Living Alone

Living ALone

I suppose this is a topic which I can speak to with authority. Hardly. There are many reasons why people live alone, as many as why people live with others. This being an obvious point, it still set me back recently when I read where more than 50% of American adults are now single. Wow, that is a real change from when I was young. I know that for sure. What is going on here? What does this all mean for our society? What is causing all this? 

I accidently attended a lecture recently which I knew was about modern American Society. What I didn't realize was that the lecture was specifically about Living Alone. It was by a Professor of Sociology, Eric Klinenberg. It was an interesting lecture, funny, intriguing, and filled with information about these people who live alone. I liked the lecture enough to buy his book----Going Solo. Professor Klinenberg does not live alone, he is married with 2 kids. 

Anyway, perhaps the following data and info is of general interest to most of us. After all, this is a huge change taking place before our eyes. In 1950 only 22 percent of American adults were single. Today, roughly 50% of American adults are single and 31 million of them live alone. That is 1 out of every 7 American adults living alone. I can understand myself living alone. When I was like 12 years old my goal in life was to be a hermit. When my parents had unexpected company I escaped through my bedroom window to the neighbors. If the company was not unexpected I had already escaped elsewhere. So much for my formative years. 

In my productive years, if invited to social events outside of work, regardless if I had agreed to attend, when the time came, I rarely did. That is not to say I did not have limited close friends, co-inhabited with others for periods of time---that sort of thing. When I move I always just start all over, never attempt to maintain friendships from the past with few exceptions. Once separated by distance there is nothing more in common and nothing is the same. So, I just skip the process of slow disentanglement and abruptly disappear. I never go to reunions of any sort or at least rarely. I have 16 cousins and we were all quite interactive when young but I have only been to one reunion with them, maybe 10 years ago. It was interesting, but once is enough. I coached crosscountry and track in high school just for two years back in the 60's and grudgingly went to a reunion with former team members i coached maybe 8 years ago. I was in my mid twenties back then and they were teenagers. At the reunion I was years retired and they were near retirement. Again once is enough for that sort of thing. The past can never be recreated. 

Be all that as it may, these 31 million people who live alone are clearly not mirror images of me. So what is going on? The author calls people who are not married singletons. What we know is this: In the last 50 years the average age of marrying has risen by five years. So there are these early singletons. Then comes marriage and half the time marriage doesn't last so again comes more singletons. People who divorce often stay single for years or decades or just stay single. The older the age of divorce the more likely they are to become permanent singletons. 

People who live alone make up 28% of American households. In 1950, there were 500,000 young people between the ages of 18 and 34 living alone. Today there are 5 million. 17 million women live alone today and 14 million men. The elderly account for 10 million of the total. 15 million are between the ages of 35 and 64. 

So why is being married becoming such a difficult lifestyle? The author points to several factors. The acquired more equal rights for women in the workplace and elsewhere is one. In 1950 there were two males for every female in college. Today, there are more females enrolled in college than males. Since 1950 the proportion of women in the workplace jumped from 33% to 60% today. Put simply, women have financial options they did not have before. Many are not economically trapped in a marriage situation. Add to this the communications revolution. In the past, if you were single and lived alone, you were kind of isolated socially. Today, with cell phones, face book, chat rooms, tweeting, twittering, etc. people can find various kinds of social interactions on all these devices. I once passed a yd were some sort of backyard social was going on. Maybe twenty relatively young persons together in a back yard. What was noteworthy (to me) was that all but one were on their cell phone chatting away with someone not at the gathering. I have seen couples at a restaurant and during the entire meal one of them chatted with someone on their cell phone. I think their partner must have felt rather alone even though they weren't. 

Now add this to the situation: many people today live alone because they can afford to. It is probably no coincidence that the greatest percentage of people living alone are in more affluent countries. And among the affluent countries, the highest percentage of people living alone are in the more socialistic countries in which basic human needs are met collectively through taxation. In other words, people figure their education is guaranteed, their health care is guaranteed, housing is guaranteed, jobs sometimes are, so the person feels secure going it alone. In poor countries, the percentage of people living alone is very small. 

Klinenberg points out that living alone and feeling alone are not the same. The goal of most people is to not feel alone. Those in a bad marriage often say there is nothing lonlier than living with the wrong person. The same goes for some college roommate pairings. Interestingly, College dorms today find single occupany dorm rooms in high demand. By the time a student gets all their gadgets hooked up there is no room nor need for any roommate for social communication. 

