An article on this site? Could you post the url? I'd be interested in reading it. I can't make a comment on the article unless I've read it, but I would like to comment on your reaction to the article.

I can't do the 3-4 days at the gym any longer and, while I don't eat junk food, I'll go without eating for a couple of days. I also don't keep my diabetes under control. I have so many illnesses that I would be surprised if I make it to 60 (I'm 57 now).

As well as my poor physical health, I've horrid mental health and I am so horribly lonely that I can only pray that loneliness can kill so that I can be, finally, away from all of this.

I'm not certain that, in your case, finding a girlfriend is going to prolong your life. As you said, you don't feel lonely. I have to agree with whomever suggested to continuing to live the life that you enjoy and stop worrying about the things that may (or may not) prolong your life for 2-3 years.

Before I became ill, I couldn't have imagined living for 3 months without a girlfriend. Maybe no longer than 3 weeks or 3 days. It wasn't because of loneliness; something much more base and common... I couldn't have gone for 3 weeks without the sex. What a surprise. And sleeping alone. It took me a long, long time to become accustomed to sleeping alone. Now, it's been only one night out of the past of the past 17 years that I've slept a full night with a woman.

I'm not sure if it's loneliness or intimacy or a combination of the two that I feel. The combination, most likely. Love. I miss love. Doesn't even matter if it's human love. I loved my cat and he loved me in return. And he slept on the bed with me. I wasn't lonely when he was around. I could trust him.

I'm in a pretty horrible spot today – it's taken me almost 3 hours to write the last paragraphs. If you're happy with the life that you lead and don't feel lonely then it's unlikely that 'being alone' would have any impact on your life expectancy. My problem, the problem that many people have but will not admit, is a feeling that we need others to feel complete. Nothing wrong with that, really. It's a question that those in the midst of divorce often ask themselves. Did I need my wife and son? Yes, I did. One day they were my family and the next day they weren't and I realised that my prime goal in life had not been to live to be 100 or to earn a one million dollar per year salary but only to be as good a husband and father that I could be.

And, honestly, the idea of pursuing a girlfriend because the addition might lengthen your life by a few years sounds a bit crass. It's no reason to pursue a relationship.

The only reason that I can see that you might want to go out with a couple of women is to see if that my quell the "emptiness" that you feel. And, if I were you, I wouldn't look as "dating" as necessarily a means of "finding a girlfriend," just a means of seeing if companionship might help in quelling the emptiness that you may be feeling.

At your age I was in the middle of an enormously high-octane relationship. At 11, (26 years of age currently minus the 15 years since you last had a girlfriend – I'm really hoping that 15 is a typo and that you meant 1.5 years or maybe 5 years?) when you write that you had your last girlfriend, I was just beginning to flirt with my first "real" girlfriend.

And, lastly, have you considered that the emptiness that you feel might be something as basic as unfulfilled intimacy or sexual desires? Do you have regular sexual relations? Do you desire regular sexual relations? Don't think that I've gone from the idealised romance to the gutter! Nothing wrong with having a strong and healthy libido, either. There are very good reasons for desiring a partner and friends and although you admit that you're social isolatedand that you're missing something it seems as if the only thing that you took from this article is the loneliness = earlier death portion; as I've not read it, I'm just assuming that there some mention made of a "way to live" portion?

I'll scout around the site article but posting the url would help! I think that if abject loneliness could outright kill someone that I would have would have keeled over and died years ago. Still, I don't think that it's healthy.