https://catapult.co/stories/the-fierce-triumph-of-loneliness

The night I moved into an apartment by myself for the first time, I unpacked boxes and ordered a pizza. When the pizza arrived, I was jolted back to a particular suburban memory. In middle school, my parents would go out for date night and leave me in the house by myself with instructions to order a pizza for dinner. The sound of the door closing when they left was a small and giddy freedom; I was entirely alone, rendered invisible, and belonging to no one but myself. My unmitigated joy at the simple fact of being left alone was perfect in a way that very few larger, adult joys have ever been able to recreate since. I never did anything transgressive or even interesting on those nights—I’d watch a movie and probably fall asleep on the couch. It was about the solitude: the lack of obligation to arrange my face in a way that someone else would understand. Even at age twelve, I understood the weight of that burden, and the relief of its absence. It was the banality of those nights I longed for, doing nothing, but doing it completely alone. I imagined adulthood would be a long night like this, ordering a pizza in an empty house—forever. I was an only child and a lonely kid, which meant I spent a lot of time alone reading books. Classical literature was full of heroes—the vast majority of them were men—who were heroic because they were alone. The quest narrative was one in which a man whittled away from himself all societal bonds and then, having perfected himself through loneliness, returned triumphant to society. Society was still there waiting for him because it had been tended by women, who were never alone. In popular culture we have “the bachelor pad,” and “the bachelor lifestyle,” but no such phrases for women. Women who live alone are objects of fear or pity, witches in the forest or Cathy comics. Even the current cultural popularity of female friendship still speaks to how unwilling we all are to accept women without a social framework; a woman who’s “alone” is a woman who’s having brunch with a bunch of other women. When a woman is truly alone, it is the result of a crisis—she is grieving, has lost something, is a problem to be fixed. The family, that fundamental social unit, dwells within the female body and emanates from it. Women are the anchors of social labor, the glue pulling the family, and then the community, together with small talk and good manners and social niceties. Living alone as a woman is not just a luxury but a refusal to bend into the shape of patriarchal assumption and expectation.

I took long walks around Barcelona, often leaving my phone in my apartment and getting lost on purpose, trying to find my way back to landmarks. I eavesdropped strenuously on conversations in bars and coffee shops, piecing together the gaps within a language I was still learning, trying to tune my ear to pronouns and verb tense. I listened to strangers flirting, their bodies moving in and out of each other’s space. I listened to drink orders and laughter spilling out of restaurants at the end of the night. I listened to everything but myself. I allowed myself to turn from participant to spectator. Like the hero in the stories I had read as a kid, I placed myself adjacent to but outside society, and began to understand its workings when I stopped trying to fit myself into it. I drifted invisibly into the background, making everyone else’s story more important than my own. I listened without wanting, learning that the world was larger, richer, and more detailed than the reactions I could generate from the people in it.

