Living alone

[sonia]

I've been contemplating the fact that I live alone. It was never a goal of mine, and at the same time I know it's a privilege. It's been almost 24 years now, with occasional housemates in there.

Upsides: No one else makes a mess in my space. I can make noise or have quiet whenever I want. I'm not trying to live with someone else's energy. No one brings foods into my kitchen that make me ill. Lots of alone time.

Downsides: If I don't take care of a chore, indoors or out, it doesn't happen. More alone time than I really want or need. Feeling isolated and disconnected.

Living alone and having a sweetie stay over sometimes is a pretty good arrangement, although I think it works better if time is balanced between both homes. At any rate, I'm not in a relationship these days.

I do know several other single women who own homes. At the same time, I feel like the odd one out, like humans are meant to live in groups. I do share my house with a cat, a massage practice, a weekly dance group, and a weekly singing group. Between all that and my fragrance and food sensitivities, it would be hard to bring in a housemate.

Do you live alone and love it? Hate it? Or live with other folks and long to live alone? What makes your living situation work for you?

Comments

[tim]

Most of the time I've shared spaces with housemates, and most of those spaces were really too small for sharing and they weren't really people I would have chosen to share with. I like the ideal of having a big house with lots of room for everyone to have alone time when they want it, but also with lots of appealing spaces to be together in, and some shared meals. Because of living in expensive cities and also not really being intentional about finding housemates who want to prioritize communal living, I haven't had this experience. I really want to. But beyond the enough-space issue (which is not hard for me to resolve in the long term, even if it means moving somewhere with cheaper housing), I'm not sure how to find people who I both connect with and who want the same living situation as I do, since so many people my age have paired off.

Maybe I can have this when I'm in my fifties and everyone else is divorced too...

[tim]

In the meantime, I do long to live alone, not as much as I did last year when I had the really bad housemate; my housemates now are friends, but the space we share is just too small and I fantasize about having a big apartment or small house to myself because that seems much more attainable than having a big house with like-minded housemates in it.

[sonia]

Yeah... I hear you about wanting a big communal living situation. I (used to) want that too, but came to the conclusion that I don't have the necessary skills to deal with my fellow humans.

[melannen]

I lived alone for awhile in/after college, and what I learned is that I really needed another human in my living space to remind me that things like "sleep schedules" and "meals" are things humans do, so I haven't really tried since then. But I'm thinking that if I had to, I might know myself enough better now that I could force myself into enough structured social gatherings to make it work.

The upsides are very tempting, though.

[sonia]

That's a good point, that having other people around helps with meal & sleep schedules. My sleep schedule is more or less okay, but my eating is pretty random on my own.

[tshuma]

I have not lived alone in many, many years. It's always been with either partners or housemates since I left the central valley for the much more expensive bay area.

I feel like I wasted my time living alone by not taking care of my space well enough and not respecting myself enough to figure out the stuff I didn't need from my childhood versus the stuff I did. I was more often out than in, and I didn't take care of my chores nearly at all. I'm ashamed now to think of the condition of the space when I did bring people into it.

I occasionally wish I lived alone again, but I know that if I did, I would be driven to be more social and outgoing than I currently am, and possibly more so than I can handle over a long period of time. I like to think I'd take better care of my space, but I don't really know.

[sonia]

Yeah, it took many years of gradual improvement, and also hosting groups weekly, to get the hang of maintaining my space. I think we get the message that we're supposed to be born knowing how to do that, and that it's easy, and neither of those are true.

[tshuma]

Right, well, for me the difference is in an unhealthy tendency for me to prioritize it if someone else is here to care, but if it's just for me, I'm likely to neglect it. I mean, I generally have a reasonably clean house now, but I live with my partner. I wonder whether I would choose to keep it as tidy if he weren't here to consider.

[sonia]

Yeah, I definitely clean more when people are coming over! Although I did notice after a while of cleaning for weekly events that I *like* having a clean house, so sometimes I clean for future-me.

Partners and gender and division of labor and expectations is a whole other huge topic...

[marahmarie]

I don't like living alone: it feels too boring, too antiseptic; there's no warmth to such a situation.

I don't like living with others: too many things are out of control, including (especially) how our surroundings look, feel, sound and are maintained, even when technically I'm mainly responsible for much, if certainly not all, of that.

I'm not even sure what's the lesser of two evils since I've spent almost nil time alone most of my life: living with others is, I guess, because the trade-offs are at least theoretically less dystopian than the opposite situation's.

But even living with others, the place is still nothing without at least one cat in it. :)

[sonia]

Basil agrees about the cat comment! He's sitting right next to the computer and miaowing.

I hear you that life can be uncomfortable either way.