Living alone is a way to protect the self, yet it also risks imperiling it, and it’s no surprise that people in good physical, emotional, and financial health are better able to find the right balance than those who are sick or poor. For those with financial security, a busy schedule, and a dense social network, living alone can be productive because it offers access to privacy, restoration, and personal development. But for the vulnerable it more often leads to what Berkeley sociologist Sandra Smith calls “defensive individualism,” a dangerous state that fosters distrust toward other people and institutions, and ultimately toward the self as well.2
MOST PEOPLE WHO LIVE ALONE are financially secure, not poor, and those who purposely use their domestic space as an oasis from their busy, stressful work lives report that it is a regenerative, not an isolating experience. Phil is a successful journalist in his late forties, and he says that working and living in Manhattan requires giving so much of himself that at the end of the day he needs to shut things out. “I wouldn’t say I’m a solitary person,” he explains. “But I like privacy. I need time to recharge.”
Unmistakably outgoing, with a warm smile and a kind demeanor, Phil has spent most of the past two decades living independently, and he’s learned how to organize his home so that it accommodates the particular kind of solitude he seeks. “I like having control of my own space, making it like my childhood room at large, but calm, like how it feels in church. I not only live alone. I’ve mostly lived without a television, without a pet.” Phil sees domestic tranquillity as a means of deepening his self-knowledge and, in turn, enhancing his creativity. He believes that the time he spends alone helps him to be a better writer, a better thinker, and a more engaging person. Like the late psychologist Anthony Storr, Phil argues that solitude can bring us closer to ourselves, and he can rattle off a long list of great artists and authors who spent most of their lives in a place of their own.3
Although his life has never been busier, living alone gives Phil ample time to confront his feelings, and he says that now, instead of getting bogged down by questions about how he got here, he uses his hours at home to think about where he’s heading and whether he’s living the way he wants. As he approaches fifty, he realizes that if he stays single there will be new challenges ahead. “The frailty of aging and the growing awareness of one’s own fatality start to factor in. You think, you know, what’s gonna happen?” What’s scary, Phil says, is the prospect of dying without loved ones nearby. “The big thing that changes with age in terms of living alone is that the words ‘dying’ and ‘alone’ start to become associated with each other,” he explains. “Nobody worries about dying married.”
AMY, who works for a food magazine, is too busy to worry about what will happen to her as she ages. She’s a youthful thirty-eight, with long brown hair and sharply defined features. Like Phil, she says that her job requires “a lot of social interaction. I’m dealing with creative people. There are divas, and egos that you have to manage. I have to cuddle, cajole, threaten, be passive-aggressive.” Added to her formal work responsibilities, this relationship management takes a toll on her, especially during the busy periods. “Two weeks out of every month we’re working twelve-, fourteen-, sixteen-hour days. I can’t plan anything.” Usually, she doesn’t want to. “Work is very social,” she reports, “and I like the peace of coming home and not having to interact anymore, having a chance to decompress.”
At the beginning of our interview she tells me that she moved into a place of her own once she could afford it, but once she gets more comfortable she reveals another layer of her story. She has moved from a shared apartment into a place of her own twice during the past ten years, and while having money to pay the rent was necessary, in both cases she made the change to escape domestic relationships that were dragging her down. The first time was in Los Angeles, where she had been living with her brother after graduating from college and cycling through a series of bad roommates. “I just couldn’t live with him anymore,” Amy explains. “He was driving me nuts and I had to get away.” Getting her own place proved liberating. Not only did it make her feel like a real adult, it also restored her sense of autonomy and self-control.
The second time was more painful. She was in New York, where she had moved in with her boyfriend and begun to imagine their life together. “It was far more intimate and intense than living with roommates,” Amy reports. But she poured herself into it because she was in love, and she knew they could make things work. Only they couldn’t. As she later learned, her boyfriend was secretly dating a woman in her early twenties. “He was a jerk,” Amy says, with well-earned hostility. “I found out that he had been cheating on me since the first month we moved in together. He had been lying to me the whole time, and I didn’t know.” Scarred from the experience, Amy ruled out any kind of shared housing situation and has vowed that she will live alone, safely removed from a potentially harmful roommate or partner, until she finds someone who earns her trust and affection. She’s not shy about looking, but she does so slowly and cautiously, ever mindful of what she has to lose.
AMY MAY BE CAUTIOUS, but, as a relatively comfortable and secure young professional, she is far less self-protective than the many disadvantaged city dwellers who choose to live alone to avoid friends and family who have previously contributed to their problems and may still threaten to put them in harm’s way. Within a few miles of Amy’s spacious apartment, there are thousands of solitary men clustered in New York City’s remaining stock of single-room occupancy dwellings and studios. These men are struggling to shake off a heavy load of burdens: substance abuse, a criminal record, poverty, unemployment, and disease are common, and often overlapping.
