My wife and I can happily spend an entire evening in the same room, each doing our own thing. She’s reading, knitting, or crocheting. I’m probably tinkering with something, researching some obscure Minecraft modpack code on my tablet, or catching up on Mastodon. The cat is supervising, as befits her position as Supreme Leader of the Household.
We’re together without constantly demanding each other’s attention.
Our cat has very clear rules about social interaction.
She wants company.
Until she doesn’t.
She wants affection.
Until she doesn’t.
She wants to sit on your lap.
Until she suddenly remembers she’s an apex predator and bites you.
In many ways, she’s taught me something rather profound about companionship. It’s perfectly possible to enjoy company without needing it every waking moment.
I do, however, usually manage not to sit in people’s laps and bite them.
Growing Older (Or How I Learnt to Stop Socialising and Love Solitude)
From my mid-twenties to my mid-thirties, I lived alone in a flat in Aberdeen. I had an extensive movie collection, back when films came on gloriously space-hungry VHS cassettes instead of DVDs. I had my PC, my World of Warcraft account, and my hamster, Quark.
Also I had a group of ex-university friends who regularly dragged me out to clubs, pubs, Sunday morning greasy fry-ups, and parties.
I went because I thought that was what people were supposed to do.
Don’t get me wrong. I had fun… ish.
I didn’t know I was autistic back then. That particular bombshell hadn’t even been manufactured yet, never mind dropped from an overhead B-52.
But most of the time I was on my own. I’d spend evenings watching films, playing games, or trying to work out where Quark had managed to roll his exercise ball this time.
I was content.
I enjoyed my own company.
Even then, I instinctively understood there was a profound difference between being alone and being lonely.
I’m now in my mid-fifties, and that feeling hasn’t changed.
As I’ve written before in Growing Old without Growing Up, getting older hasn’t made me feel old. If anything, it’s made me more comfortable ignoring society’s expectations.
I genuinely enjoy my own company.
That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy spending time with my wife. Quite the opposite. She’s my companion, my best friend, my soulmate, and the person I most enjoy sharing life with.
But we don’t live in each other’s pockets.
She has her allotment. While I greatly appreciate eating what she grows, that’s her thing. She’ll happily disappear there for hours while I disappear into my home office to write code, build a new Minecraft mod, or update this blog, as I’m doing now.
She’s even been known to disappear to Greece for a fortnight on one of her spiritual retreats while I stay at home, work, look after the house, and consume quantities of junk food that would never pass Wife Quality Assurance.
Two Whole People
I’ve never liked the expression “my other half”.
It suggests we arrive in the world as unfinished jigsaw puzzles, wandering around until someone finally turns up holding the missing piece.
I don’t believe that.
When my wife and I married, we were already two complete human beings, each with our own interests, quirks, ambitions, and ways of spending our time.
We simply chose to walk through life together.
Sometimes our paths overlap completely.
Sometimes they briefly diverge.
Most of the time, they run happily alongside one another.
Healthy relationships aren’t two halves making a whole. They’re two complete people choosing to share their lives. Otherwise we accidentally make relationships responsible for fixing problems they were never designed to solve.
Alone Is Not Lonely
I’m not antisocial, and I certainly haven’t given up on people.
I just don’t need quite so many of them.
I’ve stopped mistaking constant interaction for happiness.
It turns out the old saying “quality over quantity” applies to friendships as much as almost everything else.
Being alone is a description while being lonely is an emotion.
One tells you who’s in the room, the other tells you how you feel about it.
You can feel desperately lonely in the middle of a crowded pub.
You can spend an entire weekend by yourself without feeling lonely for a single moment.
They’re completely different states.
We often assume one causes the other.
It doesn’t.
Why We Fear Solitude
Modern life seems oddly suspicious of solitude.
There’s an unspoken expectation that adulthood should involve an ever-expanding network of friends, colleagues, networking groups, WhatsApp chats, neighbourhood associations, social media platforms, and community events.
As though popularity can somehow be measured by unread notifications.
But relationships aren’t Pokémon.
Collecting more doesn’t necessarily improve your life.
You certainly don’t need to catch them all.
Learning to Enjoy Your Own Company
If you can’t enjoy an afternoon by yourself, adding another person doesn’t magically create contentment.
Sometimes it simply creates another person to disappoint.
There’s a quiet confidence in being able to entertain yourself, pursue hobbies, disappear down strange rabbit holes of curiosity, spend an afternoon wandering around a museum, sit beside a river watching the world go by, or simply think.
Many of us have felt far lonelier surrounded by people we couldn’t truly be ourselves around than we ever have sitting quietly on our own.
Company is wonderful when it’s shared with people who let us be authentic.
Company simply for the sake of avoiding silence can feel surprisingly empty.
I’m not suggesting we all become hermits.
Please don’t finish reading this article, delete all your social media accounts, and move into a cave somewhere in the Highlands.
We’re social creatures, and spending time with people we care about can be deeply rewarding.
Some of my happiest memories involve my wife.
Others involve good friends.
But some involve nobody else at all.
Cycling through the countryside.
Sitting in a park watching deer run across a field.
Heading into London with absolutely no plan beyond wandering wherever curiosity takes me.
Looking at things.
Really looking.
Watching boats drift along the Thames.
Eating an excellent burger.
Drinking great coffee.
Spending far too long in a bookshop.
Simply sitting and watching the world move around me without feeling any obligation to join in.
Bliss.
Maybe the goal isn’t to spend less time with people.
Maybe it’s simply to stop measuring the health of our lives by how many people happen to be in the room.
Being alone isn’t the opposite of belonging.
Sometimes it’s simply the place where you finally belong to yourself.
As I finished writing this, Spotify decided to shuffle on All By Myself by Eric Carmen.
I laughed out loud.
Not because it proved my point, but because somewhere inside the vast collection of algorithms analysing my listening habits, a computer had spectacularly misunderstood me.
Then again, perhaps that’s the whole point.
Being alone and being lonely aren’t the same thing.
Spotify still hasn’t worked that out.
Besides, the song got one thing wrong.
I wasn’t by myself.
My wife was in the next room.
The cat was almost certainly plotting something.
And, perhaps most importantly, I was already exactly where I wanted to be.