More young people today remain skeptical that any intimate relationship can last a lifetime. Change is always the operative word in evolutionary time. And that includes all of us. We are not the same person at one age as we were at another. Thus, in any relationship the danger is that the two partners will change in ways which create disconnection. The belief that what God puts together let no man put asunder is a horrible accusation of the ineptitude of God. Clearly these match-ups are not made in Heaven.  

The common perception today is that more and more young people are forced economically to return home and live with their parents. The number of young people age 25 to 34 living with their parents has gone since 1960 from 11 percent to 14 percent. Not a huge change. 

Some young people see living alone as a means to enjoy sexual freedom, to avoid difficult roommates,  to enable them to socialize when they want, how they want, to focus more on their careers, etc. Of course there are also those who live alone precisely because of their own social ineptitude, physical unattractiveness, and all sorts of personality reasons.

Not surprisingly, singletonians tend to congregate in urban cities. This is where  large diverse social opportunities are available to meet a wide range of cultural and unique lifestyles----and to do it in a social environment tolerant of such diversity. 

Another factor encouraging living alone is probably a huge change in how many children now have their own room----their own personal space. Not too many decades ago children shared rooms with their siblings. In this sense, by the time modern children reach adulthood, they are already used to living alone with their own personal array of communication gadgets, including their own TV. It is probably not too great an exaggeration to say that a lot of people not living 'alone', but living with others, are substantially living alone, that interaction with others in the same house is minimal. Even at meals, if they all eat together, there may be considerable gadgets at hand to communicate with others elsewhere.  Of course a parent could say "No one can use cell phones, video games, cell texting, etc. while at the dinner table BUT this often just creates an environment where people glare in silence and rush through their meal "Can I go now?"

The current economic times do not encourage early marriage. For many career conscious young people the 20's is precisely the time not to get married.  And many employers enjoy the luxury of demanding overtime work or their employees run the risk of losing their job. Gone are the days when job security reigned and salary promotions were expected till retirement. The bottom line looms large for many employees and that means letting go of older competent employees and replacing them with competent younger ones at a much lower salary. Thus, for a generation constantly looking over their shoulder, marriage can be economically risky for many young people.  They simply do not know what tomorrow brings. 

Of course single people tend to go more often to bars, nightclubs, eat out, take classes, attend public events, go shopping, etc. than their married counterparts. Some employers favor single people. That is to say, it is understood that married employees have to go home by a certain hour, that they can't work on weekends, etc. The notion of a huge herd of singletonians out there bed hopping several times a week or dating a small army of potential partners is way overblown. Data shows that 49% of singletonians have had no more than one date in the previous three months. 

What effect does all this easy access to sex on the internet in all sorts of forms and venues have on individual sex lives, including underage kids? Klinenberg didn't go into this and I am not sure the answers are out there yet. When I was a young kid it was hard work to get access to any nude pictures and any sex videos were grainy with masked people etc. No one in my classes were sending nude pictures of themselves to other classmates, etc. After viewing endless sexy bodies on the internet just how sexually attractive can most people hope to be really? And what are normal sexual acts anymore? Any kind of fetish will generate thousands of hits on google and you can chat with anyone into anything. 50 years ago such imaginative choices would be non existent. Decades ago. for many young people, if they wanted sex on any kind of regular basis they had to get married. I suspect, despite the internet, most sex acts today by most people, are quite vanilla. Feel free to contradict me here with personal testimonials. 

So who gets the most sex? Married couples or singletonians? Naturally there can be no generalization here. But here is the generalization:  54% of married people have intercourse once a week or more compared to 9% of singletonians. Some singletonians counter that they would rather have less sex with more different people than more sex with the same person. The more we know about sex the more likely we are to feel it is proof God has a sense of humor. 

Despite so many people living alone some have stated we are really viewing the end of solitude. People like myself who genuinely enjoy solitude are a vanishing breed. I am never less alone than when alone in the quietude of nature or even the bustling streets of a city. I don't even have a cell phone except one for emergency---no one has the number and it is never on anyway. I don't spend time in chat rooms, have face book, tweet, etc. Ok, I do write long musings about most anything, and do travel some distance once a week to exercise and amuse Riva the horse. Retirement, good health admitted, is a great deal. I do what I want, when I want, for as long as I want, if I want. I have no expensive hobbies, no interest in fancy cars or fancy anything, am the recipient of many kindnesses from all sorts of people,and get the most pleasure from a charitable Fund I established called FANAFI (Find A Need and Fill It). I stole that name from a high school teacher who lectured our class on it all the time. It just stuck with me all these years. Cooking, reading, writing, 5 mile walks, museums, netflix, etc. are enough to amuse me. Enough is enough---enough is as good as a feast.  No one can give us contentment, it has to come from within.

