The Maths of Being Alone

I did the sum properly the other morning, sitting with the kind of coffee you only get right when there’s nobody waiting for the pot. Roughly thirty percent of my life has been lived alone. Early teens, some years in uniform, five years married but functionally solo in the same house, then five or six more once the divorce paperwork caught up with what had already happened years before it was signed.

Thirty percent isn’t a phase. It’s a third of the pie chart. And once I’d worked that out, the more interesting question wasn’t “why so much alone time” but “which of those was actually alone, and which was just unaccompanied.”

Because they’re not the same thing, and nobody tells you that until you’ve lived both.

The early teens version is the one people nod along to easily enough. Adolescence, a bit of distance from the pack, plenty of time in your own head working out who you’re going to be before anyone’s decided to disagree with you about it. Useful, in hindsight. Not painless, but useful. You build a private internal furniture set in those years… opinions, tastes, the odd stubborn conviction… and you don’t get that furniture built any other way. Nobody assembles a personality in a crowded room.

The military years were a different flavour entirely. That’s not really solitude, it’s structured absence. You’re surrounded by people constantly, more people than you’d choose given the option, and yet home… whatever home meant that year… is somewhere else, someone else’s daily life continuing without you in it. It’s a strange kind of alone, the kind with a schedule and a chain of command. You don’t get to be lonely on your own terms. You get to be lonely on the Ministry of Defence’s terms, between 0600 and lights out, and then you get on with the job because the job doesn’t much care how you’re feeling about it.

Then there’s the one that took me longest to name properly, which is the five years inside a second marriage where we still shared a postcode and nothing else. Her bed was upstairs. Mine was the sofa downstairs. We didn’t share breakfast, didn’t share a table, didn’t share much beyond a mortgage (in fact, she didn’t contribute to the mortgage)and a mutual talent for not discussing why the arrangement had become permanent. And I want to be careful not to romanticise it into some dignified, sad-eyed separation, because it wasn’t especially amicable. There’s a version of “living apart together” that’s almost civilised, and this wasn’t that one.

That’s not solitude, technically. There’s another human being in the house, sometimes literally a floor away. But it’s a colder thing than solitude. Actual aloneness has an honesty to it, at least you know where you stand. This was something else, adjacent to loneliness but with sharper edges, the sort of alone that comes with tension built into the walls rather than silence. I’d take a decade of the real thing over another year of that staircase.

I think that’s the bit worth sitting with, if anyone’s still reading a newsletter about a middle-aged man’s living arrangements. We’ve got a cultural shorthand that says loneliness is what happens to people without partners, and companionship is what happens to people with them, and the maths just doesn’t hold. I was colder in that house, married, than I’ve ever been properly on my own. That’s not a swipe dressed up as diplomacy; some marriages end quietly, and some end by degrees over years, with the geography of the house doing the talking, neither of you will. It’s more of a note for the record that proximity isn’t connection, and sharing a roof isn’t the same as sharing a life.

The five or six years afterwards, in my own flat, post-divorce, were the first properly chosen solitude I’d had. Nobody assigned it to me, nobody left me there, I built it on purpose. And it turned out to be the most honest stretch of the whole thirty percent. No performing. No staircase keeping score. Just the actual texture of my own days, which took some getting used to and then, rather to my surprise, became the closest thing to peace I’d managed in years.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to where I’m typing this from now… a cave in rural Spain, off-grid, with a small handful of people around who I’ve chosen and who’ve chosen me back. It’s not solitude any more, not in the strict sense. But it’s built on everything the solitude taught me, which is mainly this: I’d rather be properly alone than badly accompanied, and I’d rather earn company than default into it because the alternative looked lonelier on paper.

I don’t have a tidy lesson to hand you at the end of this one. I’m suspicious of pieces that do, they usually mean the writer stopped thinking a paragraph too early. What I’ve got instead is the thirty percent, properly totted up, and the observation that not all of it hurt the way I expected, and some of the company in between hurt considerably more than any of the solitude did.

Make of that what you will. I’m still working out what I make of it myself.

Until Next Time

Dominus Owen Markham