**I just love this article I came across one day and just wanted to share it with you.** 

A SINGLE WOMAN CHOOSES A LIFE OF SOLITUDE IN THE LAND OF WE.

BY CAROLINE KNAPP | Nine forty-five p.m. I am standing in my kitchen preparing my very favorite meal, a zesty blend of wheat flakes, Muslix and raisins that comforts me deeply. It is a Thursday, which means that "ER" is on in 15 minutes, and it is mid-May -- sweeps month -- which means that I am filled with anticipation: yes, a new episode. I feel serene. I am wearing torn leggings, a T-shirt, a bathrobe. The dog is in the living room, curled contentedly (and wordlessly) on the sofa; the phone machine is blinking with several messages, which I've dutifully screened and have no intention of answering until tomorrow. And a thought comes to me, a simple statement of fact that arrives in a fully formed sentence. I hear the words: I am the Merry Recluse.

This, I must say, is a magical, transformative moment; it represents a kaleidoscopic shift of sorts, the kind of sudden internal restructuring that occurs when an established set of facts about the self seems to spontaneously shift, presenting itself in a new order, a surprising new light. An old thought becomes a new thought; a prior definition takes on a twist, a new edge, a new meaning.

Listen to it again: I am the Merry Recluse. Doesn't that sound chipper and grand? Had you asked me to sum up my sense of place in the world a day before -- an hour before, 10 minutes before -- I would have offered something very different: I am a single woman, I might have said. Age 38, a bit of a loner. My voice might have had an apologetic edge, as though I were acknowledging the sad and spinsterish associations behind such words, and I might have shrugged a bit sheepishly, as if to say: Ooops, sorry, this is all an accident; I was supposed to be married by now. But in that instant, poised above my bowl of Wheaties, the psychic kaleidoscope turned a notch, the apology blurred, something new shifted into view, something that looked very much (dare I even say it?) like happiness.

Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many. A friend, recently divorced but involved with someone new, asked me a question over dinner not long ago: "So," she said, her expression concerned, "how does it feel not to be in a relationship?" I tried to ignore her tone, which was vaguely pitying, and pretended to be kidding when I answered by pointing at the dog: "But I am in a relationship," I said. "I have her." She laughed, a rather halfhearted and dismissive laugh, then resumed the line of questioning: Wasn't I lonely? she wanted to know. Didn't I find it hard to be responsible for all the household details -- the cooking, the shopping, the errands and bills? Didn't I worry about the future, about growing old alone, about whether or not I'll find someone?

I sat there and mused for a moment. The questions are difficult to respond to, not because the answers are complex (which they are) but because we live in a culture that puts such a high premium on romantic intimacy, that uses partnership as a measure of mental health and social normalcy. Answer affirmatively (yes, I get lonely; yes, solitude can be very stressful and worrisome), and you sound sorrowful, the slightly pathetic outsider; answer negatively (nope, I'm quite content, thank you very much) and you sound hermetic, incapable of following the accepted path to human happiness, pathologically disengaged somehow. In fact, 25 percent of the adult population lives alone today -- that's almost double the number that lived alone 35 years ago -- and although plenty of us may end up on our own for unhappy reasons (divorce, fear, geography, any number of quirks of fate and timing and circumstance), it seems both simplistic and erroneous to assume that solitude is an inherently sorry state, something you wouldn't choose if you had a better option.

I said as much to my friend. "Sure there are downsides," I said, "but I really like being alone." I ticked off a little list: the freedom to set my own hours, make my own rules, indulge my own tastes; the relief at not having to interact or negotiate or compromise with another human unless I choose to; the little burst of accomplishment I periodically feel at being the architect of my own space, physical and psychic. "It's a choice," I said, "a style I'm comfortable with."

She listened, nodded soberly; I could tell she didn't believe a word.

Exchanges like this wouldn't bug me if they weren't so common. I often walk my dog in the morning with a friend named Wendy who's been in a relationship for the last 19 years and whose social calendar is packed so tight it makes me dizzy: a constant stream of parties and potluck suppers, movie and theater outings, vacations and visitors from out of town. Every Friday she asks me what I'm doing over the weekend and every Friday I demur: "Oh, not much," or, "The usual: just hanging." The truth is, I rarely make weekend plans, at least not social ones. My recipe for bliss on a Friday night consists of a New York Times crossword puzzle and a new episode of "Homicide"; Saturdays and Sundays are oriented around walks in the woods with the dog, human companion in tow some of the time but not always. This doesn't mean I'm a misanthrope: I have a small, carefully cultivated social life -- a handful of treasured friends; a beloved sister; people whose presence and support mean the world to me -- but Wendy can't quite make the distinction between a quiet life and an empty one, and she finds my style unsettling. A look of veiled discomfort comes over her face when I hem and haw about the weekend, as though she envisions 48 hours of disconnection and sadness, so sometimes I make stuff up to placate her: I tell her there are dinner plans, movies scheduled, a shopping trip with a girlfriend, and she always responds with a little heave of maternal relief, which I find mildly patronizing. "Oh, how nice for you!"

Me, I walk along and feel quietly defensive, a recluse in the Land of We.

That's quite the loaded word, "we."

