Episode 168: Home Alone
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time, three perspectives on living and working alone…
“So much of what I’ve been reading about how to adjust in the pandemic is how to keep up social relationships. And that’s unquestionably important. But I think it’s also important to talk about the value of solitude.”
“The general discourse around it is let’s all band together and support the mothers and fathers in this trying time, and not once has it been mentioned, let’s band together and support the people who are enduring this by themselves.”
“It forces you to some personal growth whether you like it or not. When it’s not about survival you get to know yourself in a different way.”
Coming up on The Broad Experience.
I was a mess in the lead-up to my 40th birthday. My father had died, work was in upheaval…All I could think about was that I had failed as a woman – I didn’t have the things society said I should have by that age – a partner and children. Things I had wanted all my life.
Then as soon I got past the birthday everything was fine. It was like, OK so I didn’t meet expectations – so what? It was like a weight had been lifted from me and I could do anything I wanted. I started this show the next year.
Women who never married used to be called spinsters. And even today remaining single, without children, has some stigma attached. Yes, it’s changing, and yes the single life gets glorified in some pop culture. But traditional attitudes are always ready to pounce.
But if you feel it’s bad now, let me introduce you to Joan DelFattore.
Joan has been happily single for decades. She is a retired professor of English at the University of Delaware. She still teaches from time, and in recent years she’s written a lot about the single life, and particularly about improving access to healthcare for single adults. More about that in a minute.
Joan is 74 now. We got on the phone last week.
AM-T: “And what did it feel like when you were in your twenties, I mean the societal pressure now on women to pair off can be pretty intense. So what was it like then?”
“It was incredible. Let me give you a very specific example. I’d been working fulltime as an adult for 7 years before I had a legal right to a credit card or mortgage or to any other credit…there was no law that prevented banks from giving credit to single women, but they routinely did not. It was not until 1974 that Congress passed a law saying that marital status could not be used as the basis for determining whether someone could get credit. So think about that, how that feels living in a society where you could not get credit in your own name – it was deliberately aimed at making it difficult for women to work on their own, live on their own, have independent lifestyles.”
In 1979 she’s in her early 30s and she lands her first job at the University of Delaware. She should have been able to get a credit card by then, but when she applied for a Visa card, no bank in town would give her one. Until she got to the very last place. That bank manager said there’s no point even putting in your application because they’ll turn it down…
“He gave me a credit card with a limit of $499 because that was the most he could approve on his own signature.”
She says not that long afterwards, credit cards were being issued to pretty much everyone.
Joan says she knew early on that she didn’t want to be half of a couple. She liked her freedom, her career, her friends. But the rest of the world was focused on partnerships.
“At work it was not uncommon for the single faculty to be expected to teach at night because of course the married faculty were expected to be with their spouses…as if there was nothing a single person might want to do at night that would be equally important. And tremendous pressure to marry – people didn’t even say why are you not married, they said things like when are you going to get married?”
She’d laugh it off, try and change the subject. Basically she says she flew under the radar for years. She didn’t want to make a statement about being single. She just was.
But about 10 years ago Joan was diagnosed with stage 4 gall bladder cancer. She told me the survival rate for this type of cancer is around 2%. She found a great surgeon, who operated successfully – but then she needed follow up chemo, her chance of survival was still tiny. Now Joan had done her research. She knew the type and amount of treatment she should get to maximize her chances of survival. But she says the medical oncologist she saw wanted to give her a lesser treatment – because he worried that, being single, she didn’t have the kind of support network she’d need to get through this grueling treatment…
“He was totally hung up on the fact that…he kept asking, you have no husband, you have no sons, you have no daughters? He couldn’t get passed that. And even when I tried to tell him about the friend based support and extended family support I had received after the surgery, that had gotten me through that, so it was not hypothetical, I knew I had a strong support system, I couldn’t finish a sentence, he interrupted me, and was going to give me just this one, mild drug. If I hadn’t known that was not what I was supposed to get, I would have stayed with him, and almost certainly would not have survived.”
She found another oncologist who was willing to give her that higher dose of the drug. And she came through. But that experience changed her.
“So at that point I said ok I can put up with the teaching at night, I can put up with the questions when are you going to get married, but when you try to kill me now I am going to do something about that, that’s a little too much.”