Back in New York, I was forced to do the slow, small, and unglamorous work of living better. I cleaned my apartment when no one was coming over, and cooked elaborate meals with no guests in mind but myself. I began to learn to say “no” to things, to define space for myself. I considered decisions longer, and hurt people less. With no one else’s needs into which to escape, it becomes much more difficult to skid through life on self-delusion and comfortable ignorance. Living alone is a confrontation with the mirror, a removal, if only for certain hours of the day, from the social contract, outside the systems of manners that grow up around women like strangling vines. It is becoming the witch in the forest, powerful and watchful and silent, setting visitors on edge. I had been living alone in Brooklyn for a year and a half when my boyfriend, Thomas, and I decided to move in together. We started dating long-distance at almost the exact same time that I’d finally gotten my apartment. Yet right from the first day, as I moved furniture up my stairs and ignored text messages from him, I knew that this relationship was probably the one. There was a tumbling sense of inevitability, a dread of permanence, at the bottom of my stomach. He didn’t live in New York at the time, and I was glad this was the case. When I looked directly at our relationship, I had to admit that I wanted to come home to this person every day. But I also wanted to come home to myself. The idea that we progress in a clear trajectory from single unit to couple form, and achieve a sort of emotional success by doing so, seems wrong to me. Love is about what we give up when choosing to knit our life against someone else’s—to make a home in the shared bed, and enjoy the small talk between bodies within the inhabited space. A paired life is not an aspirational state, but a compromised one. Loneliness is not the terror we escape; it is instead the reward we give up when we believe something else to be worth the sacrifice. With Thomas, the world seems less relentless, more forgiving, with fewer trapdoors and teeth. We thread ourselves through the other’s difficulties, offering the answers we can’t get to on our own, making the jagged edges of each day cohere. Living with a partner, when it’s truly good, is easier in almost every aspect, from the lessons in forgiveness, to the heap of congratulations society offers traditional couples, to the very literal benefit of combining resources and splitting bills. Love, in its closed circuit, can be as antisocial as staying home alone and not talking out loud for days. At its best, love turns its face away from good manners, proves itself the opposite of small talk. I have often told Thomas that I love spending time with him in the same way I love being alone. I have been surprised by how many of the lessons are transferrable, how partnership demands the same confrontation with the mirror. I once thought people entered into relationships to hide from themselves, to burrow into an obsession with another person’s regard, and escape the facts of their shortcomings. Loving someone else, and joining our life with theirs, asks us to sit down with the brutal facts of ourselves, to sift finely between what is true and what we wish were true, in order to understand what we need and what we can offer. Love is a stark accounting of oneself and one’s partner, wiping away excuses and avoidances, insisting on responsibility. But there are so many things I miss. I never get to the middle of the night in the home that I share, those empty hours when I wasn’t worried about keeping anyone else awake. Now I eat three meals a day and I hate it. I drink less coffee. My own simple, boring health, my obvious contentment, frequently disgusts me. While I am happy with my choices, I know at once that they follow a narrative approved by forces larger and less benevolent than myself, a narrative I am not happy to know I perpetuate. The things I miss could be seen as childish, a state of being in which I was never obligated to consider anyone’s needs other than my own. Women are pushed out of childhood so quickly, shoved without ceremony into the heavy social obligations of adulthood. Living alone is a reminder that we can make our bodies antisocial, hoarding our selfishness and our silence. Loneliness and solitude are privileges of thoughtless and full-throated adulthood traditionally handed to men and kept from women. They are the strange and rich pleasures of the world beyond the social, beyond the structures of home and family. Choosing the domestic actively, out of love, is a sacrifice worth making, whether this is to make a family involving children or simply with a partner, but it is still a sacrifice. Living alone as a woman takes on outsize significance because it offers the right to a full self obligated neither to family nor to love. Because we are often denied this fully formed and selfish reckoning, it is difficult to give it up after finding a way into it. There is a mourning in that letting-go, as though I am not passing naturally from one stage of maturation to the next, but coming back from something rarer and more precious, something that should be guarded closely. No matter how committed I am to the life I’m building with the person I love, some part of me reaches back to the fierce triumph of loneliness.

https://catapult.co/stories/driving-to-nowhere

In the rental car, we’re driving back from Thomas’s parents’ house to a hotel in an adjacent city, and on the way back the light sinks over the roads, the river coming right up to the highway, mapping out the green country. Thomas tells me stories about his adolescence and what came after it and all the stories have to do with cars. It’s easy to fall into this if one is lucky enough to be offered it, easy to let someone do the hard things when they offer to do them. Long-term love is to at least some degree always an agreement to depend on someone, to build them into the structure that keeps the house standing. We lean into the people we choose to love, we allow them to fill our lacks, to make up for the things we can’t do. We lattice together a shared capability where one does not work without the other. It’s a kind of tenderness, but it carries with it defeat, a nervous sense of disarming. The trust I place in another person erodes my ability to survive on nothing but myself. When I imagined having a car of my own, the attraction was that I would be able to take care of myself fully, that nothing would depend on anyone else’s presence. I was a good driver when no one else was in the car; I was a bad driver as soon as someone else was there. When other people were in the car I became nervous; all at once the consequences mattered, and all my swagger evaporated. If I endangered my passengers’ lives it would actually matter. My fear of endangering them caused me to endanger them in exactly the way I feared. I don’t ever miss driving with other people in the car. When I miss driving, it’s the same thing I miss about being alone. Driving to nowhere, obligated to nothing, free of a destination and of the promise to return home to anyone.