Ron Collins
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

More forceful, however, is the way it reveals your dependent nature — your ugly addiction to validation and socializing.

This may be the difference between your angle on living alone, and mine.

Over the past nearly twenty years since the end of a long-term marriage, I have lived alone way more than half that time. I have to say, I vastly prefer it.

To put it into your offering of a context above, I suppose I never had any addiction to socializing for its own sake. I always found it shallow and insincere, and consistently attended by unarticulated grudges and remembered slights held between the players that only the rules of the socializing game keep them from ever confronting or dealing with between one another.

Sitting around laughing and joking (almost always at the expense of parties not present) because that’s what one does, among people whom you happen to know in their various combinations can barely stand each other, and then spending three hours back at the house listening to your spouse run through all the ways she found everybody’s conduct of an evening annoying (the evening she’d spent laughing and joking the whole time), gave me after fifteen years of that kind of life as a married man, a whole new dimension for what “hypocrisy” means, when elevated to a group activity.

As for validation, again, the only need I have for anything about me to be validated, is for anyone who cares to, to join in and work together to accomplish something. Mutual undertaking is self-validating, and other than that I could always manage to validate myself, to the extremely limited extent this is even a requirement. I am not, after all, a parking-garage ticket, but a human being, and seldom had much trouble believing that I deserve to exist or have value.

Getting things done together, is what I value in the company of others. And in that light I see the making of a home as the ultimate expression of what one values. In my entire life, there has never been anything I had to endure so grating and demoralizing and exhausting, as to share a home with someone who does not value it or wish to make it a living undertaking. Probably the central let-down of my life (and I certainly realize my own personality has contributed to this) has been to never have found one person who wanted nothing more than to be a true partner, and to use our home as an ongoing and ever-changing expression of why we wanted to be together.

Let’s just say, the opposite has been the case, consistently.

I grew up always working on the homes I lived in. I never lived in any house that I didn’t leave better than I found it, my gift to the next people to make a home in it. I make a living doing improvements on others’ homes and consequently on their lives in them. I love working on my own house, and living with the results even more. It’s what I do. It’s who I am.

And I’d rather do what I do, and be what I am, without the irritating distraction of someone who doesn’t want to be there or pitch in and make making a home a thing we do together, than to live with that kind of atmospheric stress and permanent tension and disappointment in another occupant.

And it turns out, keeping up with laundry, dishes, straightening-up (I never make a bed, what is the point of that?), shopping, etc, was never, ever something I needed anyone else to compel me to do. I do all those things better than any woman (aside from my mom, an artist of a homemaker and my chief inspiration, along with my late sister) I ever lived with did, and take them seriously and enjoy them more than just about anyone I ever knew.

What is more crucial to a life well-lived, than one’s home?

Having someone in it who seems committed to making it something less than the most comfortable and secure and enjoyable space on earth, is just a waste of my time and theirs both.

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s