Not long ago, in the locker room of my gym, I eavesdropped as a woman held forth about her upcoming wedding. We're thinking about a honeymoon in Hawaii, she said. We're registering at Bloomingdale's. We're buying a new car. We're doing A, B and C. We, we, we. I stood there, and I thought about how infrequently I use plural pronouns to describe the events of my life, and I felt a familiar stab of inadequacy, questions about priorities and social worth scratching at the subconscious. On the broad spectrum of solitude, I lean toward the extreme end: I work alone, as well as live alone, so I can pass an entire day without uttering so much as a hello to another human being. Sometimes a day's conversation consists of only five words, uttered at the local Starbucks: "Large coffee with milk, please." I also work out alone, and I grocery shop alone and I cook and eat and watch TV alone, and if you don't count the dog (I do; many don't), I sleep alone at night and wake up alone every morning. Much of the time I don't question this state of affairs -- it just is -- but I listened to this woman in the gym, and I spun out a vivid fantasy about her life (the best friend at the next StairMaster, the colleagues at the office, the fiancé at home, the 200 friends and family members at the wedding reception, the children two or three years hence), and I felt like an alien, a member of some mutant species getting dressed in the locker room before crawling back to her dark, solitary cave.

Why don't I want that? That's what comes up. Why do I find the fantasy -- husband, family, kids -- exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?

In fact, that woman at the gym, poised as she is at the matrimonial brink, is not necessarily headed for a more "normal" life than the one I lead. For the first time, there are as many single-person households in the United States as there are married couples with children -- 25 percent of the population in each camp -- but moments like that I understand that cultural standards and expectations haven't quite caught up with the numbers. Census figures be damned: If you choose to be alone, you're destined to spend a certain amount of time wondering why.

I suppose the why, at least for me, is internal, temperamental, as deeply personal as sexuality. Like most women, I grew up expecting to marry someday, expecting to have a family, expecting to want babies. And like some women (and men), I've found that the years have passed and passed and passed and those things simply haven't happened, as though some deeper yearning simply failed to kick in. Lots of life decisions are made that way: Choices are revealed by default, answers arrived at far more passively than we might expect. I look up today and realize, with some surprise, that I've spent the bulk of my adult life alone -- 15 of the last 18 years. For much of that time -- indeed, until my merry little epiphany in the kitchen -- I've tended to see my solitary status as a transient state, a product of circumstance instead of a matter of style. In fact, I suspect I've lived this way for a reason, that the degree of solitude I've chosen feeds me in some way, that the fit -- me with me -- is right.

Considered in that light, the "why" -- why spend so much time alone? -- becomes a more interesting question: why not? I've always been drawn to solitude, felt a kind of luxurious relief in its self-generated pace and rhythms. I eat breakfast pretty much 'round the clock -- muffins in the morning, scones for lunch, cereal at night -- which may be odd but is also oddly satisfying, if only because the choice is my own. I am master of my own clutter, king of the television remote, author of every detail, large and quirky: The passenger seat of my car, uninhabited by humans most of the time, will always be a disaster area, a repository of cassette tapes and empty coffee cups and errant dog toys; my alarm clock will always blast National Public Radio at precisely 6:02; my ashtrays (smoking permitted here constantly) will always be blessedly full and stinky. Solitude is a breeding ground for idiosyncrasy, and I relish that about it, the way it liberates whim.

Of course, living alone can make you psycho, too. I often feel deranged in the supermarket, hunting down grazable foodstuffs that don't come in family-size packages, wishing I could buy grapes in bags of 10 so that the other 80 don't rot in the refrigerator, wondering if the check-out clerk has noticed my apparent obsession with wheat flakes. The lack of backup can overwhelm the solitary dweller, especially when you're confronted with life's more fearsome tasks (decoding assembly instructions, killing spiders); the lack of distraction, which alters your core relationship to physical space, can make you think you're nuts. The other night, I caught myself talking to a spoon, which had twice fallen off the counter and clattered onto the tile. "Hey!" I said. "Stop doing that!" And then I stood there and shook my head, aware of that tiny persistent question, the low-level mosquito whine inside: Is this normal? Is it?

For me, the most pressing challenge involves negotiating the line between solitude and isolation, which can be very thin indeed. Social skills are like muscles, subject to atrophy, and I find I have to be as careful about maintaining human contact as I am about maintaining physical health: Drop below a certain level of contact with other humans, and the simplest social activities -- meeting someone for coffee, going out to dinner -- begin to seem monumental and scary and exhausting, the interpersonal equivalent of trying to swim to France. Solitude is often most comforting, most sustaining, when it's enjoyed in relation to other humans; fail to strike the right balance and life gets a little surreal: You start dreaming about TV characters as though they were real people; houseflies start to feel companionable; minor occasions that others find perfectly ordinary (the arrival of a house guest, an event requiring anything dressier than sweat pants) start to feel bizarre and unfathomable.

And yet I'd be hard pressed to leave this little world, singular and self-constructed as it is. I have lived in the Land of We; at times, I have pounded on the door for admission, frantic with worry and need. When the friend at dinner asked me how it felt not to be in a relationship, I remembered all too clearly what it was like to feel despair at the state, to regard my own company as scary and inferior. When I see that look of discomfort come over my friend Wendy as I talk about my unplanned weekends, I remember how horrifying I once found the concept of unstructured time, how much difficulty I've had simply sitting still, giving my own emotions room to surface. And when I hear people pepper their speech with the word "we," like that woman in the gym, I remember a lot of painful years spent struggling to define myself in relation to other people, as though my own existence didn't count unless it was attached to someone else's.

That night in my kitchen, fixing my Kellogg's feast, reveling in the order and quiet of my own home, felt like a gift, a victory of sorts, an awareness that some of those struggles have receded further into the past. I am shy by nature, a person who's always found something burdensome about human interaction and who probably always will, at least to some degree. Accordingly, I have always felt a deep relief in solitude, but I've not always been able to bask in it, to sit alone in a room without getting edgy, to feel that comfort and solace and validation are available outside the paradigm of a romance, to believe that my own resources -- my own company, my own choices -- can power me through the dark corridors of solitude and into the brightness.

I took my cereal bowl into the living room, settled down in front of the TV and thought, so merrily: I'm home.
SALON | July 27, 1998

background by Memories - Victorian Gifs