felt more creative and vibrant when you were in love and thus the true cure is to write, make artwork, take pictures and so on.. and it lacks the hassles that come with "chasing love".

If you start writing you will extract all the things you need out of your head (and distract your loneliness for a bit). What you want to do is ask yourself first a lot of questions. Some example probing questions that will help you write the perfect dissertation of why you feel lonely are:

1. Why do I feel lonely? is it because I miss love? Miss being loved? Is it rooted in passion?

2. What kinds of things are I feeling when I feel lonely?

3. Is loneliness a sporadic thing or am I feeling it a bit compulsively?

4. Do I fantasize about past relationships and miss them and this is what makes me feel alone?

5. What triggers me to feel lonely? Is it being home alone? Seeing love on commercials or TV? Do I miss love or do I miss people and groups I loved being in?

6. How is my self esteem? Can I be alone or do I need to feel someone else in my life to feel complete?

7. If I got into a relationship right now and fell in love with someone I feel is wonderful because they make me "feel" happy, and they dump me, how will this honestly impact me? will the way they dump me make a difference in my heart breaking or will it impact me different if their rude about it?

These are only a few, start asking a lot of questions and the brain will open up. Asking lays the foundation for the very way our brain accesses information, as you ask one question and receive an answer another question about that answer should take you deeper. For example:

Question: Why am I lonely?

Answer: Because I miss being loved

Question (deeper down the rabbit hole): What is it about love I miss exactly?

Answer: Feeling appreciated

Question: why do I need to feel appreciated externally as opposed to appreciating myself?

Answer: Because it feels good

Question: What makes it feel good exactly?

Answer: I feel competent, worthy, and compelled to better myself

Question: Can I accomplish this through my own work and appreciating my writing, artwork or other creative expression?

Answer: absolutely!

Solution (one potential): Do something bold, creative and that I really enjoy, and show it off to others to gain the same appreciation and admiration without losing myself in a relationship that I may not discover I'm using just to feel happy without realizing the real reason I'm lonely *Grin*

If you do this process, you not only open the doors to WHY your lonely but you make more informed decisions than "hmm I'm feeling lonely.. I miss love.. I need a girl or guy in my life and that would make me feel happy, I'm going out" then you neglect why you're lonely but try to just put a band aid on the problem. If you go through the process of first realizing why you feel lonely, you can still go out and look for someone to share it with, but you'll know that you're not looking for love as a fix, but company as a way to feel better. You won't make mistakes in judgment!

You may also save yourself from a broken heart that will elicit the same answers but through desperation now to remove the pain of your mistakes! What if your loneliness causes you to make a rash decision to "go get laid" and you (guys) end up getting a girl pregnant that you don't even really like, she just cured your loneliness because she was the first person your desperate ass saw that made you feel good and was willing to sleep with you?

Ladies what if you end up getting pregnant by a loser who you used for the cure to your loneliness? Making rash uninformed decisions can have drastic consequences. If you at least hash out the problem to get to the focal point of the emotions true reason for manifesting, you will at least chase the safest and most fulfilling path to the cure.

In this second half of the hub I will talk about broken heart (past present or recent) and how this is something that needs to be addressed OUTSIDE of jumping back into a relationship.

When we get into a relationship we start to enjoy a hightened sense of ourselves. Some get into a relationship to just feel themselves because they have no idea how to do this by themselves without a partner.

A broken heart is always self inflicted but we tend to see the external stimulus of our sadness as the culprit. If you enter a relationship because you can't be alone you are just begging to feel your heart break. Just the act of doing this makes you a leech of what your missing. Instead of learning to be alone you learn to become co-dependant on the other person for that void.

This doesnt resolve the problem, it only puts a bandaid on the wound, a dirty infectious filled bandaid at that. The wound gets better temporarily because we feel the relief the other person offers us, a bridge to our happiness. We feel more confident in ourselves because that bridge that was elusive is now manifest in their attention towards us and we don't feel like were doing this alone.

What happens however is this causes the other person to subconciousely realize their being "used". Even if thats not your concious intention thats exactly what your doing and it will drag the relationship into the gutter, especially if the other person is not using you, and is confident and fullfilled, trying to have a real relationship with you to enhance what he is not fullfil a missing peice of his soul.

If you cannot handle being alone and still feel content then you have no business getting into a relationship or trying to find love. Loneliness is not always a punishment; it just means you crave human contact and conversation. Being lonely and being desperate for love are two completely different animals. I am very content being alone, yet I still get lonely time to time, but will never chase love for this reason.

When you feel desperate to feel loved you are being shown that you are lacking something about your self esteem that needs to be expressed and dealt with. NOT by going out and filling that void with another person.

One of the dangers of this is not only damaging yourself but hurting others in the process. Let me illustrate the danger of misplaced or mal-defined loneliness and how it usually manifests into disaster if unchecked and dealt with properly.

I once dated this girl Paula who was so incredibly lonely and desperate to be loved that she would date several guys at once (dozens really) on and offline to get a "fix" of attention she craved so deeply it never really became fulfilled.

She didn't realize that she was desperately trying to fill something that had to be dealt with internally, not externally (The real problem was her mother, not others loving her, and others couldn't give her what made her feel so lonely)and so she would seek out and make guys fall in love with her then make them think she only thought of them, when she moved on to another guy her attention and passion waned and they felt it (she has an intense personality that is intoxicating and dangerous as a black widows intentions!). She is on a perpetual but endless and hopeless journey to find love in all the wrong places, and when she realizes its not working to fulfill this desperate need for attention she breaks hearts without any compassion or even conscience.

