The Unexpected Joy of Being Single

by Catherine Gray

I love how author Brené Brown literally carries around a list of people whose opinions matter to her. She calls them her ‘Move the body’ mates. The ones who would help you get away with murder. I’ve now done that too, by mentally drawing up a list of around ten people whose opinion I will actually allow into my psyche. The rest? Nah.

‘There’s an Irish proverb about a tractor. It goes: don’t go and ask for a tractor from somebody who doesn’t have a tractor. There’s no point in asking them if you can borrow their tractor, since they don’t have one to give.’

As Zadie Smith writes, ‘I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.’

Your heart is actually like a colossal, rambling country house. You own this house. Throughout your life, you take in lodgers. Some live there your entire life; some come and go. It’s one of those cool, creaky stately homes replete with secret underground tunnels and hidden rooms behind fake bookcases. There’s a whimsical room atop the house that feels more magical than the rest somehow. It’s probably set in a tower, a turret with a stained-glass window and curved furniture to fit its round walls. This is where you place the person you are in romantic love with. It’s your favourite room in the house, so you award it to them. The shock comes when the lodger in the tower room suddenly leaves. You forgot they were just a lodger. You forgot they could depart. They may leave under the inky cloak of night. They may leave a mess you have to clean up. Or stuff in storage that you can’t bear to chuck, for years afterward. Equally, you may evict them yourself. Which is often almost as hard a process, given it involves painful conversations, and often confrontation. When the tower room is empty, there’s a temptation to sit up there, even long after they’ve left, howling at the moon about how lonely you are, how unloved. Sobbing into the sheets that still smell like them. But here’s the thing. While you sit up there in the gables, gazing forlornly and longingly out of the window, you are choosing to feel alone.