LIVING ALONE CREATIVELY

How many mothers have you met who sent a child into the world hoping he or she would end up living alone? None, did you say?

And how many of those sons or daughters grew up with the intention to live alone? Probably not many more.

Yet, consider these numbers:

…The year 2000 census counts eighty-six million single adults living in this country—more than ever before.

…Twelve percent of American women and sixteen percent of men now enter their forties never having wed, the highest percentage in the nation’s history.

…Women now actually spend more of their adult lives single than married.

…In 2003 nearly twenty-seven percent of American households consisted of one person living alone.

Potent statistics, aren’t they?

Some of those singles are in a relationship with another person. And it’s a safe bet that others are looking for one. But not all.

There are plenty of people who are dedicated to living a life that is rich and full without a companion or spouse. They have reached their mature years unsubscribed to the belief that a complete life dictates settling in with a mate. In this book you will meet twelve of them.

Though searching for a partner may not have been wiped from their screens, they are not postponing a satisfying life until—if—that partner is found.

How did they reach this point? It wasn’t by following a quick 1-2-3-step program toward single happiness but by facing struggles and challenges and incorporating creative components to living their lives alone. Besides Henry David Thoreau, the famous loner, the list of artists who were unpartnered is long: Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Vuillard, Federico García Lorca, Eudora Welty, and scores of others.

These artists were endowed with genius. But the creative component referred to here doesn’t imply a gift for painting or writing or composing. “Creative” here means facing circumstances with activities and attitudes that are imaginative, rejuvenating, challenging, and that sometimes mean standing up to usual convention.

Other books have explored the single life but not focused on introducing people who make being single a successful, ongoing lifestyle. This book does that.

Being a person who has tried to make a good life for himself alone, at least most of the time, I’ll include myself at the end of the book. But before introducing others and myself, I’ll offer an opinion: It’s that the world seems to be mostly populated by two kinds of people—the marrying and the non-marrying kind. (This excludes past generations when there was heavy pressure for everyone to get married and they did, happily or not.) Haven’t we all known a man or a woman who breaks up with (or maybe loses) a partner, only before the calendar can move to a new month hears a knock at the door from the next suitor, hair combed, bouquet in hand? And this without even doing a search?

The other camp is populated with people who don’t ever seem to locate the right boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife. Maybe an affair gets underway, but mostly it’s based on sex, and when the window shade goes up in the morning or a few mornings later, the companion looks disappointingly less interesting— maybe even boring. And this scenario is repeated until the man or woman faces up not to the unavailability of Mister or Miss Right but to the maybe reluctant admission that Mister or Miss Right may not be the desired object. At such a point, our unmarried man or woman either despairs of that state or determines just to muddle through.

There is a third camp, and that is those people who come out of a relationship or marriage to discover that they prefer to build a fulfilling life alone rather than to look for a new partner, that they find maybe unexpected virtue in being unpartnered. You’ll meet some of those people in this book.

To determine making a good life alone seems to require that being married or partnered not be viewed as categorically preferable. Envy of the person wearing a wedding ring needs to stop if it ever started (as it has done for me). Society doesn’t help in that regard. A character in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town remarks that most folks go to the grave two by two.

If you are one who is single, you’ll manage better by stamping “OK” on yourself as single. That means granting yourself permission to attend a movie alone, to go out to dinner alone (which may be harder for women than men), to put on a nice outfit and show up at a party alone, even if most other guests arrive in pairs, and, finally, to put on your coat and head home, satisfied with the evening.

Those goals may be harder to reach than they sound. There certainly have been times when I didn’t like attending a party alone and when I wasn’t happy going home alone. Thus, you’ve got to create one more stamp that says, “Don’t expect perfection.” Sometimes being alone can mean being alone when alone is what you don’t want to be. Lonely times are lonely times, and regrets have to be allowed. As one of the singles in this book says, “Yes, I feel sad sometimes, and that’s OK. I wish I felt it less often, and that’s OK, too.”

I’d say that the single person confronts other challenges as well. If you’re past a certain age, you face the platoon of friends and acquaintances who wonder, as they surely do, why an eligible man or woman like you is alone. You might have psychological insights to offer an explanation, but the world doesn’t care about that. They just see your single name on the door. That’s when it’s time to stand tall and look and feel—-and maybe even say—that life is agreeable as it is....