Living alone

The news about the release of Eric Kleinberg’s book «Living Solo» (not lonely, he clarifies, but preferring to live alone) brought me back to many conversations of recent years. This is interesting to me for several reasons: I grew up when living this way was an exception to the rule; I constantly encounter complaints that adult children do not want to start families, and requests for help; I am interested in the life of my young friends.

Judging by many data, living alone is a satellite of the development of modern life. According to the 2002 census, about 1,5 million able-bodied Russians lived without a couple, and during the 2010 census, about a quarter of Russian households consisted of one person. We can stand up for traditional family values, but we cannot ignore the ongoing changes and try to understand them. Some guesses I will risk fluently, as far as the space of the column allows, to share.

Living conditions are becoming more comfortable, requiring less effort, the role of the family as a means of survival is becoming less. The values ​​of continuing family traditions give way to the values ​​of self-development and self-realization in their interaction with the inevitable requirements of social and professional flexibility and mobility in the rapid development of civilization. Individual freedom, which presupposes not just the acceptance of life and moral guidelines from the family, but the development of one’s own position in life and the possibility of its development, requires more and more respect for oneself — today even preschoolers insist on it more than the youth could once afford. Ideas about readiness for marriage have changed. Previously, it was possible to jump into it, like into a river, and swim out either together, or behind a bulkhead in an already full boat of parental families. Today, marriage has ceased to be a condition of sexuality, and a woman who gives birth at the age of 30-35 will not be called, as before, an old-born. It requires personal and social maturity, material readiness, the achievement of which takes more time and effort than before. Yes, and in the requirements for marriage, individual freedom of life-creation (the concept of D.A. Leontiev) occupies an increasing place. This may raise objections, but let’s see if the head-on opposition of such freedom and, say, parenthood makes sense: doesn’t life independence and, as shipbuilders say, stability, together with the experience of the fullness of self-realization, make us happier and therefore better parents than if would we not remove the heel from the «throat of our own song»?

• I’m only good when I’m alone

In today’s life, one can live alone without being lonely: the space of communication has become immeasurably wider than it was even just half a century ago, protecting from loneliness, but eliminating «friction by the sides.» It can attract even the elderly. “We are different,” a 65-year-old friend told me, “I need my cup of coffee and pipe in the morning, a piece of meat for lunch, I like a full house of guests, and I am indifferent to the order in the house, but she does not digest my pipe, an orthodox vegetarian and all day long she is ready to remove dust particles from things, but we love each other — so we began to live in different houses, we go to visit each other on weekends or together with children, we travel together and are completely happy. And for young people, such a separate life helps to check the relationship for truth and strength, it is better to get used to each other.

You’re playing the devil’s advocate, they tell me. I retreat: well, I am silent, do as you know. And I hear the answer — what can we do?! Older people always have the opportunity to try to understand children and not shake the potholes of conflicts around traditional values ​​of the relationship with them. It makes sense for younger people to look and listen into themselves, so as not to push thoughts and feelings together, but to come to meaningful feelings and heartfelt thoughts about how to build their lives now and in the future. It’s not ice cream to eat, but the game is worth the candle. It only remains for me to wish the reader a happy meeting with Eric Kleinberg’s book, so that in silence and without haste to turn it from a book for everyone into a book for oneself.

• Single women scare men?