The ranks of men in this situation have grown steadily since the 1970s, due not only to the collapse of the industrial labor market and the fact that employers in the service sector are reluctant to hire them, but also to the rise of women in the paid workforce, the vast expansion of the penal system, and the retrenchment of social services for the poor.4 In 2006 the New York Times reported, “About 18 percent of men ages forty to forty-four with less than four years of college have never married, according to census estimates. That is up from about 6 percent a quarter century ago. Among similar men ages thirty-five to thirty-nine, the portion jumped to 22 percent from 8 percent in that time.” The economic crisis of the late 2000s made things even worse, and in 2010, as a Pew Research Center study of the “New Economics of Marriage” showed, single men without a college degree had even less income and fewer prospects than they did in 1970—making them more “unmarriageable” than they were then.5
Many of these men see living alone as a necessary evil, since it gives them the time and space to regain their footing, but it deprives them of much needed care and social support. Greg, who’s unemployed, is in his early fifties and suffers from severe heart disease. During the past ten years he’s lived alone, mostly in shelters and SROs around Manhattan. When he recounts his life story, it’s clear that, for men in his situation, close ties with friends and family members can be helpful or harmful, depending on the circumstance.6 Communities, in this way, are a lot like marriages: When they’re good, they’re very good, but when they’re bad, they’re dangerous.
Not long ago Greg was hospitalized after a heart attack, and he worries about a recurrence. “I think about that sometimes, me being in a house alone. It could be a disadvantage. It might be good if I have somebody around me.” But who? Greg used to be a drug addict, and for roughly twenty years he lived between jail cells, abandoned buildings, and the streets. “I went in and out of jail, in and out of jail, in and out of jail, until around ’97 or ’98. I hadn’t had a job in over twenty years because I stayed on drugs a long time.” Greg had two children with a common-law wife. He says the state wouldn’t let them stay together because they couldn’t afford an apartment together, and he’s never spent a night with the kids. Their mother died recently, and these days he rarely s
ees his other family members. Eventually, Greg would like to spend more time with his children, and maybe with other family, too. Although he has been off drugs for nearly a decade, he knows that day is a long time off.
For now, Greg has devised an alternative strategy for soliciting care and attention after a heart attack. “No matter where I’m at, nobody with me or nothing like that, if it did come down on me, I make sure I get out in the hallway. I’ll get to my door real quick. You don’t last that long after it hits you because it cuts your wind. You can’t breathe, so you’re gonna pass out. If I got in the hallway and fell, somebody coming down the next floor probably see me. It might take a little time, though—might be too late ’cause wasn’t nobody on my floor. But if I got out in the hallway somewhere down the line, somebody coming in gonna see me.”
The shelters and SROs where Greg has lived pack a lot of people into small spaces, and there’s considerable human traffic in the common areas and hallways. Greg could try to develop some relationships in the buildings and use them for social support, but he’s wary of his coresidents. He’s even more cautious around his older friends: “I had a lot of headaches in my days by knowing people, the type of friends that I’ve had. You know, it’s like, ‘Oh man, let me have this, let me have that.’ And, you know, when you got a friend, if he got a problem, you got a problem, because they gonna bring it to you. Back in those years, we just thick and thin, everything was us together. We do our drugs together, go to homes, abandoned buildings together.”
Occasionally Greg gets lonely and longs for good company, but he fears that spending time with the people in his network will lead him down the wrong path. “Most of those guys, I hardly see them anymore. I kind of avoid things like that nowadays. I guess it’s kind of on me. I don’t be trying to make friends to talk to. ‘Hi’ and ‘Bye.’ ‘How you doing?’ Almost every day I go outside, but, you know, most of the time I just go to the park, read my book. I’m not real conversational here lately. I’ve been so much into myself.”
Tim, who’s in his fifties, has also decided that he’s better off keeping to himself in a small room rather than trying to live with a partner or roommates. “Whenever I lived with roommates, well, those people were always on drugs and stuff. I like being alone right now because I can’t blame anybody except myself if I fuck up. It’s like, I’m not antisocial, but I have a hard enough time with my own problems without other people’s problems.”
Recently, Tim moved into an SRO with a staff offering social services and decent security, because he wanted a place that felt safer and more anonymous than his previous building. “There’s other hotels like this, with people doing drugs and stuff, saying, ‘Hey, you wanna get high or anything?’ But here, there’s no pressure to do anything. You can just go to your room every day, you know, come home and close your door and nobody’s here to bother you. There’s nobody knocking at your door.”
POOR MEN WHO LIVE IN SROs and low-cost efficiency apartments build interpersonal barriers to defend themselves from the potentially corrupting social influence of their peers. Others, particularly those who have fallen down the class ladder and hope to climb up again, distance themselves from coresidents to evade the stigma of poverty and failure. Some of them avoid family, former partners, and old friends because they’re ashamed of their status, or because they believe they’ve been abandoned by those who are fed up with or ashamed of them.
Although poor men who live alone often express an abstract interest in finding a partner or reconnecting with another community, in practice the obstacles to doing either are so daunting that maintaining independence takes precedence. The result is a vicious circle: Self-imposed social isolation removes impoverished singles from job networks and potential sources of support, increases stress, and compromises health, placing them at risk for even greater detachment and suffering.
