Going Solo

by Eric Klinenberg

  Sam, the sixty-year-old who admitted to neglecting his home after he separated, explains, “I tend to not have a social life. I become a workaholic, working way too much, like a hundred forty hours every two weeks. And it leaves me very little time for fun.” He’s a counselor for men in the criminal justice system, and his work is fulfilling because he gets so deeply involved with men whose lives he can help to change. It’s also exhausting, emotionally and physically, and at the end of most days he doesn’t have much to give. Sam loves music, so occasionally he’ll go to a club by himself and just listen. On most nights, however, he’s fine being home alone.

  Still, Sam says that he feels good about his situation. He wishes he lived closer to his three children and his siblings, and holidays can be hard when he can’t travel to be with them. He’d like to date more often and would prefer to have more sex as well. But he wouldn’t trade places with most married men he knows, and he certainly has no interest in a relationship like the one he had before. In Sam’s account of his marriage, things fell apart because his ex-wife insisted on doing things that she knew he disliked but she wouldn’t accompany him to things he wanted to do, either. He found himself married to someone who wasn’t with him. “That was lonely, to be with somebody and not to be. I was all by myself, and I didn’t know how to do things on my own.” Sam had always enjoyed drinking, but he did more and more of it as his lonely marriage drove him to despair. “I didn’t have happiness,” he recalls. “And everything I did was for the pursuit of alcohol. It was my companion and my first love. And when I did sober up, I didn’t know the person that I had married. I wasn’t connected to that person.” Divorce not only liberated him, it allowed him to reconnect with himself.

  Sam has been sober for several decades now. He attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings regularly and says that, although he lives alone, “I seldom feel lonely because I’m closer to God.” This, too, is not an unusual sentiment. As the Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has shown, a growing number of contemporary Christians (including the nearly 40 percent of all U.S. citizens who identify as evangelical or “born-again”) say that having an intimate relationship with God is a central feature of their personal life.12 Among all singles age thirty-five and above, half of women and a third of men report that they attend a religious service at least once a month, and churches have taken notice. Today, clergymen and -women frequently offer special ministries for people who live alone. In their book about living alone after the end of a marriage, the Christian educators Herbert Anderson and Freda Gardner argue that people can enjoy rich and spiritually fulfilling lives if they maintain close connections to God. “What is finally distinctive about Christian anthropology,” they write, is that “the ultimate aim of human life is to be in relation with God . . . God comes to each one as a friend and, in accepting that gracious offer from God, no one need feel that she or he is all alone.”13

  Many divorced men we interviewed feel socially integrated even without a strong connection to God. They may not have as much contact with their friends as women do, but they are far more likely to date and be sexually active, and often they take so much pleasure in the liberties born of going solo that they lose interest in commitment altogether. Steven, a policy analyst in his late forties who lives in New York City, divorced his wife six years ago and says that he never anticipated that living alone would be so compelling. He has a flexible work schedule, and on most evenings he stays up late exercising at the gym, watching sports and movies, or socializing in restaurants and bars. He dates often, and remarks on how easy it is for a successful man his age to find smart, attractive, and available women in the city. It’s a single man’s luxury, he acknowledges, but it’s not one he enjoyed when he was young.

  Steven got married in his early twenties, before he had much experience with other women, and became a father soon after. He adores his children, but he grew estranged from his wife as their interests veered in different directions. His career took off and the world opened up to him just as his home life began to be constraining. Steven spent years pouring himself into work—partly because he liked it and partly, he now believes, to avoid confronting his family situation. Eventually the problems grew impossible to ignore. Counseling didn’t help much, because he and his wife were fundamentally incompatible. The marriage could be justified only for the sake of their children, and who could say that they were better off living in an unhappy home?

  Two years after the separation, Steven got involved with a younger woman who wanted something serious, and he was drawn to the idea. She might not have been a perfect match for him, but she seemed pretty close. They had a great sex life, liked each other’s friends, traveled well together, and shared taste in movies as well as work interests. They started spending several nights a week in each other’s apartment, and eventually, like so many other couples living in expensive cities, they found it hard to justify the costs. She moved into his place, and Steven enjoyed sharing a home with her . . . until he didn’t. The problem, he realized, was that living with someone—even a women he loved—meant denying himself the chance to enjoy an unfettered existence: Dating new women. Staying out as long as he wanted and not worrying about anyone else. Watching sports. Seeing movies. Meeting friends.

  Steven had grown to appreciate the virtues of living lightly, without obligations. He was willing to give up some of this, but after his girlfriend had moved in, the relationship took on more weight than he could handle. When she started bringing up marriage, perhaps even children, everything snapped. “I feel awful about it, because I really do love her,” Steven tells me. “But there’s something in me that just cannot commit to another relationship. And part of it is that I really like living alone right now. There’s just too much to give up.”

