From Alternet.org

I recently went through a breakup. It was the worst — they always are — but as I wrestled with sadness over the end of the relationship, another perplexing challenge arose: how to be alone.

I’ve been through a million — OK, three — breakups before. I’ve spent plenty of time single in between. I thought I’d be good at this alone thing by now. I’m an only child, for crying out loud. Instead, on the heels of another split, I’m amazed at how difficult just being by myself can be. I have friends – they are wonderful — but I feel a suffocating solitude at the end of the night, in the morning or at any moment of the day that isn’t scheduled with distraction. It wasn’t this way when I was coupled. Just the knowledge that I had “a person” to call my own (even though I know in my bones that you can never truly call another person “your own”) was a comfort; that knowledge itself was a constant companion.

How does one become good at being alone? This question might be uniquely poignant for those of us fresh out of a breakup, or still in our 20s, but it’s a question people confront at all stages of life and for all sorts of reasons, whether it’s a big move to a new city, an unexpected death, a divorce or any countless number of things that life can throw your way. And regardless of your romantic status or friend count, it’s nice to be capable of enjoying a movie or dinner alone. A friend told me a story about an acquaintance who is married with kids: She has a meltdown whenever her family goes out of town; she doesn’t know what to do with herself.

So, I decided to seek out the world’s wisdom on how to be alone. (As I tweeted earlier this week, “One of my favorite things about being a journo? Being able to take my own burning questions to experts under the pretense of public service.”) In terms of romantic aloneness, Anna David seemed like a good first stop: She wrote the memoir “Falling for Me: How I Hung Curtains, Learned to Cook, Traveled to Seville, and Fell in Love,” and understands the ache of singlehood all too well. “I spent so much time where everything was filtered through this lens of ‘but I’m alone.’ And I was haunted by the thought, ‘I’m going to be alone forever,’” she says.

It took a long time to move past that fear. In fact, it took setting out to write a book about bettering herself in order to land a man. “The idea I pitched Harper Collins was very much ‘Let me get totally perfect so that I can find the perfect guy to fall in love with me and the last chapter will be about how in love we are,’” she says, but none of that happened. While the book ultimately delivers a happier message of self-love, she privately felt like a failure for still being single. Shortly thereafter, though, she “bottomed out” in a relationship where she says, “I just got crazy and obsessive and I started to believe … it’s this guy or a lifetime of eating dinner with my cat.”

Either through the writing of the book or that final relationship disaster, she says, “I basically realized that it was the old cliché: that no guy was ever going to make me happy,” she says. “I was buying into this age-old fairy tale that at the end of the movie you end up with a guy.”

In my search for wisdom on spending time alone, regardless of relationship status, I quickly found that very few experts want to talk about being alone; they’d rather talk about how to not be alone. Judy Ford, the author of “Single: The Art of Being Satisfied, Fulfilled and Independent,” is a rare exception to that: “We are born alone and die alone, and deep within our souls we live alone,” she tells me in an email, instantly invoking those universal truths that hurt the most. “No one else ever abides in our skin. If we haven’t yet come to terms with this ultimate truth, we are scared out of our minds to be alone.”

She adds, “The fear of public speaking is a mere tickle in comparison to the seismic ripples of horror that reverberate through the heart when faced with spending the weekend alone,” says Ford. “People are more courageous about going to the dentist than they are about eating in a restaurant alone.” That’s true for young as well as old: Many seniors feel lonely “because they have not developed their inner life,” she says.

Her practical tips for conquering solitude are to get creative (“creativity is the cure of loneliness”), push yourself to “do something you have never done before” (like taking yourself out to dinner), admit your loneliness to others (“you might be surprised that they feel lonely too”), “get cozy with the gaps,” those empty spaces in between plans, and remind yourself, “Loneliness is not going to kill me.” These aren’t easy fixes — and may induce eye-rolls from self-help haters — but they’re crucial to happiness, she argues: “To experience wholeness, first we experience the void.”

Speaking of happiness, Gretchen Rubin wrote the book on it — she’s the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Happiness Project” — and has a slightly different take. “Ancient philosophers and contemporary scientists agree that probably the key to happiness is strong relationships with other people,” she says. “You need to feel like you have intimate long-lasting relationships, you need to feel like you belong, you need to feel like you can get support and give support.”

Her emphasis isn’t on learning to be happy alone, but rather recognizing what level of social interaction makes you happiest — and it’s different for everyone: “Maybe you don’t have a sweetheart, but being around a lot of other people might make you feel happier even if you wish you had that,” she tells me. “I think people sometimes aren’t very aware of how much they need to be around other people.”

As for making the most of whatever degree of aloneness that you have — whether it’s being a bachelor or living in a new town with no friends — she says, “You don’t wait for circumstances to change in order to have the life that you want. If you want to go to France, don’t think, ‘Oh, as soon as I have a boyfriend I’ll go to France’ or ‘As soon as I get married I’ll fix up my apartment.’ Have the life that you want as much as you can now.” That’s instead of putting your life on hold, or living in ignorance of what you do have: “It’s things like electricity, the minute your electricity goes out you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, if only I had electricity I’d be so happy!’ But it’s not like we walk around in an ecstasy every day over electricity.”

