Letter to Elizabeth, Number Two

I haven’t had time to blog much lately, but when I read your piece “On Breaking Two Taboos, Sharing, Playing Games, and Not” (elizabethtannen.com/blog), about a month ago I started composing this letter to you in my head. Now it’s in writing.

When I was in my carefree twenties (that’s a laugh, carefree maybe but, as I talked about in Letter Number One, full of existential angst), I remember having a conversation with someone about the “worst part of being alone” and all he could come up with was he didn’t like eating by himself. I went into a long discourse about how being alone denied one intimacy, being able to share your most heartfelt feelings with someone who actually cares to listen and respond to those feelings.

I ended up being intimate with Mark for 34 years, and yes, there was a lot of sharing and caring and listening, along with all the silence (comfortable and uncomfortable) that accompany a long relationship. Now, however, I am at the other end of the book shelf, alone again, without the intimacy I complained about not having in my twenties, but aware now of how complicated intimacy can be. I lost the only person in the world who paid constant attention to me, even if it was often critical attention. There will never again be anyone who knew me as Mark did, and in many ways I won’t know me as well either because I don’t have him around to fill in the gaps: “Who is that person?” or “Did we see that movie?” or “Which kid was it who called big trucks ‘hot zooms’?” Neither is he there for me to share the information only he and I were privy to, which makes it hard to validate a feeling or remembrance.

You don’t particularly appreciate this when you’re living it. Mark and I, as well as many other couples I know, were constantly jockeying for time alone, to have the house to ourselves so we didn’t have to answer to anybody or do anything we didn’t want to do, like cook dinner when you wanted to read your book. We’re not really wishing for singlehood, as we see our single friends wondering how it happened that they live alone, without the intimacy we’re complaining about. We want to have it all, actually: someone around with whom we feel completely comfortable and intimate when we want them around, and when we don’t want them around we want them to go away for awhile but know that they’ll be back.

When we lived in extended families or tribal groups or all those crazy communes in the sixties we had more than one person paying particular attention to us, which created its own problems, of course: lack of privacy, peer pressure, group think. It’s complicated, no matter how you look at it: living alone, living in a nuclear family, living in a group. We fumble along, complaining and compensating, rationalizing and resigning ourselves to circumstances that are both amenable to change and outside our control. I imagine you’ll experience it all over the next 30 years, like I have. All I can say is, buena suerte.


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