  Charlotte, who was mulling over a marriage proposal during our first interview, has also decided that she’d lose too much if she accepted. In our follow-up interview, she explains that, after fourteen years of going solo, she’s not willing to give up her independent lifestyle. She has grown anxious about intimacy, and particularly about letting someone see how she acts and who she is when she’s in her own space. As she enumerates some of her domestic quirks—eating what she wants, when she wants to; spending full days in her pajamas; keeping the TV and radio on at the same time—she says that her suitor “doesn’t have a clue who I am” and predicts that “it would slide downhill once he found out.” Right now, Charlotte says, things are simply too good to risk giving up everything for a live-in companion who may not love her when he really gets to know her.14 She is hardly certain that she has made the right decision. “You’ll have to interview me again in twenty years,” she jokes, and if things turn out badly, she promises to complain, “Why didn’t you stop me then, when I had a chance?”

  CHARLOTTE HAS A GOOD SENSE of humor about her predicament, but divorcees who live alone in their fifties and early sixties often have a hard time confronting their concerns about growing older on their own. Some get previews of how challenging it might be during episodes of severe illness or injury. Sam, who once struggled with alcoholism, suffered a heart attack, had major surgery, and then developed a severe lung infection about a year ago. “I didn’t know if I was going to live or not,” he recalls. “I stayed in the hospital from August to November, and I don’t even remember August and September.” What was certain, however, was that he would be unable to take care of himself after the hospital released him, and that meant calling on family members to help. His mother, who’s in her late eighties, had visited him after the operation, but she was unfit for the responsibility of managing his care at home. Fortunately, Sam has always been close to his sister in Washington, and she offered to look after him if he could move in with her. Though it was far from California, his boss was willing to give him extra time to recover, and Sam spent two months recuperating in his sister’s house before he was well enough to return. Now he says, “Everybody thinks I need to get marr
ied and have a wife” to take care of him. But Sam took away a different lesson: His family would be there for him when he needed them most.

  Not everyone shares this confidence. Lou, the fifty-seven-year-old attorney and musician in Berkeley, has a back condition that occasionally leaves him “hurting like hell” and “hardly able to walk.” When he lived in San Francisco, he could call on his son to help him move around his apartment or get food and medicine. Now his son has moved elsewhere and he doesn’t have any family nearby. So what would he do if he were bedridden, or worse? “Maybe somebody could . . .” He takes a long pause and thinks about it. “I could call somebody . . . I don’t know.” The issue gnaws at him during the interview, and by the end he is adamant that he needs to find a partner before he gets much older. “I’d really like to have some companionship,” he acknowledges. “Is it too much to ask?”

  The divorced women we interviewed had more faith in their support system of friends and family, in part because they had worked so hard to build and sustain it. This isn’t surprising, since, as psychologists such as Carol Gilligan have argued, from an early age girls are encouraged to develop intimate relationships and to value mutual support, while boys are pushed into larger group settings (such as sports teams) where competitive, rule-based activities prevail. According to one review of the literature on gender and social networks, “From childhood to adolescence, girls appear to seek more help and support from others than do boys.” The result is that, compared to men, adult women tend to be more empathic and sensitive to the needs of others. They also tend to be more active social planners, which helps them stay connected even after their marriages fall apart.15

  As for Madeline, she would be thrilled to find the right romantic partner to accompany her on the next part of her life. But she would also be shocked, since every story she knows or statistic she hears suggests that it’s not going to happen. Most of her closest friends are single women who live alone too, and they all expect to stay that way. “By any objective measure we should be depressed as hell,” Madeline says. What’s surprising is that “I’m not, and none of the women I know are. It’s almost one of the best times of my life. I have more friends now than I’ve ever had. And I’m making a concerted effort to enlarge my social circle.”

  Madeline reads a lot of science, and she has come to believe that expanding her social network could help protect her from the dangers of growing isolated as she ages. She’s been reaching out to new people in hope of enriching her life with the kinds of “social capital” that the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam made famous. She’s determined not to be alone. Madeline sees her behavior as more than simply strategic, however, because she enjoys the experience of putting herself out there and seeing what happens. She’s over sixty, after all, and if she doesn’t try things now, when will she?

  In recent years Madeline has started using social networking sites quite often. A site like Meetup.com helps her find discussion partners who speak Italian or share her interest in politics, and she finds an occasional date on Craigslist. She connected with her neighbor a few years ago, and now the two of them often knock on each other’s door and take spontaneous walks to local cafés and parks. She also decided to get to know some of the gay men in her neighborhood whose social world had always seemed closed to her. Now she says, “I am the fag hag of the Western world, if you’ll excuse that expression. I can go out every night with another young gay man and they are wonderful to me—wonderful company.”