Joan wondered if she was just unlucky, or if other single people had similar experiences. She did a lot of research, and found solid evidence that marital status did predict what kind of cancer care you’d get. The New England Journal of Medicine published her findings.
Earlier this year, she had an article in the Washington Post that looked at single-by-choice people and how they were pretty well prepared to thrive in lockdown. But the one thing they did worry about was being overlooked for Covid treatment because of their lack of a partner. Because of the perception that they just don’t have those close, caring relationships in their life.
Joan says for her and many other single people, nothing could be further from the truth.
She has a group of cousins who are like siblings, she has women friends she met through a travel group – women who say they confide some things to her and other members of their friend group that they wouldn’t to their spouse…
“And so there’s a real intimacy, a closeness that people sometimes think comes only inside marriage, and always inside marriage…but that kind of close relationship can happen between people who, if you want to put it this way, whose souls are on the same wavelength. It doesn’t have to be someone to whom you’re related by blood or by law.”
Joan has been busy throughout the pandemic pursuing her many interests – reading, opera, walking…some of this she does with friends, other times she’s alone or in a group on Zoom. But she has a community around her. She says she relies on them, and they rely on her.
But not everyone feels they have that.
My next guest only wants to use her first name, Susie. She lives on the west coast, works in consulting. She’s in her forties. And unlike Joan, she did not seek out the single life. In fact she desperately wanted a partner and children. And it hurts that she doesn’t have them – especially during Covid.
“Being stuck at home by myself living a life I didn’t want is really challenging. I haven’t touched another person since late February. No hugs, no comforting hand holding, no nothing. It is a very unique experience and it doesn’t get a lot of exposure and I think there are a lot of reasons for that that makes it even harder to endure… It feels like an invisible struggle.”
As the pandemic has ground on we’ve all got used to seeing frequent glimpses into eachother’s home lives via Zoom meetings.
But Susie says for her what’s been tough is seeing her colleagues’ family lives play out in the background of meetings…it exacerbates her feelings of isolation.
“It’s just a much more personal view into the lives of people. However, I’m witnessing their life but the same is not happening in reverse. It’s really challenging because I don’t necessarily want to share this very personal element of my life with my co-workers…and yet I’m being just shoved into their personal life. I’m sure they’re not excited about it either. But the general discourse around it is let’s all band together and support the mothers and fathers in this trying time, and not once has it been mentioned, let’s band together and support the people who are enduring this by themselves.”
She says any outreach her company has done has spoken to couples and families. Like the webinar she was on a few months ago…
“That webinar was focused on dealing with your spouse and dealing with your children and going through home schooling…and it basically provided me nothing, because I don’t have that experience, and when I asked a question, what do you recommend people who are enduring this by themselves? What do you recommend for them? And the presenter just was stunned into silence, had never considered it.”
Susie says it’s that knowledge that what she’s going through isn’t even on people’s radars that so hard to bear.
Her remaining family lives far away. She’s lonely, and has hardly seen anyone in person this whole time because she’s afraid of getting sick. She says she has to think more about this than other people because she doesn’t have anyone to take care of her should that happen.
“If you start to get sick you have to figure things out, you have to prepare for every situation, and it’s really hard and it’s almost like because there’s no one to witness us because we’re by ourselves, the world doesn’t think about it.”
One bright spot in that otherwise underwhelming webinar was that after she asked her question, the facilitator of the meeting spoke up herself. She said she too was single…
“And she was able to provide some empathy…and she basically said yeah, it’s a struggle to see and hear my married and parent friends talking about what this is like for them because that’s not what I’m experiencing and it’s really hard to feel so alone and isolated.”
AM-T: “So that must have felt really validating.”
“Oh, it was amazing, it was incredible, I reached out to her afterward and thanked her so much. Not only did she make me feel that what I’m experiencing isn’t unusual or there’s not something wrong with me. It also helped everyone else on that webinar open their minds a little bit to what others’ experiences are like.”
She says it’s difficult to hear her mom friends bemoan the craziness of their lives juggling work and home schooling – they say things like, ‘you’re so lucky you don’t have to deal with this.’ But because ‘this’ – a family – is exactly what Susie wants and doesn’t have, she hates hearing that. She does not feel lucky. For her, part of success means being half of a couple, being a mother.
