Power of One
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Our culture sends very mixed messages about solitude, being single, and marriage.
We believe strongly that each person must be able to stand alone. In my packet of suggested wedding readings I have the famous passage from Rilke’s letters, in which he says, “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” A selection from Kahlil Gibran counseling partners to allow spaces in their togetherness is another popular choice. So is a blessing that reminds the couple how marriage should not so much fill their emptiness as help them to know their fullness. Too much dependence on one another, even a marriage partner—especially a marriage partner—is seen as codependence: a disorder, a failure to be as independent as each soul ought to be.
Rilke himself valued solitude so haighly that after his wedding he frequently retreated for long periods of almost monastic seclusion, and he and his wife essentially lived as a separated couple for most of the rest of their lives. “I belong to solitude,” he wrote. “I must not need anyone…all my strength is born from this detachment.” Solitude offers an opportunity to practice a kind of integrity of self.
Most of us, however, aren’t so delighted when singleness offers us this golden gift. And no wonder. It isn’t easy to be single in this culture—especially around Valentine’s Day—but all around the year as well. There are so many social pressures to do things as a couple; there are still people who look askance at anyone who dines alone or goes to the movies alone. You’re likely to get a look of pity, or, if you profess a desire to do these things alone, disbelief. Our children hear a lot of stories teaching that marriage is the key to happiness, and very few that suggest that someone can be just as happy single. We dismiss the companionship of friends, parents, children and housemates as a poor substitute.
As for actually living alone? Surely no one would prefer that for more than a short time!
When I knew that I would be addressing this subject, I wrote to a friend in her late thirties who has been single for a long time, and unhappily so. She has often spoken about how things are frequently organized for couples; how, when people get married, they start to socialize with other married couples instead of with the singles who have been their friends. So I asked her whether she had any resources to suggest, perhaps a book that summed up her thoughts on being single in this culture. What she offered instead was this thought: “Maybe you should ask somebody who is happy being single.”
That really gave me pause. I wondered whether I knew anyone who was single and wanted to be single. Many single people I know are happier than people in unhappy marriages, certainly, and seem as happy as those in happy marriages. And yet most of them, I reflected, seem to want a partner. Or was this just my own assumption, my successful brainwashing by the pro-marriage propaganda that we see all around us?
Being single has its advantages. Even the long-and happily-partnered may sometimes wish for the simplicity of making a major life decision without consulting anyone else’s needs, or for the freedom of staying out late without calling home, or choosing activities without negotiation and compromise over the slightest thing like what movie you’re going to see. To have a shared life is, in the words of the writer Lynn Darling, “to be blended, smoothed, to pare down the sharp ends of [one’s] personality to fit into the too-small allowances made for them.” It isn’t easy, and it is at odds with the fundamentally individualistic ethos urged on us by this culture.
But to be voluntarily single, as my friend suggested some might be? To happily embrace that state as the best one for you? We seldom see this phenomenon, or appreciate it when we do. We are more likely to call it sour grapes, or, if we grudgingly acknowledge that the person is genuinely content, we still imagine that, really, the poor, lonely single will gratefully abandon that state of being when the right person comes along. We shake our heads at priests and monastics who chose a life without partners, and are suspicious of those who claim to be happy being single.
You can tell a lot about a culture by what it deems worthy of a ritual. We have rituals for engagement, marriage, and childbearing, and for the loss of a partner through death, but when it comes to divorce, that conscious choice to become single, we have to invent them. As for the choice by a single person to remain single, we have no rituals to mark that momentous decision at all. It is as if we don’t recognize that it can be a conscious and willing choice—perhaps not a permanent one, but still a deliberate choice.
We do have subtle ways of signifying an intent to remain single, if not forever, then for the foreseeable future. Buying a house by oneself, or, especially, choosing to raise a child alone are ways of saying, “I am not going to suspend my life until that day when I may have a partner.” I have heard of a couple who financially helped each of their married daughters set up a home and, when another daughter told them she did not anticipate ever marrying, they gave her the same gift of money and household goods that they would have if she had had a wedding. It was a lovely way to demonstrate that they respected her choice. But the truth is, we generally regard singlehood as a way of life to be pitied and not accepted. If this weren’t the case, we would have more established ways to recognize and honor it.