The classic example of where generalities and stats fail us in how this topic of living alone affects the blk population of our country. Rights can be granted and laws passed, but past circumstances and practices do not disappear that quickly. Disproportionate to their population numbers, too many young blk spend their formative years in poor schools, difficult home environments, in areas ravaged by decades of the War on Drugs, and all the disadvantages of economic poverty.

The world viewed through the eyes of those living in such environments is a different world than viewed through more affluent environments. These young people are more likely to see the world as everyone for themselves and their demeanor more like one of 'don't mess with me'. This demeanor and dress may well succeed, but this aura of fear in others to mess with them deprives such young terrors of jobs, kindnesses from others, opportunities of all sorts, and not the least of these is attracting a suitable mate. As a consequence, black Americans who have never married and live alone are the fastest growing segment of the blk middle class. In other words, the price for many blks who achieve economic affluence is limited access to potential mates at the same level of affluence. For some, they have had enough stresses getting to their economic level so they shun situations where they might have to deal with it in someone else. Their life has improved and they are not about to risk sliding backwards. To what extent this is true, and the author did not discuss this, is debatable. I am not the one to provide any definitive answers---I am sure there are multiple factors in play here. The stats are true, but the cause and answers are a different ball game. Statistically, blk women are twice as likely as white women ti never have married by age 45 and twice as likely to be divorced, widowed, or separated. But we need be careful here in interpreting this. The percentage of our population living as singletons is rising sharply for all groups, so in this sense black women are just leading the way. Unless this whole trend represents a tragedy, which is clearly debatable---and at least not yet knowable--then one can't logically say it is good for some and not for others, or bad for some and not for others. 

Singletonians are responsible for more than 35% of total consumer spending. In 1950, only one in ten Americans over 65 lived alone, whereas today about 1 in 3 do. Until 1930 there was not a single European country in which 10 percent of the population reached the age of 65. If anyone thinks the cost of medicare and social security can be contained with such a vast increase in the percentage of  people over 65, they must be mentally retarded or incapable of simple math. No one wants to pay for it. Elections are more about putting together a coalition of groups who comprise a majority so the majority can then make the minority pay for the increased costs. I have yet to hear any Presidential candidate campaign on everyone paying their share according to the size of their piece of the pie. Obama hints at it, but to hold a majority coalition he fudges here and there. In surveys, those elderly who lived alone gave a somewhat higher satisfaction rating then those living with others. And those living alone do not suffer more mental or physical illnesses on the average. However, those who have strong social ties outside family have fewer health risks as do those elderly who have pets. Elderly women who live alone have fewer mental problems and diminished vitality than their married counterparts. Older people who use the internet experience 20% less likelihood of depression. 

Okay, that's all she wrote, or actually all Klinenberg wrote. I found most of it quite interesting and thought provoking, and if you got to this point, I figure so did you.Most kids in an affluent society get their own personal space early on, they learn at an early age to communicate with others via gadgets, they enter the job market under stressful circumstances, sharing space with someone else on any permanent basis is threatening, and increasingly they feel quite normal with living alone and postpone any sexual limitations or career limitations until later. Most singletonians, according to Klinenberg, have no intention of living alone permanently unless they are older and fear being saddled with a mate who might take tremendous personal care with a health problem. 

P.S. One aspect the author did not mention about singletonians is this. Some people live alone because they are physically unattractive, have personality disorders, have mental disorders, are closeted gays, have severe medical problems, live in isolated areas where there are limited potential partners, etc. 

If anyone questions me, the perfect answer might be 'all of the above'. The bottom line is this----none of us will ever get out of 'this' world alive. The fact of having been born does not speak well for our  immortality. We get dealt our cards at birth, we play our cards the best we can, that is the reality, and to the extent we achieve some success, and help level the playing field for those less fortunate with their  given cards, we have done our ethical duty via the Golden Rule and can enjoy  contentment with our lives.  Time stays, WE go.