Adventures in Being Single

[Originally published on Quora, in response to the question, "What is the brutal truth about being single?"]

The brutal truth is that your partnered friends tend to forget about you until they're single again.

Your single friends find a partner and forget about you.

And the circle goes around.

Your social circle keeps shifting, because people with partners rarely spend time with single people. They don't invite you to things unless they're trying to set you up with someone, because they see your singleness as something to fix instead of seeing you as a valuable friend in your own right.

When you're young, this isn't that big of a deal, because there are still lots of other single people to hang out with. But as the decades go by, it gets much harder. Even a few years ago, I spent a lot of time with people in their 30s, but they all found partners and now I'm too old to even want to form new friendships with people under 35. We just don't have much in common.

I have friends, of course. People haven't stopped caring for me. But I rarely ever see them.

I haven't been to the movies since I broke up with my last boyfriend, back in July. The last three or four times I made plans with my closest friends, they canceled on me. I get it, of course, you get busy. But those friends have partners to talk to, to sit and hold hands with, to actually physically be in the same room with. If my three best friends cancel on me three weeks in a row, I have gone three weeks without a face-to-face talk with anyone who really knows and cares for me, who knows the story of my life or where my comfort zone is or what makes me laugh. I can go weeks at a time with absolutely no physical contact with another human being.

I don't mind being single. I don't mind spending time alone. But when you are middle-aged and single, you are never anyone else's priority. You have to work harder at all your relationships. If you don't put in a lot of extra effort, they'll exclude you. Even if you do put in that extra effort, they may cancel on you at the last minute. It's only right that they prioritize their partners and families, but it leaves you in the lurch, over and over, and it gets harder every year.

The other thing is that you don't have any automatic person that you tell your troubles to. We had a close death in the family over the weekend and two days later, a dear friend of mine died. I've mentioned it to a few people--mostly people at work who needed to know why I'd miss work, or people who my son needed me to tell. I haven't really talked about it much because, you know, you have to actually figure out who you should call and when you sit down to figure it out, you realize that you haven't actually seen most of your friends for months. So you have to decide how to approach the conversation in the first place. “I know we haven't seen each other in months but people have died" just seems a weird thing to impose on a friend.

If you're in a relationship, though, you just tell your partner immediately. You don't have to think about who you're going to call, because you have someone for that. You have someone who you know you're going to see, because you would see them anyway. You have someone you can talk to, because you were going to talk to them, anyway. You have someone for those moments when, no matter how much you love solitude, you absolutely need real human contact.

The hardest thing about being single, for me, isn’t just not having a partner. It's about how not having a partner can alienate you from other people, too. Even my family spends less time with me now that I'm no longer married. How's that for a kick in the teeth?

Adventures in Reading: 2019

Last year, I decided to finally try the Goodreads Challenge. Frankly, I was less concerned about my ability to read 52 books in 2018 than I was about my ability to actually keep track of them. That may seem a little odd, but I've always been a pretty avid reader and the truth is that I have a hard time remembering to do anything faithfully, including eating and sleeping. It's just one of the frightfully quirky things that makes me, me--like the time I forgot to pay my phone bill and instead paid my utility bill twice. You know, the stuff that keeps life exciting.

By "exciting," I mean one of those county fair teacup rides that spins you till you're dizzy and about to barf. Some people might think excitement is supposed to be like lovey butterflies in your stomach which make you feel like you're floating, but the other truth is that love hits my stomach like a lead balloon, too. Love, the flu, poTAYto, poTAHto.

That might be a little too much truth for so early in a blog. So, anyway, uh, back to reading.

I actually managed to keep track of all or most of the books I read, and I discovered that I'd also underestimated how much reading I did, because I ended the year with a whopping 108 books on my list. They weren't all gems. A few were actual clunkers. A few were respectable but overregarded tomes (I'm looking at you, The Alienist), a few were actually rereads (Tom Sawyer, A Christmas Carol, Emma), and a few were books I only read because they were lying around handy. For some inexplicable reason, I spent a couple months reading the first 10 novels of the Agatha Raisin cozy mystery series...and wondering the entire time why I wasn't reading something better. I suppose there was something comfortingly familiar about them.

Of course there were some very good books, too, including: The Feather Thief, The Song of Achilles, Rules of Civility, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice series; the true crime masterpiece, I'll Be Gone in the Dark; the sublime H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, and two books by the hilarious Jennifer Wright (It Ended Badly and Get Well Soon).

This year, I thought I'd try blogging about what I read. Not everything I read (I've set a goal for 100 books and I'm already well into books 4 and 5). Maybe one book a week, maybe just what strikes my fancy. My reading habits are broad and unpredictable, not organized. I read whatever interests me at the time. I figure my blogging will be like that. I won't strictly write reviews; if that's what I had in mind, I'd just post them on Goodreads. This will be whatever I feel like writing about--with books!

Think of it as the Chex Mix of blogs. Everybody  knows you're here for the books, but in the meantime there's a lot of Corn Chex to eat your way through.