She would love her HR department and some of her married friends to think more about people who don’t fit the family mold.
“I don’t need people to stop, I just need people to be more aware. Women have miscarriages, people go through divorces, there are a lot of things people experience and just being aware not everyone is living the same life would be so much more helpful. Inclusion doesn’t stop at the things we currently think of as inclusion, it includes all types of different lifestyles and things people didn’t chose or didn’t choose.”
She says even if companies just used language like ‘families and individuals’ instead of just ‘families’, it would make her and others like her feel better.
“You can make a big difference. You can make someone feel ignored or you can make somebody feel like they’re seen – and right now when there are so many challenges, feeling seen is huge and it’s a gift you can give to so many people who aren’t being seen.”
When I posted about this topic on Facebook the other week the responses were quite varied. One of you said you’d been fine living and working alone during Covid but you had two cats, and you’d chosen to live alone, and that made all the difference. Another almost burned out in the summer in part because of all the household chores that piled up on top of work…someone else was frustrated by the difficulty of dating during this time…
What was clear from the responses is that you need your friends. Seeing other people both safely in person and online and talking on the phone is really important. And still it can be hard.
Magali Rozenfeld is a psychotherapist in New York City. She’s originally from Belgium and she started out as a lawyer before changing careers.
She says the pandemic has brought hardship and misery to a lot of people, for those lucky enough to be healthy and financially stable…there are opportunities to explore, internally.
“There’s something new that’s come our way that we didn’t expect, that we weren’t prepared for, and it’s a change in the system, a change in our lives that we have to adjust to, and so as long as obviously you’re privileged enough to feel safe and have financial security and all these basic needs are met, then what do you do with that shift? It forces you to some personal growth whether you like it or not. When it’s not about survival you get to know yourself in a different way. There is less busyness and overscheduling and intense, doing, doing, doing – life has become, especially if you live alone and you work at home, a lot slower, and a lot of the ways you’ve used in the past perhaps for coping and keeping difficult emotions at bay are gone. So you have to wrestle with all of this, which is not necessarily pleasant but can also reap incredible benefits.”
Magali and Joan Del Fattore are in agreement on this. As a longtime single person Joan is entirely at ease with her own company, and her own psyche, and she is a firm believer in the power of solitude. In the worthwhile-ness of getting to know yourself.
“So much of what I’ve been reading about how to adjust in the pandemic is how to keep up social relationships. And that’s unquestionably important. But I think it’s also important to talk about the value of solitude. The value of having time to just be quiet and think. The value of doing reflective writing. The value of having interests that deeply engage you that are not compatible with someone chattering at you all that time. It’s not either or. In my opinion it’s a balance between that social/psychological, emotional intersection, but also quiet – the kinds of reading and thinking and self-growth that happen when you’re in a room alone with yourself and that’s OK.”
Solitude and loneliness are two different things. I can relate to what Joan says. In my many years of living alone – not exactly by choice – I enjoyed it a lot of the time. I saw friends a lot, I a gave dinner parties, I also cooked for myself, I read, and I was able to develop and launch a big creative project - this one. I had more headspace back then.
Magali Rozenfeld says for some of her single women clients, it’s hard to slow down, even now. We talked about this a couple of shows ago with Laura Vanderkam but living and working alone can mean you never switch off.
“A lot of the work I do right now is teaching people to set boundaries, allowing themselves to set boundaries, if you talk about women who are socialized to please a lot and to bend over backwards and women who don’t have children, that guilt – when they look at women who do have kids and they have to work so much – so there’s this tendency to over-extend yourself and at some point you’re burned out, because actually also the isolation and the work, as we talked about, it takes effort to do these things to keep your mental health at a level that’s acceptable, that’s satisfactory for you, for yourself. All of this combined, setting boundaries and learning how to say no, taking vacations even if you don’t feel safe going anywhere, learning how to listen to yourself and then take action is a big part of it.”
AM-T: “Yeah, and actually saying to yourself, I’m worth it. I think that for a lot of women is a problem. We don’t even let ourselves think that.”
“Yeah, giving yourself permission to say no and to stop and to learn what’s OK and what’s not OK, and when to ring the alarm bell.”
