How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't

by Lane Moore

When it’s not that simple, or you don’t have any of that information, it’s that much easier to go your whole life thinking it’s just you; you’re too sensitive, you’re wrong, you need too much, you could fix your relationship with them if you wanted to, if you would just do the right thing, whatever that is, only God knows, but you should die trying.

I know this is why most people who have similarly conflicted relationships with their family members will smooth the paper when they speak of them. They will tell you they’re close with their family, they love them so much, so perfect, so great. And then, just maybe, if you get them alone on a certain day, they’ll tell you they always felt alone, still feel alone, their family wasn’t great. And the very next day they might deny this, to you and everyone else. And if you do this, I want you to know I know why you do it. Particularly if one of your family members was just evil, and the rest were . . . complicated. Because you know there is so much goodness in some of your family members and some days, years, lifetimes, it’s easier to forgive the deep pain they’ve caused you, when you know that humanity and compassion lives within them, and why, FUCKING WHY couldn’t they have shown it to you sooner? And the answer might be that someone else in your family had tied their hands behind their back and they couldn’t. And it will only make you feel worse. Ah, what could’ve been.

At this point in my life, I often fear it’s too late, as if there were a sign-up deadline for intimacy and friends and family and I just kept missing it.

On some level I walk through the world like an adult human version of the baby bird in Are You My Mother? subconsciously waiting for someone to see that I’m very take-care-of-able, can I live with you now? I know you’re my age, but have you ever thought of adopting an adult? It’s cool and fun! And I know that sounds stupidly heartbreaking, and I’m not pretending it’s adorable and cool, but I know it’s there, below the surface.

It’s hard not to throw everything I’ve written so far out the fucking window right now because I don’t want you to know this, because I don’t want you to hate me for being so sad and not normal, but then I think, What if you know exactly what I mean? What if you, like me, would at times throw your whole life out the window and walk away, in hopes there was somewhere you could go and buy an entirely new life with new problems, new people, new everything, as if you were replacing a shitty sweater you’d worn through? Except you get only one sweater for your whole life, and anything can happen—theft, weather, cars that splash you with dirt, stains that do and don’t come out—but you can’t trade it in or take it off. It’s just yours and it’s you, forever and ever and ever. So what do you do? Well, as far as I can tell, you explain how your sweater got like this. Why it looks the way it does. And why you put patches where you did, to hold it together and make it look intentional. And you hope people will understand the parts you can’t hide anymore, even if you tried.

In my experience, most queer women—and heterosexual women, for that matter, because women absolutely have crushes on guys who don’t see them that way—don’t get as pissy as some heterosexual dudes get about the Friend Zone. The Friend Zone, while not always ideal, is still a goddamn gift, and really, the definition of true love. If you love someone, or even just care about them, as you claim to, you don’t mind the Friend Zone at all, because sure, fine, you don’t get to French them and stuff, but you get to know them and be close to them and hear all the dumb things that run through their minds and all the brilliant things that they don’t even know are brilliant. You get to know them and share the same air, and you’re alive at the same time, which is a gift in and of itself. If you don’t want the Friend Zone, you don’t want the girl. Simple as that.

A straight high school—or even junior high school—boy will never come close to knowing that level of “I don’t have a shot with this girl” pain. First of all, you do have a shot, because as far as you know, she’s straight or has been told to act straight. Second of all, all our lives, girls are told in not so many words that our main job in life is to please men, don’t embarrass them, don’t make them angry, give them what they ask for, be nice. So really, men technically “have a shot” with literally every woman they see, because we’ve all been trained to give you one, or else we’re assholes.

We’ve all been taught to lose our fucking shit if a boy, any boy, has chosen us. “WE HAVE BEEN CHOSEN!!! And now, we must do whatever he wants because it is so special that he has chosen us!!!” It’s truly upsetting how persistently that message is communicated to us and how we accept it blindly, on a molecular level. Not attracted to this guy at all? BUT HE CHOSE YOU! Don’t think he’s funny or kind? STOP BEING SO PICKY, HE CHOSE YOU! Wish he treated you differently? OMG, NO ONE’S PERFECT, AND HE CHOSE YOU! YOU KNOW, ONE DAY BOYS WILL STOP CHOOSING YOU ALTOGETHER IF YOU DON’T CONSTANTLY DATE EVERY GUY WHO CHOOSES YOU AND THEN YOU’LL DIE ALONE, SO FUCKING LET HIM CHOOSE YOU!!! YOU ARE A TEDDY BEAR PULLED OUT OF A SHITTY ARCADE MACHINE AND HE PAID SEVENTY-FIVE CENTS. HE’S YOURS NOW. But with men, in the broadest sense, they get to choose who they do or don’t want, like a king deciding which of the seven types of lamb placed before him is suitable for dinner. Mostly because no one cares when men get married, and if they wait until they’re forty or fifty or sixty we all assume it’s because they haven’t found anyone good enough for the high standards we allow them to have for themselves. And then we sneer when women do the same.

