Going Solo

by Eric Klinenberg

  Like Angelina, most pet owners are convinced that they get tangible physical and psychological benefits from their relationships with animal companions, and a good deal of research (though not all) supports this belief. In a survey of the scientific literature published in the Annual Review of Public Health, animal experts Alan Beck and N. Marshall Meyers write, “All indications are that companion animals play the role of a family member, often a member with the most desired attributes . . . For some, pets increase the opportunities to meet people, while for others pets permit them to be alone without being lonely.” The rewards of pet ownership vary depending on the circumstances, but the list of documented effects reported by Beck and Meyers includes: prolonged lifespan, reduced anxiety and isolation, decreased risk of high blood pressure and heart disease, perceived security, even increased laughter. “Animals can also play a role in improving the well-being of people of all ages who are stigmatized,” they conclude. In public, some who live alone may feel stigmatized or stereotyped. But when they’re home, playing with their pet companion, they can hardly feel the bite.31

  THE TRUTH IS, eliminating the pain related to living alone is no more possible than eliminating the pain related to living. Some feelings—loneliness, regret, fear of failure, anxiety about what lies ahead—are said to be common among singles. Lori Gottlieb, for instance, depicts single women in their thirties and forties as “miserable,” while Linda Waite describes the unmarried as emotionally unhealthy compared to their married peers. As people who live alone are quick to point out, however, people who are coupled up, or have children, or live with friends and family experience no shortage of difficulties—loneliness included.

  The young adults we interviewed were not shy about discussing the hardships of going solo. But their thoughtful attempts to meet the challenges generated by living alone were productive, and often successful. Young adults can and do learn how to live well without a domestic partner, and they benefit from this knowledge when they move in with someone, as the great majority ultimately do. Some, including those who’ve always thought they would get married, come to enjoy living alone so much that they question whether they could give it up. Perhaps this explains the results of a recent Pew Research Center study, “Not Looking for Love”: “Most young singles in America do not describe themselves as actively looking for romantic partners. Even those who are seeking relationships are not dating frequently. About half (49 percent) had been on no more than one date in the previous three months.”32

  Hoang, a professor in his early thirties, recently broke up with a long-term girlfriend and is wondering how to take care of himself. “I have anxieties about living with someone, like a girlfriend or something,” he says, from behind thick-framed glasses that cannot hide the fatigue in his eyes, “because I’m cool living by myself—all that self-awareness, comfortable-in-your-own-skin stuff.” Not that living alone is perfect. Hoang does a lot of writing in his apartment, and he often loses himself in a “floating-through-space-type existence” that can feel isolating and lonely. But the rewards more than compensate for the difficulties. “I’ve learned to enjoy things that I know I’ve always liked but didn’t really have the time or patience to truly delve into,” Hoang explains. “Like, I’ve always had a lot of music and records, but before I wouldn’t just sit at home and listen to a record because I would always have another person around. I fear not being able to relinquish what I get out of being single.”

  At times, those who find themselves growing attached to their solo lifestyle sound a cynical note about relationships in general, and their words reveal how far the cult of the individual has advanced. “All you have ultimately is yourself,” Hoang says. “Something could happen to everyone else in your life and you would end up being alone, so I like the idea of being used to it when I’m still young. I like my friends, but something could happen, something tragic, or our relationships could change. So I try to grow less reliant on my friends and more reliant on myself. Living alone is an embodiment of that.” Hoang observes a world of divorce, broken families, and failed friendship, and anticipates that the people he loves most will someday disappear. “It’s less complicated for me to just live by myself,” he explains, with a voice full of sadness and resignation. Others who share Hoang’s view make light of their condition. In Single, a documentary based on the premise that “finding and maintaining a lasting relationship has never been more challenging,” several men and women are asked to name the best thing about being single. “Not worrying about being broken up with,” one person responds. “I will not be rejected today,” says another.

  It’s easy to understand why some people who have been injured by rejection and separation become cautious about putting themselves on the line in another serious relationship. But when caution turns to cynicism and leads those who live alone to shield themselves in safe houses, the situation can be perilous, too. For no matter how socially active, professionally successful, or adept at going solo one makes oneself, there is something uniquely powerful about the intimate connection forged through sharing one’s home with another person. Then again, there is also something uniquely painful about sharing one’s home with someone who has squandered or abused this intimacy and trust. As we see in the next chapter, one reason so many people separate is that they are lonely with each other.

  3.

