The single life is great, but not always

For the most part, I enjoy being on my own. I love the sanctity of the mornings, when I sit with my paper and my homemade latte, anticipating the day. And I love the way I can exit into the world, for parties and dates, and then come back into my place, with only myself for company.

Certainly, as we age, we get to know ourselves well, and when we do, there is a certain calm. You learn to honour yourself, for having come this far, for having survived, for still standing in mid-life. Especially, after divorce – which is one of life’s most harrowing experiences – a little calm after the storm is welcome.

But there are times when it is not so great. When you are sick, for example, which happened to me this past weekend. A terrible bout of food poisoning sent me to hospital. Luckily, a son was at home. He was able to call 911. But if he had not been here? I was about the pass out.  I couldn’t get off the floor. What would I have done?

And other times. A friend of mine, single and divorced, in her mid-forties, called me the other day to say that she had had a difficult day. She had to get her son to a soccer practice. Her ex was away. After she dropped her son off at the field, on her way back home, her tire went flat. “It sucks to be single at times like this,” she moaned. She had to figure it out – call the garage, all that. Which is not impossible. But a girl gets tired of being wonderful, of being competent all the time. That’s the thing. When you have a spouse, or a committed boyfriend, there is someone who is always there to help. You can drop the Super Woman thing, at least for an hour, a day, perhaps, and be taken care of; be needy.

Oh, yes, needy! Because that is the very thing we try so hard not to be when we are on our own. You know, most of the time, I am so self-contained, I feel like an egg, with a lovely, smooth shell that no one can crack. I clean up my own emotional spills. I rarely emote to people – not like I did, when I was married at a young age. My ex-husband was a sponge, who would soak up all my emotional outpourings, and make me feel better. Now? I make myself feel better. I cajole myself out of funks. I take myself to movies and to a spa. I praise myself, when I need to, and I tell myself not to worry at night sometimes when I am awake, alone in my bed.

It is okay. Really.

But I also think that a problem – or attitude – we develop when we are single, and have been for a while, is that we convince ourselves – like I just did in the previous paragraph – that everything is just dandy and why would you want a husband again anyway? We rationalize away the romance that doesn’t exist. We say it is over-rated or that it never works out anyway, so why not just have fun with as many people as possible. We ditch the fantasy of finding love.

“I’m through with all that stuff,” I have heard many older women and men say about the search for the perfect partner.

But then….you meet someone, you have a fling, and even if it doesn’t work out, you are reminded of how lovely the whole business of romance is. Someone wants to know about your day. Someone sucks you up with his attention like a milkshake through a straw. Someone finds your every thought a revelation. And you find yourself looking at him with a kind of divine fascination – the way his hair curls, the way he smiles, the way he likes to eat.

“I think that as much as we have been burned in previous relationships, and therefore talk about how we can live without them, we need them,” said a friend of mine on our weekly walk on Sunday. She was just in the process of ending a relationship with a man, who had swept into her life, and given her exactly what she needed – while it lasted. “I have my work,” she explained. “I have the kids. I have my life. But this – being in love or lust or whatever it is – is a big, important part of what I want. And I am not going to sit around and think that I don’t need it. Because I do.”

When she met the man who became her husband all those years ago – and who is now her ex – she was the passive one, she said. “Men always came to me, even this latest guy,” she said. “But now, I am going to be more aggressive. I am going to go out there and look. Because now I know what I really want, and I deserve to be happy. I am going to get what I want.”

I have often thought that love is what we are here for. As humans, that is what we all want. It’s what we say to each other on our death bed. And from my experience with my children, I know that love works like a potent magic. It can fix things. It can produce great accomplishments. It can heal.

And as single people, unfortunately, we sometimes talk ourselves out of it – we find it elsewhere, of course, in friends and children – but we are often shy, scared, about putting our hearts out to the world in a random, vulnerable way. And that is a shame.