Living Alone
I returned home from a few weeks away yesterday. I had traveled from Rome to Munich to Newark, stayed two nights in Manhattan and flown home from JFK direct to San Diego. It is always a long ride back and forth from San Diego to Europe, but we make a point of using it to stop in NYC to see the kids whenever we can. This time I came home by myself since Kim has a show she is putting on in Manhattan and then in Wabash. It’s a show I have seen, so I didn’t mind missing it, but the truth is that I had to get back to teach tonight. I had missed one week of class, but feel uncomfortable missing two. That means that I will be home nine days without Kim. Natasha, our dog sitter will be here for half that time and the other half it will be just me and Betty (though Colleen will come in three times a day to care for Betty’s eating, walking and medication needs). Despite Natasha being here for five days while Kim is gone, I consider this to be a nine day stint of being home alone. If you remember the Macaulay Culkin movie Home Alone, you will recall that after the initial shock of having been left behind, he is thrilled to be home alone since he sees it as an opportunity to do all the things that are forbidden to him in a normalized setting. Then, after a day or two that wears thin and he gets lonely. Now, the movie has the help of the holiday season to add to the feelings of loneliness, but the point is still the same. Be careful what you wish for. There is a reason people join together and live together.
I have been alone now for approximately 32 hours and I have already had enough of living alone. I’ve picked up Chinese take-out, ordered in Grubhub and gone to the Sideyard Pub for a lunch at the bar. I’ve simply had enough and yet I have another eight days to go, four of which I won’t even have Natasha to talk to. I have said for a long time that I don’t do alone very well. I was married at age 22 when I had just come out of business school and moved to NYC to start working. I didn’t live alone then since my first wife, Mary and I lived together right from the start of my move to the City. I have gone through two divorces and had a half dozen relationships in between, but I honestly never went more than ten days without being in some sort of relationship. That strikes people I tell that to as pretty amazing. It may well be why it took me some time to find my perfect partner in Kim. I am decidedly not a person who like dating and playing the field. I’ve never thought that was my long-suit and it just always felt way too distracting for me. I much prefer to settle in and while I thought I had a broad range of acceptability (meaning I never thought of myself as particularly picky), I didn’t find the best fit in a partner until I met Kim seventeen years ago this summer.
I have a habit in all things ranging from relationships to buying houses in being a fast decider. I think that’s less about being impulsive than it is about being intense and factoring all the variable right from the start in a way that makes the decision quite rapid. I have certainly changed my mind a few times and would argue that of the half dozen interim relationships that did not end in marriage, four were ended at my choosing, one way mutual and one was me getting put out with the cat. I knew that Kim was my perfect partner within a few hours of first meeting her. There was something in her manner and sense of humor that just fit for me. I have been drawn to other women for their looks or their joie de vivre, and Kim certainly had both of those, but I’m not sure I was ever so drawn to manner and sense of humor as much as I was with Kim. With time I came to understand and appreciate all her other fine qualities Ike her empathy and kindness, but that manner still sticks out.
I understand that “manner” is a rather vague term, but what I mean by it is that I saw, especially during my brief online dating stints, that there were some women my age that had either hardened or gotten old in spirit. That simply isn’t the case with Kim. She seemed to me to be like me in her manner and sense of humor. It was very now and with-it without being too over-the-top trying to be younger and hipper than it was. It’s a delicate balance, but she nailed it and it felt perfect to me. That is not something you can easily describe or be aware of when you are in its presence, but I really know it when I am without it. I know that generally speaking, absence makes the heart grow fonder, but this is more than that. I know Kim will be back in a few days, but I also feel that there is something missing in my daily comfort that is hard to pinpoint other than to say that I don’t feel that way when she is in residence.
There is no doubt that I love Kim and I have little doubt she equally loves me, so that’s well and good. But this is a slightly different issue. The best analogy I can give is that I may live in a big and comfortable house, but I seek to put in certain design features and little touches that make me feel extra-special good when I am at home. Kim gives me those features and little touches that make my life feel so much more pleasant and at ease. This is not something that I have had to learn to appreciate, I somehow sensed it from that first date, but I have certainly come to appreciate it that much more as I have gotten older since many of the superficial justifications for a marriage fall away with the passage of time and we are left with a combination of cover emotion (love) and then this extra feeling of comfort that I’m saying I get from being around Kim.
If I am assessing my last day and a half, I would say that I get a reprieve from the feeling of absence of this special thing for the first few hours. Since I was pretty tired from traveling, I went to bed fairly easily and while I thought about being away from Kim, my tiredness overwhelmed any feeling of loss. But by morning, I was lost. To begin with, it is Wednesday, which means I have to gear my day to leaving the house by 5pm to come to class. I had a two-hour weekly massage scheduled which would take up part of the morning and I had a few bookkeeping chores to attend to, but I still awoke lost. Why would I get up if Kim wasn’t here? OK, I can turn on the TV as I wish since she isn’t here, but even that failed me as Hulu was having some sort of issue this morning. So I lay in bed wondering what to do with my life. Obviously, I am overstating this, but that is the essence of the feeling I get when I am alone. Life misses a big part of its meaning to me if my primary relationship is absent or in disarray for some reason.
I cannot tell Kim not to do the things she wants to do. I cannot keep her by my side just for my comfort. That isn’t fair and simply not reasonable. But I can tell you one thing for sure, living alone sucks for me.