Although awareness of the harmful effects of loneliness has increased in recent years, lonely persons continue to be viewed as family outsiders or nonfamily. Beginning with the general‐systems concept of loneliness as having a healthy, adaptive function in families, this article explores the family context of different degrees of loneliness. It assumes that prolonged loneliness (in addition to its meaning for the individual system) is a manifestation of certain kinds of family processes. Five such processes involved in the prolonging of loneliness are suggested: unresolved grief, pathological certainty, synchronicity, family expansion, and parental abdicatio