Two years ago, I broke up with a long-term boyfriend and moved into a bachelor apartment. Part of me felt liberated and joyous, but most of me felt devastated and incredibly alone. That kind of loneliness is self-reinforcing, because the closer you get to other people, the more spiritually remote you feel. You feel like you’re watching your friends have fun from a parallel dimension where joy does not exist. You get panic attacks and vomit and empathize with the siphon jet. That’s why if I ever become a ghost, I will never haunt parties.
Breaking up with that boyfriend was the right thing to do. After a couple years of living alone, I know myself way better and enjoy my own company a lot more. I get more work done and laugh at my own jokes and sleep with whomever I want. And while all of the above is true, I’m saying it somewhat defensively, because being alone without loving being alone feels kind of pathetic. I’m also bragging, because loners are a noble people. Needing people is a sign of weakness; the better you are at being by yourself, the stronger your character.
I’m not sure I believe that, but I certainly feel it sometimes. Feeling it shapes the way I talk about being alone, and it shapes the way my loner friends talk about it as well. I’m relatively new to the loner scene, but we loners kind of have our own culture. It’s kind of a shitty culture, just as a party where everyone read books in the same room would be a shitty party, but it’s held together by strong, utilitarian bonds. We loners depend on each other, because as a loner you have to outsource relationship duties like sex and getting people to read stuff for you. Actual conversation between loners can be difficult sometimes, because when you talk to yourself constantly, other people can become like Wilson. Sharing a bed with another loner is sometimes like an emotional gloryhole.
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Loners have a party line, which pretends that being alone is an evolved form of existence. For example, a loner who read that line about book parties would probably have said, “Hey, sounds like a pretty good party to me,” and they would have been totally wrong for reasons I shouldn’t have to explain. It’s easier for us to believe that we chose this life and that we’re defying a society that wants us to get married and have kids. Definitely easier than considering that human biology wants that for us, too (although human biology also wants us to go to the bathroom whenever and wherever we want to). As a loner among other loners, you don’t talk very much about the fact that at least 20% of being alone is as crushingly lonely as non-loners would expect it to be.
There are times when it feels awesome to not have to talk about my day or give a shit about someone else’s shitty day. I like being able to keep working without having to give a progress update to someone who is whining about being hungry and who is thisclose to just ordering the pizza. I can make jokes about how disgusting my apartment is or how bad my habits are without anyone narrowing their eyes at me and saying, “Everything is a joke to you, isn’t it?” And I can tell jokes without wondering whether my boyfriend is going to find them funny.
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But sometimes it feels incredibly awful to come home to an empty apartment with only reheated pasta to look forward to. Sometimes it feels incredibly awful to wake up and have to go to work knowing that the day’s highlight will consist of reheated pasta in about fourteen hours. Sometimes you watch your friendships slowly disintegrate because every time you call your buddies you uncork three days’ worth of mindless chatter and then ask them to read something for you. And sometimes it’s Sunday night and you feel like either you’re dead or the rest of the world is.
Furthermore, sometimes you see great, fully realized individuals and realize that they have partners and kids whom they love and spend every day with. Or great, fully realized individuals with roommates that they love and hang out with all the time. And it’s not so much jealousy you feel, but cognitive dissonance, because you realize that you can still be yourself with other people, and that being alone isn’t a choice necessarily, but a consequence of how lousy you’ve been at being with people, or a consequence of the fact that no one you’ve wanted to be with has wanted to be with you, or just the luck of the draw.
Loner pride is not unfounded, but it’s very idealistic. It’s a puny defence against a deep vulnerability: we can’t count on other people–to be there in the first place, to not abandon us, to be better for us than being alone–but we still need them. What’s really scary is that not many of us loners, save for a few die-hards, are likely to stay alone forever. But there’s always a chance we’ll be alone in the end.
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Alexandra Molotkow writes about life and stuff for Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter at @alexmolotkow.
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