  She hasn’t yet had to activate her support system for anything more than the occasional emotional boost that everyone needs. But she trusts that her friends will be there for her when she needs them, and after one failed marriage and then a twelve-year relationship that dissolved, she can’t say that about a romantic partner. Now, Madeline insists, she’s not going to do anything to jeopardize the strength of her network. “There’s such a thing as too much togetherness. If I were to find a relationship, we wouldn’t have to do everything together, we wouldn’t have to share friends. And I never again want anybody living with me, nor do I ever want to live with someone else.”

  4.

  PROTECTING THE SELF

  NO ONE REALLY BOWLS ALONE.

  The provocative phrase, from Robert Putnam’s sweeping account of the decline of civic participation in the United States, is a metaphor, not a finding (as he acknowledged). Putnam used it with great effect to dramatize the fact that participation in bowling leagues had fallen during the second half of the twentieth century, as had participation in a number of historically significant civic associations and membership groups, from the Boy Scouts to the Elks clubs and the League of Women Voters. The truth is, Americans continue bowling together, but with friends (and friends of friends) in their social network, not in formal teams or organized groups.

  The distinction is important. When Bowling Alone was published in 2000, pundits and policy makers worried that families were watching TV together in their living rooms rather than interacting with each other in the public sphere. Today, our most pressing social concerns are different—and not just because we’re nostalgic about the days when family members watched TV together rather than on their own miniscreens! In the first years of the twenty-first century we’ve witnessed the rise of new forms of interpersonal engagement and civic participation, from MoveOn to MySpace, e-government programs to microlending initiatives such as Kiva. We are, as headlines tell us: “Addicted to Social Media,” “Trapped in a World Wide Web,” “Caught in the Net.” Our most burning questions about the nature of contemporary society are not about isolation, but the problem of being hyperconnected, or of living with what the technology guru Linda Stone calls “continuous partial attention,” because we are so deeply embedded in the personal, professional, and social activities we perform online.

  All of this should affect the way we understand how and why we live alone today. Whether or not we go solo, most of us are immersed in one or more social worlds, and today a growing number of critics have begun to worry that we are in too deep. We are experiencing “the end of solitude,” writes the essayist William Deresiewicz, who claims that in contemporary culture “we live exclusively in relation to others” and that too many of us find it “impossible to be alone.” The sociologist Dalton Conley goes further, arguing that we are witnessing the death of the individual and the birth of “intraviduals”: busy professionals whose lives are dedicated to “managing the myriad data streams, impulses, desires, and even consciousness that we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple worlds.”1

  Arguments like these are intriguing but not quite persuasive. Granted, there’s good reason to worry about the cognitive development of young people who spend their days steeping in text messages, TV, and the Internet; about the rise of knowledge-based service-sector jobs that require professionals to spend their days and nights e-mailing and doing relationship management with clients or colleagues; about the psychological well-being of “crack-berry” junkies who cannot focus on the world beyond their smart phone. But does this really signal the end of solitude or individualism? After all, the “network society” emerged only after massive numbers of young adults began living alone for the first time in history and unprecedented numbers of children started growing up in rooms of their own. It’s hard not to see a relationship between the demand for constant connection, whether online or on the job, and the enormous increase in the amount of time we spend on our own. And it’s important to note that not everyone—indeed, most of us—aren’t always elsewhere, seeking out contact or a new Facebook friend.

  In fact, we interviewed a number of people who said living alone was a way to buffer themselves against the intense pressures of social and, especially, vocational life. To be sure, this strategy for protecting the self means something different for affluent and middle-class people than it does for the poor, the mentally ill, or the physically frail. For successful profession
als, living alone as a form of self-protection typically means establishing one’s home as a sanctuary in the city, one that facilitates the very pursuit of solitude and self-discovery that Deresiewicz and Conley fear we’ve abandoned. It doesn’t always work this way, however. Some of the affluent and middle-class people we interviewed acknowledged that they’d sought out a place of their own to avoid toxic relationships, or to escape from a community that took more than it gave. The disadvantaged men we interviewed were even more likely to report motivations like this. For them, living alone can easily lead to a dangerous extreme, resulting not only in domestic autonomy but also in reclusiveness, hoarding, and other antisocial behaviors that turn one’s safe house into a tomb. Even more judicious forms of social withdrawal may lead to a kind of miserable security, as in the case of many of the ex-convicts, substance abusers, and unemployed men who take refuge in single-room occupancy hotels (SROs) and cheap efficiency apartments to avoid friends and family whose company brings more trouble than it’s worth.