Reposted from YouTube.
Here where there are so many people, it seems strange that so many of us are afraid to be alone when I think we should sometimes want to be alone so that we can hear their own thoughts and find our own pace. The conversations I have over lunch with my coworkers often drift to fears of being single, of not finding someone as though we really only are halves of people. As much as I enjoy the story of the Androgyne from Plato's Symposium I do not actually believe that I am incomplete as my own entity.
I immensely enjoy that SB and I can sometimes be a homogeneous blob of a couple together but it mostly works because we are so alike and our blobbiness is from the combined similarity and not because one of us is absorbing the other. We also stand alone quite well most of the time. Occasionally he shows me that he does need me and I have become better at needing him without feeling like I have lost something in doing so.
I enjoyed the years that I was single. I think that my ability to be happy alone is one of the traits that draws SB to me. I was not simply content being alone, but truly enjoyed myself. I liked going on walks alone. I enjoyed making my own schedule and doing my own things when I was in my mid twenties. I had spent my early twenties slowly disappearing into a relationship where both of us were too immature to realize the damage we were doing to each other and to ourselves with our insecurities and my mid twenties were a revival of sorts. Then in my late twenties a handsome stranger crept out to have coffee with me and we sat silently on the porch, watching the neighborhood wake up. Then I was no longer alone.
I always find time for solitude; SB does the same. At different parts of a hike we will wander away from each other to make our own explorations. At home SB will occasionally hear me say that I am having "alone time" which means a few hours of wandering about in the streets. He does the same.
If you can't spend time with yourself, then what does that say about yourself?
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