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I remember vividly the panic one night shortly after a hard breakup. Alone and terrified, I stared around my dark, silent bedroom and thought, “this is how it ends for me, alone forever more.”
It was like a preview of death, not some tunnel with a hopeful light at the end of it, not some entrance into a blissful party populated with cheerful charming angels, but like waking up in a buried casket, exiled and claustrophobic, my eternal fate.
I’ve had bouts of this panic after several breakups. After my 17-year marriage, I assumed my wife would tell every woman in the world that I was a loser and I’d never get a date again.
That wasn’t the case. After my divorce, there was light at the end of the tunnel, plenty of cheerful charming angelic company, women who, like my wife, had decided their husbands were losers and so looked to me as relief.
I have plenty of friends who married young and stayed that way. They live very efficient, happy lives, a companion at hand through the whole lifelong journey.
My life has been different. I had my one long marriage and have since alternated between solitude, dating and partnering, with the partnerships generally lasting about 2.5 years. It hasn’t been very efficient, all those distractingly delightful false starts and distractingly disappointing endings. Still, it’s been rich. I had a good run and I’ve learned a lot along the way.
These days I don’t think I’m cut out for partnership. My priorities, including those expressed in my articles here, make me difficult company for romance. My work, both academically and personally (my equivalent to a spiritual practice) is largely about overcoming the tendency to think any of us are exceptions to the good and bad in human nature. Romance, especially during courtship, tugs toward exceptionalism. I just can’t - or rather won’t - sustain the mutually flattering boosterism that courtship entails.
There seems to be a crossroad somewhere around midlife, a point at which if you’re not already settled into a cozy partnership or marriage, the chances of doing so fall off. There’s the maternal, but also the matrimonial clock. Make babies by 40; mate by, say 55, or the chances of success decline.
Lately I’ve asked a few single friends (mostly women) two questions: What’s the likelihood that you’ll spend your last twenty years single, and how do you feel about that prospect?
I get two responses. One is an inability to distinguish the questions: Zero chance I’ll end up alone, because it would be horrible. People do that a lot. They answer a question about actual likelihoods with hopes, not with accurate assessments.
I also get answers like “It’s very likely, and I’ll be miserable.”
Dreading decades is a sour way to have to go through life. It’s very likely that I’ll end up single for the long haul, but it is no longer horrible. I embrace it enthusiastically.
Call it sour grapes. Or call it making lemonade from lemons. There’s a fine line between sour grapes and lemonade.
After my last breakup I stopped thinking of singleness as failure. I realized that what I really want for my later years is my time and mind back from romantic distraction. I have a lot of priority projects, some of which require that I have the freedom to follow my thoughts where they take me without offending those near and dear.
My long-married friends got their time and minds back by replacing romantic intensity with cozy comfort. That’s one way. The other is with acceptance of the happily single life.
I have lots of respect for the marital buddy-system way to go through life. It no more turned out to be my life than heterosexuality turns out to be the life for homosexuals.
Times and attitudes change, and those of us who are in midlife these days happen to live on the cusp of the partial decline of marriage as the only lifestyle and the rise of singleness, a cusp that parallels in some ways the decline in heterosexuality as the only way and the rise of alternative romantic lifestyles. It would be easy for any of us to feel some shame and disappointment at not being able to live up to yesterday’s standards, before accepting our acceptability by today’s standards.
I like friendship best. I think it’s actually a more credible and honorable form of interaction than courtship – more freedom of association and speech, less ulterior motive and agenda.
I thrive on intimacy, and seem to be able to come by it readily. I’ve always tended to move conversation away from small talk ASAP. I have lots of very intimate friendships, though with people who come and go based on our mutual priorities. Though I spend a lot of time alone, I do not feel sidelined or exiled.
Friends with benefits is tricky. Approaching sixty, I’m no longer easily convinced by sex that I’m in love. But I’ve not gotten over another compelling impulse that comes with sexual contact: Dread of disappointing a woman.
Romance is fueled by its own acceleration, the ever-deepening connection confirming that it’s all systems go. But it can be a short-lived acceleration. Everything we do to delight each other romantically becomes an expectation, something to sustain or else one is disappointing. So by friends I really mean friends.
Over the years, as I sensed that I might be leaning single, I tried several commitments to it. I even gave it a new name, an alternative to matrimony, celibacy and promiscuity. I called it being a “loaner.” My life is loaned to me and I can loan it to others – friendship as subleasing the self I get to be for a lifetime.
But despite several attempts to declare myself a loaner, I fell back into partnership a few more times. This time feels different. Mostly because I’m over the panic. What I feared turns out to feel like a fine outcome for my life.
Maybe being a loaner still hasn’t stuck. I could end up partnered for the long haul again. I have friends who place bets that I will, and friends who try to reassure me that I don’t have to end up single and miserable (they make that association). This can sound a little like heterosexuals reassuring homosexuals that they don’t have to end up gay.
To each his or her own. But if you do find yourself thinking that you’re likely to end up miserable for decades, you might be able to save yourself a lot of anticipatory grief by imagining how you might be able to make it not so bad after all. Chances are you’ll do that eventually anyway. Most of us tend to make the best of what becomes inescapable.
There’s a reason one might resist accepting the single fate. Accepting it reduces the urgency to avoid it. We cry, “there must be a better way!” to motivate ourselves to find one. But there isn’t always one. At some point we can shift to saying, “actually this way is fine, even good.”
For more on the unexpected joys of singleness, check out fellow blogger Bella DePaulo.