  SEPARATING

  I GREW UP in a generation that yearned for romantic passion, yearned as if that was the key to all salvation, to all self-discovery, to everything.” Helen, who’s in her early sixties and twice divorced, sounds incredulous, if not a bit self-mocking, as she tells me this. We’re sitting in the spacious Greenwich Village apartment where she has lived alone for decades, and Helen, a writer and teacher with piercing eyes and a sharper mind, seems completely at ease applying it to her own life. Since childhood, she has seen herself as fiercely independent, but this did not prevent her from subscribing to her generation’s belief in the redemptive power of true love, and it shaped her early adult experiences. The yearning for the perfect marriage was odd, she says, because as children in a time when “divorce was unheard of,” she and her female friends were exposed to the brutal consequences of the vow “till death do us part”: “I remember sitting around my mother’s kitchen table when I was a child, and I was surrounded by a world full of internal drama, the drama of unhappy domestic arrangements that didn’t have a chance of being resolved. Women were talking about abortions that their husbands were never going to know about. Women were having affairs. They were miserable, and they were alone inside their situations.”

  The 1950s and early 1960s were confusing times to become a woman, Helen says. On the one hand, she and her middle-class peers were finding new opportunities in their professions and breaking through old barriers that confined them to the domestic sphere. On the other, they still faced overwhelming pressure to find the right man and organize their lives around marriage. “I was in Europe when I was twenty-three,” Helen recalls, “and I wrote these letters to my mother saying, ‘I know I have a great work in me to do, and I want to do it. But I also know that I need, above all else, a loving partner in order to do the work.’ I was waiting, like every girl in the world, for a man to make a life for me.”

  She didn’t wait long. Helen returned to New York and got a teaching job. At twenty-five, in a ceremony at her mother’s house, she married a Dutch Catholic artist who, she hoped, “would bring out the bohemian in me.” He didn’t, and the marriage, which Helen calls “instrumental,” didn’t work. “It wasn’t bad faith,” she explains. “But I married a fantasy, an image. I got married because I knew I needed to have a husband in order to do the work.” It didn’t take long to learn that her husband could not help her become the person she had projected, nor could she fundamentally change him. “We became real to each other,” she says, and together they realized that what they made each other was unhappy. After two and a half years together, they
divorced.

  Helen held on to her faith in the importance of marriage. She continued dating, and within a few years she had fallen for a Jewish psychologist, “the son of communists,” someone “as different as he could be” from her first husband. They were married, again at her mother’s house, when she was thirty-two. But despite the different particulars, the result was the same. Helen felt lonely and unsatisfied, and they couldn’t make things better. Two and a half years later, she asked for a divorce. “My mother couldn’t stand him,” she says. “And when I left him, I called her and said, ‘Mom, it’s over.’” She was totally supportive, but she did say, “Helen, the next one’s on you!”

  There hasn’t been a next one. Some thirty years later, Helen now believes that “marriage is fucking boring” and tells me that “I was never more miserable in my life than when I was married.” In her view, living alone stands in opposition to living falsely in a conventional but unhappy marriage, just because society tells you to. After Helen’s second divorce she made “a tremendous realization”—two, actually. First, she recognized that “without these men, I was gonna make my own life. Nobody was gonna take care of me.” Second, and more important, she noticed that a growing number of women in her generation had also been let down by marriage. They were discovering that falling in love and living with a husband didn’t fulfill them, didn’t allow them to become who they wanted to be. “We fell in love once, and it didn’t work. We fell in love twice, and it didn’t work. Once that happened, you had experience. And once you had experience, the whole myth of romantic love as salvation came to an end.”

  The men and women of Helen’s generation divorced in unprecedented numbers. “We’d seen people mismatched, living together in dead marriages for years and years because they dreaded being alone or they didn’t know what to do with themselves,” she remembers. “They didn’t know how to think about their lives.” The cultural change that made divorce acceptable was genuinely liberating, because it freed unhappy people to search for something better. But it also cast millions of people into an ocean of uncertainty. “It’s like anarchy,” Helen explains. “After you blow up the family and break up society, what do you do?”

  Helen and her contemporaries didn’t have the answers, and neither did the generations that followed them into the throes of the divorce revolution. But uncertainty about how to remake one’s life after separating from a spouse or long-term partner has hardly prevented dissatisfied couples from breaking up their relationships. According to the federal census, today about one out of every five adults has divorced.1 And although divorce rates in the United States have dropped somewhat since their peak in the early 1980s, Americans are still far more likely to split up than are couples in all other Western nations. “At current rates,” writes sociologist Andrew Cherlin, “nearly half of all American marriages would end in divorce.”2 As a consequence, millions of people who never planned to live alone now find themselves going solo, challenged to adjust their expectations and remake their lives.

  For many, the solution is to remarry. Americans, ever hopeful, are more likely than people in other nations to give marriage a second chance—and quickly! In the United States, the median time between a divorce and a second marriage is a mere 3.5 years. But a close look at the numbers shows that not everyone is in a hurry to tie the knot a second time. Young divorcees remarry far more often, and more swiftly, than the middle-aged and the elderly, as do those who live in the South and in rural areas, where cultural conservatism, fewer professional opportunities for women, and a less vibrant singles scene make marriage a compelling choice.