When she realized that they were "on to her" she dropped them and moved on to the next new catch, breaking hearts all over the world. She seemed to be charismatic and confident in herself but truly she lacked self esteem and the void she kept trying to fill was and is impossible to fill this way. She brings on a lot of bad karma, and angry guys in her wake that I'm sure will one day come back to haunt her, but this is a severe example of why you should really take inventory before you act on your loneliness. Although this girl had a good heart somewhere deep beneath her intentions, she will always (so long as she continues to try to heal the pain this way) be lonely even in a relationship.

A relationship is supposed to be the synergy of two souls together bettering each other, not two should trying to fulfill an easy fix to their pain. If you enter a relationship without resolving your self esteem issues, you will try to shoplift this lack from the other person. What makes this dangerous is you become highly addicted to and dependant on them for that "fix" (pun).

When they pull away you lose your self control and act out irrationally, you start to really show it when you don't give them proper space. People can feel when others are leeching from them, I like to call this "Psychic vampirism" as its a mental taking of their life force for selfish reasons and without permission.

When one or more people join to feel loved, not to love, it takes its toll very quickly depending on how deep the wound goes. When you enter into a relationship without leeching anything from the other, theirs no desperation, theirs self confidence, theirs no needing them to do anything to "prove" their love for you, you are confident enough in yourself to accept it when it comes and to give it when you feel it, but "need" doesn't come into the equation.

A broken heart is usually the result of you leeching something and the drug of fulfillment being unplugged. You feel you NEED them to feel complete, and when they don't give you what you need, you feel a void.

• 1. You get jealous if they even look at another person
• 2. You get jealous if they have a stimulating conversation with someone
• 3. You feel a need to be with them, not just a want
• 4. They are your "world"
• 5. You cannot spend time away from them (at all) without feeling sad or a desperate need to call them
• 6. You do things against your comfort zone to please them
• 7. You are willing to walk on eggshells for them
• 8. You hold them to an unusually high esteem before you really know who they are
• 9. You say I love you before you really get to know them well (thinking it is not as bad as we all feel deep infatuation and feel the word creep in, but if its a constant thing you think about and you barely know them its bad)
• 10. You move very fast into the relationship afraid someone else will take them from you
• 11. You chase them even if they don't chase you
• 12. You don't let them chase you first
• 13. You make rash decisions to be with them without thinking it through first (once or twice is fine but when its a redundant pattern it can be a sign)
• 14. You let what they think of you change who you are, how you act, or what you think of yourself
• 15. You don't feel comfortable being "yourself" completely around them, you fake to be what you think they want you to be.
• 16. Your too competitive for their attention, i.e. if they talk to others more than you you get offended.
• 17. You feel real physical withdraws when their gone.
• 18. You start doing things their way not yours, even if they tell you they like things you do and how you do it.
• 19. You become obsessive, changing your "myspace" page to reflect marriage with them "the future Mrs. _____x", you post their picture over your own in the avatar picture (mentally replacing your own picture with theirs canhint that they are what your focusing on as your identity!), immediately changing your status from "single" to "in a relationship" before even taking the time to get to know them.Before the relationship is set, lacing your entire page with them and you barely know them, or never actually physically met them or talked to them on the phone at any length, or because they told you a bunch of "hunny pot" comments about how they like you or thought you were hot, and you took it to the extremes as if you'd already slept with them.
• 20. Lacking self esteem if they break up with you or say they need space. Only feeling confident when their there, or only being able to be ambitious if they help or go over your work and say something positive about it.
• 21. If their opinion overrides your own on things, it means your leeching confidence and competence from them.
• 22. their are more but I think you get the idea

The cure to a broken heart is awareness. Time usually brings this but you can speed up the process by learning why you're hurting, how you did it to yourself, and what is causing you to feel so much pain. If the pain is the withdraw of the other persons attention this simply means they were providing you with a plug to a void, and to cure your pain you have to patch up the gap in your self esteem. Figure out what hurts the most, then write a couple paragraphs about the pain, what you miss, why you think you miss it.

The writing will unlock the subconscious and eventually unveil the culprit of the missing piece. When you find it you can take a healthy stance and go out and get it by learning how to be confident or alone for example, because who loves you more than you do? Who knows how to treat you better than you do? Who can take care of you better than you? You do not need someone else to feel happy, and if you do then you're doomed from the entry point into any relationship. When you can keep your scruples about you and confidence and can say no to someone who infatuates you, because they have no respect for you, or are using you for their own fulfillment voids, then you're ready. When you can be alone you learn to respect yourself to a degree that no one can break your shell, and your respect for yourself will not allow those who'd use you or treat you any less than you deserve, and with respect to come near your heart.

Hiding or shelling your heart is not the answer. Hating men or women because someone hurt you is a cop out, it's your fault 9 times out of 10 because you didn't allow yourself to do a background check on your own intentions for getting into this relationship. If both of you are in a real synergistic relationship you can walk away without a broken heart. If you've been with this person for years, you may have a different kind of broken heart but its the same when you boil it down, you've allowed yourself to become too comfortable in the relationship to a point where you've become dependant on them for something, be it happiness, security, or love. Your fears of being alone are a sign that you need to work on yourself and your self esteem. If the very thought of your lover leaving you, cheating on you, or treating you with disrespect frightens you, realize this is a sign of a problem.

As for the disrespect it shouldn't frighten you it should anger you, their is a very distinct difference. If your lover disrespects you and you allow it because you're afraid they will leave you, you're in a compromising position and they own your soul.