I wholly reject the idea that “Well, if the father fails at being a caretaker, or abandons his family, or is abusive, it’s expected, what can you do? Men are like this! But if the mother isn’t an ideal caretaker, she’s a monster.” No, I don’t agree. Especially when one monster had a very large part in creating the other.

Count what you want. You can’t change what they did, but you can change your landmarks. It’s not a rewriting of history. It’s a telling of truths and separating abuse from moments that are supposed to be nothing like abuse at all.

I’ve always wished that people who had hurt me would magically text me: “Hey, I noticed you were upset, and instead of assuming it was nothing, I took the initiative to reexamine my behavior and realize I was being a jerk. Because I did this, I’m sparing you the emotional labor of explaining to me how I hurt you. Here are action steps for how I’ll make it right.” But so far it’s been just me and a five-hour conversation I have to initiate, on top of being hurt, and it makes you want to never date again.

We have to erase the idea that if you come from anything less than a Good Family, you are bad. And if you come from a Good Family, you’re good. But we put this bullshit on one another all the time. Everything, culturally, is weighted by whatever you were born into.

But in our culture, if anything happens to you as an adult, good or bad, we assume it’s your parents’ achievement or fault. And obviously there’s just no way that’s consistently true.

At times I’ve struggled to feel seen, to have my history feel seen, to have where I come from feel seen because I “turned out great.” But that doesn’t mean that I Am Fine. I am working every day, tirelessly, like you wouldn’t believe, on being fine, fucking finally, can we get this over with, I’m so tired and I just want to travel and eat and smile and move through the world with a semblance of peace.

Don’t let your intelligence steal focus, don’t be too witty, don’t be too intimidating or have too much to say. Just be pretty forever. And by forever we mean like five to ten years, because then it ends and you better have gotten married by then, because otherwise you’re dead, it’s over. And I am fucking done with this happening to women. I am beyond done.

He was eight, and he’d already been taught that there was nearly nothing as shameful or disgusting, or whisper-quiet-inappropriate, as liking something feminine. And it broke my heart—for him, and for all the boys I know as adults who were softer, more sensitive, more expressive, more open when they were little and then were told to shut all that down. And we wonder why we have grown men at odds with their female partners who are begging them to be more open, to share their feelings, to be softer, to be sweeter, to be gentler, and they just can’t do it. They’d spent their childhoods having people tell them to be the opposite of all of those things, to kill that part of them until there was nothing left—and they did that, just like everyone asked, but now the world wants them to be like that again, and they just can’t. It’s a heartbreaking loss for everyone.

And because we’ve all been taught guys want girls who are chill and don’t “think like that” (yeah, god forbid you want something real and admit that openly), we lower our expectations because, again, we want to be chosen. And in that way, without our even knowing it, it becomes a contest for who can withstand the most. We know trying to change someone won’t work, so we’ve created a work-around for this, which is supporting our partners while they treat us like shit, and being so so patient while they hopefully magically become better people.

But we put up with it for so many reasons. The possibility that our story isn’t perfect, that people aren’t perfect, that our person is just having a rough patch and it’ll smooth out soon, and because, if you’re in your late twenties, you’re running out of time. We tell people there are specific set-in-stone ages they have to be somebody, find somebody, or else they’re fucked, and it’d be cool if that stopped.

If you see a woman who is working super hard to become who she’s meant to be and to achieve the things she wants to achieve, and you have nothing to add to her life or to give back to her in any way, please just leave her the fuck alone.

Giving yourself permission to hang out with yourself can absolutely be a gift if you can learn to see yourself as an ally, someone who got you through everything so far, whether it was totally alone or not. You know your whole story. You know everything. So believe yourself, validate yourself.

But my point is, I think that’s what you do. You book that trip for yourself, you take yourself to dinner and enjoy it the same as if someone else took you out. You take all that love you keep giving to selfish idiots and try to throw some of it in the general direction of your own heart and you pray even a little bit of it sticks there.