AM-T: “Yeah, it’s funny just talking about this has reminded me of a couple of things in my life. One nice thing I used to do in all my years of living alone, I used to buy flowers for myself at the weekend, they looked pretty and they gave my mood a lift…as did going to all sorts of shops, coffee shops, and having exchanges with the staff…years ago I remember, I shared an office with this guy…we were both about 30…I bought myself some fish from the fish market nearby, and he asked if I was having people over for dinner. I said no, it’s just my food, and he looked at me like I had 3 heads, he was so surprised I was taking the trouble to feed myself real food, and I was surprised by his surprise. He had been in a couple for a very long time… it was really interesting, because when you value yourself you actually feed yourself properly.”
“Yeah, when you value yourself it’s a lot easier to set those boundaries, and to know what’s good for yourself. And when it’s too much. And so obviously working on self-esteem and self worth and all of this is extremely important, like in normal times, pandemic times, maybe what’s good is now there’s more opportunity to see that something is a little bit off, in terms of the work/life balance.”
AM-T: “This idea of who you are when you’re alone, you said this, when our lives are crazy, busy, commuting, we’ve got lots going on, you don’t have time to look more closely at yourself, and now…there is generally more time and people are looking inward more, I’d love to explore that idea with you, of who you are when you’re alone and who you might want to be that’s different from who you are right now.”
“Yeah, that is obviously very different for everybody, but it’s cultivating that opportunity of, with things being taken away, what’s left, and how do you make use of it? With people who are in treatment and in therapy that meant really digging deeper in some of the work, it’s been an opportunity to dig deeper in the work we were doing pre pandemic, there’s less noise, recounting of what has happened in a week, because less has happened in a week and maybe more has happened internally…and really getting to know your feelings, I spend also when we talk about work life balance or fighting isolation, really getting to know what it is that feeds you, you know, developing this relationship with yourself where you get to know what feels good to you in a way you may not have had time to do before, because life is so hectic.
So really finding out the difference between what is self-care and what is numbing, how do you take care of yourself, how do you gauge, oh, I’ve watched 15 hours of Netflix, how do I feel after this, is this feeding me, is this making me feel good, is it – do I feel energized or do I feel depleted? And having this relationship with yourself is beneficial…because that is going to be something that will accompany you throughout your life, really knowing a little bit more about who you are because you have this time to do it.”
Finally, I asked Magali, what if you are someone who’s really struggling with living and working alone right now? What if you weren’t happy being single when Covid hit, and the isolation has just exacerbated that?
“So I think if you walked into this already frustrated and annoyed or angry or sad, sad, lots of feelings where you are in your life that you don’t want to be, but maybe there was still hope, you were dating, it wasn’t working but you were trying to do that, but it’s been taken away – pfft, it’s gone…there’s a loss, so the first step is always to first acknowledge the pain, the loss, the anger – and obviously it’s harder to do it alone than if you’re already in treatment with someone or if you have a group of people, support where you can process…these are difficult feelings…the loss, mourning of that loss, if you are on a time schedule to have kids and like time is ticking, there are a lot of difficult emotion to if you can, honor, because they’re not going to go away unless you move through them.
And so that’s the first step. It’s already a hard step. There’s no way to say, oh, no, its OK – it’s not, it sucks.”
AM-T: “Yeah…and then what would the next step after honoring your feelings be?”
“That’s the tricky part of the feelings, when do you know, when are you done? As we were talking about this growth, this inner work is tuning in with how you are with something. As you develop that skill you know when you’re done with the feeling because it doesn’t bother you any more. We talk a lot about acceptance, people say I just want to be OK with this, well you can’t just be OK with this, you gotta walk through it, so it’s learning how to do that, and then something else opens up. I mean…It’s obviously not a ‘how to’ – there is no how-to for these things, ‘cos they’re tough - that’s a very therapist-y answer.”
It really is.
Thanks to Magali Rozenfeld, to Susie, and to Joan Del Fattore for being my guests on this show.
And a few weeks ago I read a wonderful piece about loneliness in the pandemic that I highly recommend – it is beautifully written. I’m going to link you to it under this episode at TheBroadExperience.com.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time.
It’s the end of a very long year that most of us never could have imagined. Thank you all for continuing to devote a little of your listening time to my independent podcast. I really appreciate my listeners, I love hearing from you - and thank you especially to those of you who support the show each month.
I hope you all get some time to relax in the next few weeks.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening. See you next year.