And yet there is something amply available to singles that, for most of us, is vitally important to a rich inner life; something that is correspondingly rare inside partnered life—solitude. Every religious tradition I know puts a premium on solitude. Every tradition, whether it encourages marriage for all or has a celibate class such as nuns or priests, advocates some kind of serious time alone—for example, in meditation or prayer. Time alone, time in retreat, is important on a regular basis.
Even when one is in a temple full of people chanting or singing hymns in harmony, meditation and prayer are oddly solitary activities. The Jewish service, which consists largely of group chants, has a silent prayer at its center, when each person stands and, as it were, faces God all alone, as, in that tradition, every soul must one day face God after death. Even in the midst of community we are each in some sense alone, and that aloneness deserves a spot at the center of worship.
Perhaps it was the same conviction that inspired the Muslim mystic Hafiz to write a paean to loneliness:
Don’t surrender your loneliness So quickly. Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you As few human Or even divine ingredients can.
The great non-God-centered religion, Buddhism, values solitude perhaps most of all. And so the Buddha, in his last words to his disciples, urgedthem, “Be a light unto yourselves….Look not for refuge to anyone besides yourselves.”
In our own tradition, where we affirm that spiritual truth is to be found in human experience, being alone is as essential to spirituality as being in community. If we surround ourselves always with faces and voices, we remain in hiding from ourselves, and it is in encounter with ourselves that so much insight comes. We need to meditate, read, think, walk the labyrinth, sit in the silent hall before anyone else comes in—find solitude to balance interaction.
In her song “Solitude Standing,” Suzanne Vega imagines Solitude as a person.
Solitude stands in the doorway I’m struck once again by her black silhouette By her long cool stare and her silence I suddenly remember each time we’ve met And she turns to me with her hand extended Her palm is split with a flower with a flame
Solitude’s gift: a flower and a flame. Solitude can burn and it can offer beauty. In fact, it often does both at once. I do not mean to be glib about being alone, which can be as excruciating. Yet if we always flee from its pain, if we pick up the phone too quickly, defer our loneliness with shallow and unsatisfying relationships, we deny ourselves solitude’s treasures.
To live alone is not necessarily to face down loneliness, but it can be an opportunity to learn to face it down—or better, to learn to go with its ebbs and flows and not fear it. Those who spend all of their adulthood in one long-term partnership or a series in quick succession, never having to spend much time in the deep end, may not go beyond treading water or floating on our backs, waiting to be saved. It takes some sustained solitude for most of us, in Rilke’s words, to “ripen, to become something in [ourselves], to become world, to become world in [ourselves].” Singleness provides a milieu for this practice, just as monastic life provides solitude in which the soul may encounter the divine.
Those of us who are single may need to fight off the demon loneliness in order to ripen. Those of us who are partnered may need to be sure that we have not been picked too soon, that we don’t breathe a sigh of relief at not having to be alone with ourselves, and end up sitting unripened on the comfortable shelf. Just as it is possible to be lonely within marriage, it is possible to find a wholesome space of solitude within that cocoon.
Which brings us back to Rilke. He writes of love, and it is true that it is difficult to love well when one lives in constant fear of abandonment, when one’s love becomes a life preserver to which one must cling or drown. Desperation is not a strong foundation for any relationship. But it is not only love that requires an apprenticeship of solitude. Responsibility, self knowledge, joy, openness to the new, courage to face the unknown—all the various and beautiful forms of wisdom and happiness are harvests that come most bountifully to those who have learned to be alone with themselves.
We may go eagerly looking for solitude, or she may come to our doorway unbidden and unwanted. But all of us, whether we are happily or unhappily partnered, willingly or unwillingly single, have much to learn from welcoming solitude into our lives.
- Grief and Gravity - October 1, 2020
- On the Threshold - January 1, 2020
- Living by Love - February 1, 2015
