Soul Kadee

This article by Joie Davidow, describing the advantages of the single life, for women who are blissfully single by choice, literally took the words out of my mouth. She describes the way I think, feel and live my life, almost exactly as if I wrote it myself.

…the advantages of unmarried life seem perfectly obvious to me: I never have to do anything to accommodate the “other.” I cook dinner if and when I feel like eating it, and only if I’m in the mood to cook.

I stretch out all over my queen-sized bed. If I wake up in a good mood, I don’t have to contend with someone who wakes up in a bad one — and vice versa.

It’s nobody’s business but mine if I spend too much money on clothes or makeup. I don’t have to put up with anybody’s boring friends or annoying relatives, or listen to the football game blaring from the den.

If I decide I’d like to vacation in Mexico, I just do it. I could go on for pages without exhausting the list of petty annoyances inherent in a good marriage, without even beginning to address the miseries of a bad one.

Oooh, love all that! But one thing I appreciate most about being single is not having to clean up after another person, and being able to find things exactly where I left them when I get back home.

Whether or not you can be happily single boils down in part to how you regard solitude, notes psychologist and relationship guru, Dr. Michael Broder. Ah, the bliss of solitude! That supremely, self-indulgent state of aloneness.

“People who are not happily single turn solitude into loneliness,” Broder says. That and self-loathing are the main emotional issues in being single if you’re the type who has a hard time living life without a mate.

If you find yourself single and struggling with loneliness, Broder encourages you to learn to enjoy your solitude — it is after all a precious thing — and to reject the clichés about being on your own.

My own battle with loneliness ended the moment I decided to transform my relationship with myself. To be my own best friend, and accept myself as perfect, whole and complete - just the way I am. Perhaps you’re meant to be single, or meet someone later in life. Either way, says Dr. Broder, it’s healthy to have had a lot of alone time in which you’ve developed some independence.

If you do eventually find a mate and give up the single life, the lessons you learn from solitude - to be independent, to enjoy your own company, have your own goals, your own friends, and give your mate his space, will ultimately allow you to bring more to a relationship and make it healthier in the long run.

But, the most beautiful thoughts on a healthy togetherness and marriage were penned by Kahlil Gibran, when he wrote that:

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when white wings of death scatter your days.
Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

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