As for simple, radical acts of public solitude — like taking yourself out to dinner — Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist and author of “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone,” says a large part of people’s discomfort is the result of social expectation. “There are some [activities] that are socially approved to do alone, like you wouldn’t think twice about going to a coffee shop by yourself, but going to a fancy restaurant or a play feels strange.” That strangeness is typically the result of our knee-jerk assumption that doing things alone equals desperation.

Two years ago, the video “How to Be Alone” starring writer Tanya Davis and her poem about the “freedom” of being by yourself — eating, dancing, reading, hiking — went viral. The video got more than 4.5 million hits: Clearly, her sweet and simple advice (for example, “We could start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library”) resonated with people. As she says in the four-minute clip, “Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.”

It’s odd that being alone requires any instruction. As Ford so exquisitely and painfully put it: We’re born alone, we die alone and “deep within our souls we live alone” — but it’s one of life’s many poetic ironies that we couldn’t be more together in our aloneness.

* Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

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minmagine.com

We were not meant to be solitary creatures.  We have a drive within us to seek out relationships, whether it’s through family, friends, or a romantic partner.  Friends can be so beneficial in fact, that in Glamour magazine’s March issue they reported on a study that had people carry a large load up a hill;  when accompanied with a friend, that load or the climb didn’t appear as heavy or high.  But what do you do when there are no friends to help you carry your load?  Just like in Rachel’s article, givers can sometimes find themselves alone due to constantly being there for others, and not finding anyone in their corners.  Here are seven different ways for you to encourage yourself when the load seems too heavy to burden by yourself.

Joyce Vincent was 41 when she was found dead in her home, but she was 38 when she died. For three years, from 2003-2006, her body lay surrounded by Christmas gifts she was planning to wrap; the television still on.

How does this happen? Especially to a woman who was social, who two-years prior had a high-powered job at Ernst and Young, who had rubbed elbows with celebrities, and who wanted to get married? That’s what Carol Morley set to find out. But her new documentary film, “Dreams of a Life,” is about more than just Joyce Vincent, a young, beautiful London woman whose parents were from the Caribbean and who no one seemed to miss when she was gone. It’s about life, death, and loneliness.

To promote the film, the studio Hide & Seek, created a companion website called Dreams of Your Life to engage visitors to examine their own isolation with questions like, “Could something like that ever happen to me?” “Do you have friends?” “If you died, how long would it take for someone to find you?”

The questions are eerily introspective.“Our aim was to make something that would give people a chance to think about the people in their lives and think about whether or not there were any changes that they wanted to make about their degree of connectedness,” Hide & Seek’s Margaret Robertson said.

As for Joyce Vincent, her memory will live on in Morley’s film which debuted at the BFI London Film Festival in October and was shortlisted for best documentary there. You can also read more about her story here.

The film will be available for general release in March. Watch this clip and tell us what you think? Honestly, the way the trailer stuck with me, I don’t think I’d ever be able to get this movie out of my head.

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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Are you someone who moves from one unhappy relationship to another? Most likely that’s because you got into the relationship for the wrong reasons. Relationships and marriage are admirable goals for anyone to strive towards but there are many reasons why people may decide to engage in relationships for all the wrong reasons. Relationships should bloom from a mutual love and respect between two people and should not be influenced by outside parties, peer pressure or to fill a void in your life.  Before you jump into another relationship, look at these 9 red flags that might help you avoid unhealthy relationships in the future.

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In an effort to get you to “jump back on this Tyrese train and be a ride-or-die forever” (those are really his words), Tyrese has broken down what it means to be an “independent woman” in the eyes of a man as he encourages black women in particular to remain open to black men. Here’s what he had to say in an interview with NecoleBitchie, over the melody to his song “Stay” from his new album “Open Invitation” nonetheless:

I want to say to all the women out there, especially black women in particular, y’all are on this independent kick. “I don’t need no man, I’m independent.” I want y’all to know the difference. There is a very big difference. Independence in the eyes of a man is when we say we want an independent woman; we don’t want a woman that’s [depending on] her [...] nice body to help her get through life. You don’t wanna work, you don’t want to go to college or school, you’re not inspired to do anything on any level to try and help further yourself on any level. You just want to [...] free-load… nobody wants that as a man.

Then some women are so on this independent kick they end up alone. You’re going to independent your way into loneliness. You go off and buy all the little poodles you want. “At least my dog is happy to see me when I get home everyday.” That dog or “rabbit” will never be able to replace what a real man can do for you. So stay independent, get your own, but nobody wants to be alone period. I know it’s a lot of men out here that are playing on both sides of the fence, it’s confusing, and it’s a lot of homosexuality going on out here. I get it, it’s a lot of frustration that women have. [But] there’s a lot of man’s man still left; We’re out here, we’re waiting, we’re wanting, we desire you just like you desire us. Just don’t give up on us… “Stay.” That’s my ‘Open Invitation’. Give [us] a shot at your heart.

I wanted to give Tyrese  a little bit of credit because there are some women who tout their independence to the point that it becomes a huge turnoff, but that whole “homosexuality,” “we desire you just like you desire us” ramble was a major left turn on a road to nowhere.

Aside from the fact that he appears to be slightly affected by a substance of some sort in the video below, this is also just a low-budget effort to once again undo the damage he’s already done as far as his reputation with his black female fan base goes.  If Tyrese wants to convince black women that there are black men out there who still want them, show it in action. This little come hither PSA isn’t cutting it.

Check out the clip below. Will you be accepting this “open invitation”? Or is he insulting black women by saying it’s our fault so many are single?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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