A striking number of the SRO and shelter residents we interviewed reported that they had kept to themselves because they were overwhelmed by the illnesses and deaths among people close to them. For men who, like Greg, come from poor or unhealthy environments, staying close to old friends and family members carries a risk of being exposed to trauma as well as trouble. Rick, who’s fifty and gay, was at a loss when asked about his close relationships: “Everybody’s dead. Everybody. It was like a swipe. I lost, like, eight to nine people within a period of, like, five or six years. Along with family members. I was close to my older brother, very close. And he was talking to me about my friend [Rick’s recently deceased partner] and helping me and everything. And last October, I was getting ready to meet him for lunch and I was leaving here and the phone rang and he was getting dressed to meet me and died, so . . . So, you see. There was just a pattern to everything.”
Rick’s response was to hunker down in his room. He keeps his television on around the clock, using it as a diversion when he’s awake and as background noise when he sleeps, turning it off only when he leaves the room. It’s not an exciting life, he says, but it protects him from future pain. “Right now I have absolutely no friends. And I guess it’s my choice to be just on my own. I used to be a very outgoing person, and now I’m not really a people person. I just come in my place, go in and out—that’s it.”
Miguel has recently been through a similarly brutal stretch, and he’s responded by retreating into solitude. He says that his goal is to achieve greater autonomy, so he won’t need to depend on others who, he fears, will disappoint him or disappear: “I can’t really say right now that I have a close friend, or that I’m even looking to get a close friend. This particular experience that I’m involved with now is giving me a chance to grow more as a man, to allow the man in me to mature more, in the total sense, and to become self-sufficient and of self-worth in my own right. What I need to do is to learn to become my own close friend and best friend, and to love myself, and feel self-worth and validation.”
WHILE SOME MEN IN THE SROs stay close to their buildings to avoid friends and family, others worry more about the company inside. Nick, who’s in his mid-thirties, reports that “most of my old friends are either dead or incarcerated.” He contracted HIV from a blood transfusion when he was a teenager, spent years fighting a drug addiction, got married, had a child, got a GED, then a divorce, and soon after his life fell apart. He’s been unemployed for six years, living off disability insurance and spending most of his nights in SROs that were “heavily drug-infested, mouse-ridden, cockroach-ridden” places where there were “blatant sales, prostitution, and junkies from every drug that you could think of, dopeheads to crackheads to alcoholics.” Nick says that “when you’ve lived in a place where everything is rotten, you seem to be rotten.” He had friends in the building, and he was reluctant to leave them because he liked to party. But when things got bad, he’d try to avoid them. “I became very, very, very reclusive. If I didn’t have to go out, I didn’t go out.” His friends didn’t appreciate this treatment, however, and Nick’s life got even rougher. “You got people knocking on your door at three in the morning, you know. It was nuts. I was getting into fights, verbally and physically.” Nick became desperate to distance himself from his neighbors and started looking for a safer, cleaner place to live. Eventually he found one, and when he moved he brought along an important lesson: Keep to yourself.
His new SRO has a comfortable common area, and residents gather there daily to pass the time, talking, reading the paper, and watching TV. Occasionally the staff offers a meal, or a movie, or classes for the residents. Nick avoids all of this. “I don’t partake in the social life of this building. I kind of stick to myself. I really don’t like people to know my business.” He’s cautious about the men in his situation, because they remind him of the man he used to be, as well as the people he’s been trying to avoid. “Everybody wants to know something, and once they do they think they’ve got your number,” he says. They start issuing invitations. They harass you. They pull you down. Like Rick and severa
l other SRO residents, Nick spends a great deal of time locked in his room with the television on. “The less I have to interact, the better it is for me,” Nick says. “I don’t even know one person’s name in this whole building.”
Nick hopes that the new, nicer SRO will help him with the transition out of poverty, joblessness, and addiction. He wants his stay to be temporary, though he admits that, if he comes to like it there, it might beat his other options. His ex-wife is remarried and he doesn’t see her anymore. But he has family in Brooklyn, and he’d like to spend more time with his children. Nick also misses the warmth of a companion sleeping beside him, and he could imagine living with a partner after he cleans up. “For right now,” he says, “I’m not going nowhere. Hopefully, once I can start to get back on my feet a little better—you know, as my health continues, hopefully I’ll go back to work. And possibly one day, you know, move out of here, or, you know, stay here. For now, I’m here. I’m in a good place, so I’m not gonna screw that up.”
For some men in the building, however, it’s hard to appreciate being in a good place when other residents are in such noticeably bad shape. Downwardly mobile residents, men who once had stable jobs and a decent income, are often embarrassed to have landed in the stigmatized world of SROs, and they distance themselves from their neighbors as a way of maintaining self-esteem. John, for instance, wound up in his SRO because he couldn’t find any other housing that he could afford with his disability check. He’s been in his current place for four years, during which he’s made only one friend. “The majority of people I try to keep away from,” he says. The substance abusers and mentally ill residents who congregate in public spaces “give you a clue there’s something wrong here, know what I mean? I’m not gonna socialize with these people.”
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