What does loneliness feel like?

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I feel loneliness being surrounded by people but never really feel lonely being alone.

I agree entirely.

I can cope, after five decades sort of okay but I utterly hate it when so called 'isolation' manifests itself in practical tasks that are v difficult to do alone, ie shifting furniture or heavy items say machines; also when the car needs repairs and tho i do not do much nowadays it was utter hell trying to figure out etc etc .. my Dad was a whizz mechanic butmhe left this planet nearly forty years ago ... me myself i'm mostly baffled.

heres an example of isolation and of utter un-connectedness, I really get along with the woman in my horse feed supplier, i've helped her too, bought groceries several times to help her out as her wage is v low, the owner also i'm okay with him. But last week two more customesr turned up, both female and one was utterly utterly stunning, I never thought women like that walked this earth so to speak , but i instantly didn't know what to say, what to do, so i tried to make a card payment ... and Bingo i forgot the pin number ... uhhhhh ... i glanced once at her, good God .... unbelievable ... i felt sooo 'out of water' ... so many memories in earlier life of always being exluded..... i always get the feeling such stunners know fine well they can manipulate a man any way they want and also its prob the case any earner under £80k hasn't a chance.

Then who are on these forums?

http://www.psychforums.com/schizoid-personality/
http://schizoids.net/forum/forum.php
http://www.experienceproject.com/groups/Am-Schizoid-But-Coping/44171
http://www.experienceproject.com/groups/Have-Schizoid-Personality-Disorder/542639

Either there's a lot of misdiagnosis, or your view of Schizoid PD is a bit too simplistic.

I don't know anymore.
I haven't felt loneliness in a long long time. I think the last time I felt lonely I was around 9 or 10. As far as I can remember it felt like sadness.

i feel lonely,

for me, i get sick of my own thoughts and start to want to have friends and its frustrating because i hate making friends.

i just feel like something is wrong with me when im lonely, like its not fair everyone else can be happy with people and i cant.

I feel loneliness terribly, and it really gets to me. It actually kills me on the inside, and I do break down a lot about it. Sometimes I feel so lonely that I panic. I feel like I'm the only person in the world with so little ability to make friends due to intense shyness. I know there are thousands of other people in the world that are as lonely as me, or even more lonely than me, but irrationally I'm finding it hard to believe it until I see it. I have one Aspie friend, who I don't often get to see a lot because she doesn't have a lot of money and doesn't live too near, but I am in contact with her and we meet up sometimes. She is very socially awkward and fails socially and doesn't have many friends or get out much, but just knowing one other person on the spectrum isn't enough proof to make me feel better about my depressing social status. What if a day came where she suddenly posts on Facebook something like ''really had a great time last night at the bar with my friends'' and posts a load of pictures of her at a bar with lots of friends, especially when she finds a job and has more money to herself? If I knew more lonely people who don't or have never been clubbing, and they struggle to make friends and feel so lonely that they wonder what there is to live for, then I won't feel so alone and afraid of my social awkwardness.

Loneliness is really doing me in. I could weep about it forever, but I am strong enough to battle on through these obstacles life throws at me. People say ''oh join clubs - you'll meet people then'', but I have tried a social group before but didn't make any friends out of it really. It was an arts and crafts thing, aimed to get people out and mixing, but I still felt like I was the quietest one there. There were mostly older people, either recently retired or living on disability, and they seemed like narcissists. They got a bit carried away in just talking to nobody and everybody, and all I did was just sit there and listen. I couldn't get a word in edgeways, and they didn't talk to me personally. To them I was just a quiet youngster.
My uncle once joined a fitness club, because he felt lonely for a time and he enjoyed fitness hobbies like walking and running and working out, etc. But he attended the fitness club regularly for nearly a year, but gave up in the end because he found nobody really talked to him. They all were just wrapped up in themselves and he felt rather left out. He had a bit of small talk here and there but failed to actually make friends with anyone, even though he tried hard. He is NT but struggles socially due to shyness and past rejection. That's the same sort of reasons why I'm so lonely - it's not entirely due to Asperger's. It's more to do with being terribly shy in certain situations and being held back because of so much rejection from people in the past, that it hurts. If I didn't have shyness, social anxiety and stress disorder but still had the Asperger's, life might not be so terribly cruel.

Anyway, sorry to gabble on there, but that is what loneliness feels like.

have never felt loneliness,am very unrelateable to other humans though and have often appeared pyschopathic in some ways to other people due to both severe reactive attachment disorder and severe classic autism.
the only thing that have ever felt loneliness for is animals,when am living in places that dont allow pets,even as a five year old when the first pets came into life humans never came into focus,it was only ever the cats.

steelmaiden,
perhaps its more to do with the schizophrenia side than the autism side.

I feel lonely when I am with a group of people, and they all seem to know a lot about each other, but none of them know anything about me, and no one even wants to know. It makes me feel like I don't exist.

Like when people are handing out food or drinks, and they know what other people like and give them what they want, and they give each other looks like it makes them happy to do that. But no one knows what I like and they just hand me something I don't want. And they just give me a strange look like they can't even comprehend what it is I might like.

Or like what happened for years, at family get togethers every Christmas, each person would end up with a big pile of gifts, and they are all excited and talking about what they got and showing off their gifts to each other. And I would have only a small pile of really cheap gifts that look like things they pulled out of storage at the last minute, not something they put any thought into.

Or when people talk about good times they had together, and they don't remember that I was there too and it wasn't such a great time for me.

I feel lonely when I know I can't talk about my experiences, because no one will understand. Or worse when I DO talk about something and people misunderstand me or twist my words around.

I feel the most lonely when I really care about someone, and I spend a lot of time thinking about them and wanting to be with them, and they just take me for granted like I will always be there and they don't do anything to care about me.

Why can't I have just ONE person in my life who really cares about me and wants to know who I am? I am not asking to have a lot of friends and I don't even expect anything anymore from family. I'd just like to have ONE person who really knows me. No one knows me.

The Radiohead song "Street Spirit" sums it up for me.

It's funny, my first day here and I'm drawn to this post. This is something I've noticed with a great many people with ASD. The very idea of loneliness is an abstract concept to most; an echo of what others have said and yet not something we have never experienced ourselves (of course I'm not saying this is true for all ASD)

The truth is I have no idea what loneliness is as I've never felt anything about being on my own. It has always simply been....fact.....I am alone. Simple. Uncomplicated. I may not always be. I might very well be. But that's it, nothing more. A truth to be me that it seems NTs don't experience. And yet the funny thing is the idea of experiencing loneliness scares me more than actually being alone! lol