  Overall, remarriage rates dropped precipitously during the second half of the twentieth century, even in the United States. In 1950, for instance, two out of three divorcees remarried within five years, whereas in 1989 only one of two did. And although 80 percent of women who divorce before age twenty-five marry for a second time before turning thirty-five, those who divorce when they’re older are far more cautious.3 According to national statistics, only 44 percent of women and 55 percent of men who divorced over age twenty-five have remarried, and a recent American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) survey of people who divorced between the ages of forty and sixty-nine found that just one in three had wed again.

  Why have so many of us given up the supposed benefits of wedlock for the tumult of being single and the possibility that we will spend the rest of our days living alone? One reason is that modern women, untethered from traditional economic and sexual constraints, have discovered that going solo can liberate them from the many unrecognized, unappreciated, and unrewarded responsibilities they (still) take on as homemakers and caretakers, and allows them to attend to their own needs. (The burden of the “women’s role” in marriage helps explains why two out of three women surveyed in the AARP study claimed that they had demanded a divorce from their spouse.) Another reason is that men who are unhappy in their marriages develop fantasies about having a more adventurous sex life as singletons, though the evidence shows that the reality rarely meets their expectations. The booming singles culture of contemporary cities does, however, allow those who separate from a spouse to be socially engaged and personally stimulated rather than isolated and withdrawn. We also opt out of unsatisfying marriages because we cherish freedom, personal control, and our search for self-realization. For both men and women, living alone is a tempting way to achieve these goals.

  NONE OF THIS IS TO SAY that divorced city dwellers have abandoned their interest in finding another spouse or domestic partner. The great majority of those we interviewed say that they recognize the benefits of being married or cohabiting, at least when things are going well. Separated women tend to emphasize the value of small, everyday intimacies. “I liked the feeling that someone knew me on a day-to-day basis,” says Kaela, who’s forty-one and has been on her own for five years following a divorce. “He knew the stuff that you generally hide from others. It’s nice to feel the comfort of being who you are around someone else, sharing the things that come out in that unstructured time that just kind of happens, the no-pressure casual time that is so sweet.” Dina, who’s in her thirties and was married for four years, says, “I knew the sound of him coming up the stairs and this particular way that the door outside our door opens. I miss the rhythm of his steps. It’s a physical absence in my life.” Madeline, a sixty-one-year-old technical writer from San Francisco, has been happy living alone for two decades. Yet she valued “the company, the conversation, the sharing, the communication, the knowledge that someone is there. It must be psychological,” she concludes, “because life seems easier if you have someone going through it with you.”

  The benefits are also economic. Both men and women affirm what the statistics tell us: that there are tremendous financial advantages to being married or living with a partner. The ability to afford a larger home or a better neighborhood and to split expenses that are the same no matter how many people use them, like cable, Internet, and utilities. The security of having someone else’s income and benefits in case you get sick, lose your job, go back to school, or decide to try something different. The luxury of pooling income for savings, or blowing it on things that are better when shared. Moreover, decades worth of careful research confirms that most divorces result in a substantial decline in the standard of living for both parties, with women suffering far greater losses than men.4

  Divorced men who are asked about the benefits of marriage tend to bring up other luxuries. Sam, a large and jocular man who, at sixty, has allowed his waist to expand and his health to deteriorate, has been single for nearly three decades. It’s not surprising to hear him say that he now appreciates the way his wife took care of him and their apartment. Like most wives of her generation, she did most of the domestic work. But Sam says he reciprocated by taking over other household tasks, and this, he insists, not only made his home life pleasurable, but also made him a better man. “It’s good to have responsibi
lities,” Sam explains. “It makes you perform better. When I was married, I would make sure that the clothes were always washed and there was not a big pile in the corner, that I put away my shoes and washed my dishes. Sometimes when you’re on your own you become lackadaisical on cleaning and taking care of yourself. When I’m by myself, I tend to work, go home, watch TV or sporting events. I become a couch potato. I have a hard time finding somebody to date.”

  Sam is but one of the many divorced men we interviewed who say that living alone has hurt their sex lives. Ray, who’s been single since moving from Taiwan to California eight years ago, says that “sex, guaranteed sex,” is what he misses most about living with a woman. “You don’t have to go out there and hunt for it. You’re not spending all your energy trying to be a playboy, so you can relax and do other things.” (I should acknowledge that Ray, who’s short and pudgy with neatly combed straight black hair and slightly yellowed teeth, is the only man who used the phrase “guaranteed sex” to describe the virtues of cohabitation. Others reported that while living with a partner made sex more accessible, it was hardly guaranteed.) But in fact middle-age men who have remarried are more likely to have sex regularly than those who have divorced and gone solo. According to the AARP survey of divorcees between the ages of forty and sixty-nine, 57 percent of men with a domestic partner (married or not) said that they’d had intercourse once a week or more during the previous six months, compared to 43 percent of men without a partner. Men with a domestic partner were also three times less likely to experience long periods of celibacy—16 percent said that they had sex “not at all” during the previous six months, compared to 49 percent of divorced singles. It’s not surprising, then, that single men were twice as likely as their partnered peers to report masturbating at least once a week.5