Although I’ve been told I have ‘a face that comes with subtitles’, I’m not the kind of person who easily cries in front of others or shows my upset. I didn’t cry when Bambi’s mother died, and when my parents had their 50th anniversary party recently, my sister let loose the Ganges from her tear ducts while I was a dust bowl in the Sahara. And yet, when I picked up my car today from the garage, after she’d been in a car accident and needed a door replaced, I burst into tears.
There is a lot I love about living alone and being alone. Mostly it’s the peace and freedom. That isn’t to say I don’t want a romantic partner, rather that the people I’ve met since my late husband’s passing haven’t been compatible, and while I could’ve settled for scraps with two of them and had the semblance of being in a couple, I would prefer to be alone, eating from a full plate. A plate that is filled with love from my friends and family, a sprinkling of lovers, hobbies I adore, and a home that is restful and calm.
That being said, there are things that are challenging. It is hard to talk about these without some dimwit yelling WELL WHY DO YOU PROMOTE BEING SINGLE THEN or WHY DON’T YOU GET A MAN YOU SAD CHEESE-EATING HAG, as if two things can’t be true. You can be happier being single if you haven’t found the right partner, and still be entitled to feeling sad about feeling lonely or exhausted at having to do everything by yourself. In the same way that parents should feel entitled to talking about hard it is at times with their kids without some blowhard yelling WELL WHY DID YOU HAVE THEM.
If we hold space for our couple friends who talk about the aggravating things their partners do without instantly resorting to ‘just leave them’, then surely we should be able to hold space for our single friends without offering up a solution via a partner.
As a single woman living alone, there are a countless number of things I do to make myself feel safe in ways that I’m fairly sure men don’t do. In the same way we don’t tend to run at night, and we do hold our keys in our hands and make sure our female friends text us that they are home safe after we have parted ways.
I live in an area which I love, which I initially chose because it is an area I feel safe in while walking down the street regardless of the time of day. I have a lot of small things that reassure my daily existence from knowing the local shopkeepers, having a cordial relationship with my neighbours and an understanding that we won’t steal each other’s packages. But one of the biggest things is my little universe on wheels: my car.
When I first passed my test at the age of 17, a car was freedom – it wasn’t safety. It was about borrowing my mother’s car and driving somewhere, anywhere that was not the boring confines of the suburbs. When I moved to London, the following year, I didn’t have a car. Mainly because I couldn’t afford it but also the city offered functional, efficient public transport that didn’t mean waiting for a bus every hour.
Almost 13 years passed before I got my first car, and by now I was married. My parents bought it as a present for me, but in truth, Rob did most of the driving. He worked from home, and often picked me up from the station or did most of the driving on our road trips. I was so in love with him, and so conditioned to think of men as better drivers that I didn’t initially notice Rob was a terrible one. As a result of his driving, my car was constantly in a series of scrapes that were somehow mysteriously the other person’s fault.
I can be more forgiving of the fact that it also smelled permanently of wet dog, courtesy of our dog Daisy, and although her paws were wiped down with a towel before she clambered in the back, she turned the car into a hotbox of stink.
I am less forgiving of when Rob lapsed back into alcoholism and lied about it, I found out he’d been driving while drunk. And then, my car became something terrifying and unforgiving – a means through which my husband might drive into a wall, or worse, someone else. I took the keys and was thrust into the role I hated most, that of the jailer.
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