Loneliness

     There’s been some back-and-forth over this subject recently: men asserting that women have become impossible to please; women countering that men have very little to offer; and so forth. Meanwhile men seek women with perfect bodies who’ll cook, clean, and meet them at the door in lingerie and heels at the end of the workday. The women, of course, seek Adonises of chiseled perfection who earn seven figure incomes and never ask them to wash a dish. It’s all very sad, especially as I’m no longer on the market and neither is the C.S.O.

     Life is like that. The higher your standards for a mate, the fewer the people who’ll meet them. But I’m not here to tell you stuff you already know.

     Loneliness is also prevalent within marriages. Yes, I said prevalent. After they’ve been together for a while, romantic partners don’t provide one another with a lot of companionship. (Never mind sex.) If you’re married or in a long-term / live-together relationship:

• How long has it been since you and the Significant Other had a conversation about anything but the week’s shopping list or Junior’s problems with school?
• What percentage of the day do the two of you spend in the same room?
• When you’re in the same room, what’s your focus? The food? The TV? Making the bed?

     Don’t be alarmed by those questions or by your answers to them. More to the point, don’t think of your situation as a “problem” to be “solved.” Because the terrifying truth of the matter is that after the intoxication of romance begins to diminish, a space will naturally grow between the two of you. It always has. You won’t be exceptions.

     It won’t matter if John finds a Miss America contestant who loves housework and sex, or if Jane finds a Musk / Bezos-level entrepreneur with the physique of Michelangelo’s David (except in flesh rather than marble). Life is composed of many desires, needs, and challenges, especially in these United States. All of them demand attention. Alternately, as put by an old friend: You can’t spend your whole life in bed. Trust me on that; I’ve tried.

     Yes, anything can be overdone; that’s why we have the word obsession. The goal is to find a satisfactory blend. If that involves spending a large fraction of your time alone, what of it? If you genuinely wanted some other proportion of activities that would involve you more often with your S.O., you’d be working on it. Wouldn’t you, you highly adaptable problem-solving demon, you?

     Time was, you would call your partner “needy” if he strove to have more of your attention than you wanted to give him. So the loneliness condition has an inverse: a lack of sufficient privacy, or in the happenin’-right-now argot of the cell phone generation, “no me-time.” And yes, I know of people who complain about exactly that. They talk about their S.O.s as if they were leeches they yearned to detach... when their S.O.s can be induced to be elsewhere, of course.

     This is on my mind for a simple reason: these past two weeks, interleaved with all the usual burdens the Fortress of Crankitude lays on me, I’ve been compelled to adjust to the near-constant presence of the C.S.O. in my office, where I write the crap my Gentle Readers come here to savor. Owing to a siege of intense sciatic pain, she tested every seat in the house and discovered that my office recliner is ideal. Sitting in it relieves her sciatica so completely that she’s fallen in love with it. So she’s camped out in my office for two unending weeks. That might not have been so hard to take, except that she brought the dogs, the cats, her cell phone, her laptop, her Kindle, her water bottle and her Salty Snack Of The Day, and Big Fuzzy, her enormous nappy blanket which I bought for her not forseeing that it would take over her life. It’s made my day’s usual activities much more difficult, and not because she’s always looking over my shoulder.

     I used to sit in that recliner myself, now and then. I’d read, or nap, or jot down notes about some novel I’d probably never write. Ah, those halcyon days of yore. Right up there with the lingerie-and-heels days, I tell you.

     So there can be too much togetherness in a relationship. But you already knew that, didn’t you? Enough of that, for I too am a highly adaptable problem-solving demon. I’ve ordered a duplicate of my recliner for her office. I’m also researching colorless chemical repellants that will keep Joy the Newf and Sophie the German Shepherd / Husky mix on the other side of the house. And can anyone introduce me to music that makes the listener want to be alone? Nothing too coarse or whiny, please. Thanks in advance.