Women are better at battling loneliness

FROM REBECCA CHRISTIAN | THONLINE.COM

"Today, let us break a taboo and utter the L word. I don't mean Lesbianism but Loneliness. Loneliness and her kinder sister, Solitude, are rampant in the U.S. In 2006, the Census Bureau reported that someone lives alone in 26 percent of households, up from 17 percent in 1970. That percentage is probably higher now.

Of course, to live alone is not necessarily to serve a sentence of loneliness, and as many married people know, few things chill the soul more than feeling alone while with someone else. Yet there remains a sense of shame to being literally alone, a fear of contagion. I remember visiting my former baby-sitter when I was home from college and feeling a frisson of alarm at how happy she was to see me come and how loath to see me go. My subconscious recognized someday that could be me.

The reasons for Loneliness are many. People marry later, divorce more frequently, live longer. Married couples are now a minority of all American households. Gone, baby, gone are the days that my great-great grandmother spent the last years of her life mending and rocking babies in a chair by the kitchen stove. Extended family members often don't live in the same town, much less under the same roof.
A study came out recently confirming what the old joke already established (What's the difference between a girlfriend and a wife? Thirty pounds). That is, married women who live with a mate put on more pounds than those living alone. My experience bears that out. Married for 25 years and single eight, I have been slightly, but consistently, slimmer post-divorce despite the weight gain one would expect from aging and menopause. It's not that I'm not keeping myself svelte for a future partner but that breaking bread is communal. When it's just you and Delilah, a bowl of popcorn will do. (The upside is not having someone ask you if dinner is "that soup" again.)

Women are more likely to live alone over the course of their lives because not only do they outlive mates, we also are more likely to delay remarriage after divorce. I admit that doesn't explain why the casserole brigade pounces on a newly widowed man! Perhaps because we've had more practice, I think women are better at living alone -- generally maintaining a closer network of friendships and more likely to stay close to adult children post-divorce.

My married daughter, 31, says female friendships are particularly critical to her single girlfriends who eventually want marriage and kids. She has two friends, raving heterosexuals, who consider each other life partners ala Oprah and Gayle. Although not housemates, they live in the same town, send Christmas cards together, and go to each other's family milestones like weddings and funerals.

When my mother and sister joined households last year, chiefly for financial and health reasons, I fretted that their years of flying solo due to widowhood and divorce might make the adjustment rocky. Instead I noticed a curious lilt in their voices as "I" turned to "We." There was a funny moment over the holidays when I spent the night. As my flatulent Boston terrier and I clambered into bed in the attic with my sister -- the same bed we shared as girls 40 years and several husbands ago -- she chortled, "I always knew it would come to this."

My bosom friend since middle school, Di, and I speak of eventually sharing a home, perhaps with other women -- like college girls in a geriatric version of a dorm pod, say, or nuns who cuss. As boomers age, real estate developers would do well to create communal homes with shared living areas surrounded by several private arthritis-friendly bedroom/bathroom suites for us girls. The best way to banish Comrade Loneliness is with a little help from your friends."

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