What’s it like to be not only the head of the household, but all its arms and legs as well? Monica Walker, 34, an equity portfolio manager for a Chicago investment firm, grew up in Texas with four brothers. “All of my life I’ve had to do certain things alone,” she says, “because I was a female in a house of all men.” Her family is Roman Catholic, and when she was younger, she assumed she’d be married with children by the time she was 34. “But that was only based on growing up in an environment where my mother and her friends said these things,” she now believes.
Before moving to Chicago in 1991, Walker turned down a marriage proposal from her boyfriend in Dallas-and there have been others as well. Her mother, she says, still thinks she should be married and worries about her safety. Most of her highschool and college friends are married, and when they discover she lives by herself, says Walker, their first comment is often something like: “Don’t you want to be married?” But after a grueling workweek, she relishes coming home, alone, to her quiet apartment in the city’s Streeterville district. “Sometimes I just want to read,” she says. “I don’t want to get my hair washed. I want to put on a T shirt and wool socks and not have to talk to anybody.”
According to the 1990 census, almost a quarter of the 94 million U.S. households consisted of just one person, up from 17 percent in 1970. And the raw mass of people living in them has more than doubled, soaring from 11 million then to 23 million now. We may think of them as old and lonely, but many, like Walker, are neither. According to a new census report, about a quarter are younger than 35, another quarter are 35 to 55, and 40 percent are 65 and older. In most cases, says Census Bureau demographer Jeanne Woodward, “it’s a hard call to say whether [living alone] is a choice or a consequence.”
As a group, people living alone have taken another dramatic step on the path away from the close-knit, extended families so common just a few decades ago. Why are they doing it? For one thing, they’re benefiting from a decrease in the social stigma against flying solo. In the past, the tongue-clicking assumption was that if a man wasn’t married, he must be gay, and if a woman wasn’t, she must be undesirable. Now, going it alone has become socially acceptable, even chic, in many circles. Americans are surviving longer, too, and staying healthy enough to live independently. We’re marrying later and divorcing more often than we used to. Financial comfort has also contributed to the rise in one-person households. “Living alone is a luxury,” declares Nina Hagiwara, 38, a divorced librarian at San Francisco State University, “but I think once you do it, you can’t go back.”
For David C’DeBaca, 46, living alone is more of a comfortable habit than a luxury-one that’s been with him since he left the military at 24. A builder of expensive custom-made Spanish colonial furniture, he lives in the village of La Cienega, N.M., in a house that he built himself. “I always seem to have known I was going to be single a long time,” he says. “I like being alone, always have.” He dates about twice a month and has come close to marriage in the past, he says, “but I don’t feel I have to try to make it happen.” One reason it may not, he says, is that “women over 30 are set in their ways-like me. I understand.”
He does suffer occasional bouts of severe loneliness. “About twice a year I get really down,” he says. “It lasts a few days but I always seem to find my way clear.” He relies on a network of six especially close friends-both male and female-who, he says, instinctively sense the problem when it comes up. “So I spend some serious visiting time. We go to the movies, people-watch at the mall or go to this theater or that art gallery.”
Acknowledging solo status can be traumatic. When Sandy Goodenough, 43, a health-care administrator, bought her own condo in Cambridge, Mass., 10 years ago, she says, “It was scary. I thought at the time: Does this mean I’m making a statement that I’ll always be alone? When I look back on it, it seems really silly. You have to live your life as it is.”
Living alone can be frightening, says Philadelphia psychologist Michael Broder, who has counseled singles for 20 years. “There’s a fear that something will happen to them and no one will know about it, that they’ll get sick and there will be no one to take care of them,” he says. “There’s a fear that when major life events occur, there will be no one to share that with.” Solos tend to take exceptional security precautions, although they are no more likely to become crime victims than members of larger households.
Robin Leeds, 38, is a political consultant and community organizer who’s concerned about protecting herself. Six years ago she bought her six-room condominium in a Boston brownstone. Back then, she carried a police whistle for personal safety, but now she relies on a network of women friends who check in with each other by phone on a daily basis. If she spends the evening out with a pal, they call each other later to make sure they both got home safely. “When you live alone, you really do have to build an outside support network,” says Leeds. “If I had not grown up as a feminist, I’d probably not find all this as easy.”
For the 51 percent of women living alone who are widows, being suddenly solo is often not so easy. After her husband of 37 years died four years ago, Dione Donnelly, 60, says weekends were especially tough. She’s come to dislike weddings, always leaving before the dancing begins and she finds herself without a partner. She misses sharing the change of seasons, especially the times when she and her husband would go to their second home on Wisconsin’s Green Lake to enjoy the first snowfall or the autumn colors. Worse, she says, “People who had been our friends for 30 years, I never hear from … But the thing that bothers me the most is not having someone to share all the small everyday details that couldn’t possibly interest anybody else.”
There are, however, some consolations. Married in 1952 at 20, Donnelly had a husband who expected a clean house, dinner on the table when he came home-and a wife who didn’t work outside the home. “I never had anything to talk about with people,” she says. “I was just a housewife.” Then she got a real-estate license. “It gave me opportunities to see that there was a big world out there,” she says. Today she looks forward to weekends-her busiest time as an agent. And she revels in the small freedoms that now are hers. “If I don’t feel like eating dinner,” she declares, “I don’t make dinner.”
Living alone doesn’t exclude having a serious relationship-and having one doesn’t necessarily lead to living together. Chris Mack, 43, a wastewater-treatment specialist, bought a house in Portland, Ore., for herself five years ago, shortly after breaking off a romantic liaison. Mack, who is a lesbian, doesn’t plan to join households with her current girlfriend of more than three years. “I like to know the rake is where I left it,” she says. Furthermore, Mack doubts anyone would put up with some of her habits. “I’ll play the same music over and over a trillion times,” she says. “I like to sing, and I have a lousy voice.”
Lynn Michael Cohen, alone since his rocky three-year marriage ended in divorce in 1986, is also not about to share his four-story, five-bedroom house in the east San Francisco Bay city of Richmond. He says it’s just the right size for him and his 8-year-old tabby cat, Cindy, whom he calls his surrogate child. Having lived by himself most of his adult life, Cohen, 53, found marriage a strain, a violation of his privacy. Now, while he enjoys the company of friends, he prefers hiking by himself in the rugged Point Reyes area north of San Francisco. “I’m not a loner,” he insists. “Not in the sense that I’m cut off from the universe. But I like to live alone. I come and go pretty much as I please and I don’t have to explain what’s what and where I’m going.” For Cohen, an engineer and software developer, “It’s these little perks that any relationship would have to compete with to make me give them up. And there’s no doubt in my mind that your ability to compromise atrophies after nonuse.”
Perhaps what most separates people who live by themselves from those who don’t is the time they have to muse about the texture of their lives. Most would agree that going it alone is something of a tradeoff. To be sure, the pictures may get hung a little crooked, the aching back may go unrubbed. But it’s also the fulfillment of that other childhood fantasy, hurled defiantly at the all-powerful parents: “When I grow up, I’m going to do exactly what I please.” Now, more of us than ever before are getting a chance to find out if that freedom is really as exhilarating as it sounded back then.
In 1990 there were 23 million Americans at home alone, up from 11 million in 1970. Women outnumber men three to two.
Of those living alone, a quarter are younger than 35; another quarter are 35 to 55. For women the average age is 66; for men it’s 42.
Half the female solos–but only 14 percent males–are widowed. Half the men–but only 23 percent of wonem–have never married.
