There are evenings when I come home, close the door behind me, and know that for the rest of the day, no one expects anything more of me. No one asks when I'll be home, what's for dinner, or what we're doing this weekend. No one is waiting on the sofa, and if I want to tell someone something, I have to pick up the phone myself.
I probably would have called moments like these loneliness once. Today I often feel them quite differently. I kick off my shoes, put on music, cook something, sit down at the table with a glass, and enjoy that strange, wonderful feeling that this evening belongs entirely to me.
Of course, there are other evenings too. Evenings when I'd love to have someone beside me. When something wonderful has happened and I want to share it right away. When the day was hard. When I'm sitting somewhere, see couples around me, and think for a moment how nice it would be to share that moment with someone.
I think that honesty is part of it. Being happily alone doesn't mean never feeling lonely. It doesn't mean no longer wanting love, or having become so independent that you need no one. It means, rather, no longer seeing your own life as incomplete just because there's no partner in it right now.
And that realization has changed a great deal for me.
When your life suddenly belongs to you again
We women spend an astonishing amount of our lives organizing ourselves around other people. We're daughters, partners, wives, mothers, colleagues. Often we don't even notice how naturally we tuck our own wishes in somewhere between it all.
And then, at some point, a phase can come where much of that falls away or changes. A relationship ends. The children grow up. Or we ourselves change and realize we no longer want to stay in a life that looks complete from the outside but hasn't felt right on the inside for a long time.
Suddenly there is space.
That space can be frightening at first, because we're used to filling it with other people. But at some point I understood that something incredibly precious lies exactly there: I get to find out what I actually want.
Not as a mother. Not as a partner. Not for my family, my employer, or some social idea of how a woman my age should live.
Simply me. Maybe that's one of the greatest freedoms of growing older.
