Flying solo in your twenties, continued

3. Experiment with your own tastes in architecture
and design


Most of us furnish our first apartments with cast-offs from our parents’ basements. That’s fine, but eventually you will grow weary of knotty pine.

You may begin to notice that your friends differ in their decorating styles. One lives with a treadmill and a giant screen TV and not much else, another has collected so many knick-knacks you feel suffocated when you sit in her living room. Pay attention to the way you respond to these spaces.

You might want to look at some decorating magazines to see what appeals to you, and start clipping images you like. Eventually you’ll come to prefer a particular look, whether it’s modern or country or shabby chic, and will find color schemes that feel right to you. You can build your own bookcases, but head to IKEA for a couch and second-hand stores for lamps and side tables. Stuff doesn’t have to match, it just needs to be comfortable and pleasing to you.

Over the years I’ve noticed that we tend to surround ourselves with the same colors we like to wear. A redhead may be drawn to autumnal oranges and browns, or someone who looks great in dramatic colors will paint her living room electric blue. Go ahead and experiment, but keep in mind that if you want your security deposit back you may have to repaint before you move out.

I remember that my friend Linda’s very first apartment — a one-bedroom in a vintage building with high ceilings and hardwood floors — looked like something out of House Beautiful. Her towels matched her shower curtain. She’d slip-covered an old couch from her mother and made coordinating throw pillows. Everything was spare and clean and smelled like fresh lemons.

I thought with shame of my dingy efficiency in Washington, DC and vowed to do better.

I have done better, I guess, in that I’ve accumulated better rugs and more valuable antiques, but Linda, who has a wonderfully minimalist sense of style, still uses me as bad example. Whenever her husband complains about Linda’s (hardly noticeable) clutter she tells him, “That’s not clutter. If you want to see clutter, go visit Kit.”

Flying solo in your twenties

“Never become romantically involved with anyone
who has more trouble and less money than you have.”
~ Classic advice

1. Ditch the roommates


"The postponement of marriage has led to a substantial increase in the
proportion of young, never-married adults," said Jason Fields, author of
America's Families and Living Arrangements: March 2000. "For example, in
the past three decades, the proportion of those who had never married
doubled for women ages 20 to 24, from 36 percent to 73 percent, and more
than tripled for women ages 30 to 34, from 6 percent to 22 percent."


When you are young and just starting out in life, it’s likely that you will share an apartment with others or rent a room in a group house. Eventually, unless you are remarkably tolerant, living with other people and their messes will drive you crazy.

You will long for your own refrigerator, so that you can come home from work reasonably confident that the chicken breast you planned to have for your supper will still be there. You will grow weary of stepping over prone bodies on your way to the kitchen in the morning. You will insist on a bathroom that is more or less up to code.

It’s time to find a small space you can call your own.

When I moved into my first apartment, many years ago, my best friend Judy sent me the advice you see above. The only thing I could add to this would be: buy a plumber’s friend and keep it handy because if you ever need it (and this will probably happen at some odd hour) you won’t feel like venturing out to Target or a hardware store to buy one.

2. Live in the city


What a great time of life — to be in your 20s, independent and fancy free.

Depending on your career aspirations, you will find employment where the jobs are. Great cities for young professionals include New York, Washington DC, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, L.A., Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Austin, and (yes) Minneapolis. Smaller university towns are good bets, also — Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill, Charlottesville, Madison, for example.

Even if your workplace is in the suburbs, find a place in the city. You’ll have a reverse commute and you won’t be stuck out in the boonies with all the married people and their bratty children.

I know several single women who bought (admittedly, affordable) houses in developments so far away from the rest of us you have to take a light plane to get out there, and I think they were out of their minds. Nobody wants to go visit them and by the time these women get home from work exhausted the very last thing they want to do is get back in their cars and retrace their commutes.

The ‘burbs can be lonely places for the unmarried, so go urban. Ask your friends where other young people live. Twenty-somethings tend to congregate in cool neighborhoods close to restaurants and bars. Chances are you won’t have a car so you’ll want to locate within walking or cab distance of your friends and their hangouts. Have a great time.

Introduction

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the proportion of households consisting of one person living alone increased from 17 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 2000 — and the number of householders living alone in 2000 was 27,230,075 — or 25.8% of the population.


Other than a couple of unfortunate experiments in cohabitation — and even more disastrous attempts to share space with roommates — I have lived alone for most of my adult life.

In the process, I have created quite a nice nest for myself. When people come into my home, they usually exclaim, "Oh, it’s so cozy!" and it is; it’s like a little Hobbit cottage, appealing to all the senses. Visitors cross threadbare oriental rugs and dodge the books and piles of magazines stacked everywhere; they may notice the scent of freesia, my favorite flower, in a vase on the coffee table. Classical music, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio, plays faintly in the background while my two cats snooze in the wing chairs beside the fireplace. My house is cluttered and untidy, but it feels inviting to guests, who usually arrive confident that they’ll be given a cup of tea or a drink and a nice snack while they’re here.

I do make it look easy, even though I don’t have any money — I’ll scrimp on supper in order to buy a bunch of flowers, instead. I have arranged my life to please myself alone, figuring I might as well be comfortable since God knows I don’t get any sex.

It seems to my friends that I’ve always been alone, largely because I arrived in Minneapolis by myself nearly 20 years ago and have flown solo ever since. People here have never known me as part of a unit.

But I was coupled once or twice, when I was young, and still yearn for that sense of belonging. My friend Linda calls it attachment hunger, when you don’t so much miss the man himself as you do having a partner. So I know what it feels like.

And I am able to be sympathetic to the women who have collapsed in my living room over the years, in floods of tears because they’re suddenly alone and afraid. I know what that feels like, too.

They seem to think I have a secret, that I know something special because I make it seem so effortless, so natural. "How do you do it," they wail, "how do you get through the days?" Long practice.

I give each of my friends a 10- or 12-point plan, and with every sobbing advisee, I realize that maybe I have something here; maybe I do know a few tricks. They’re pretty simple, really — turn on the radio, adopt a pet, reach out to your friends, find some nice gay men to play with, worship at a welcoming church or temple — none of this is rocket science, but it can seem incredibly daunting when you’re just starting out.

Believe me, I know how terrifying it is to be alone, and arriving finally at this place of peace has taken me many years and many tears. Even now, when something goes wrong with the furnace or my car breaks down or I’m driving alone at night, hopelessly lost because the people giving directions assumed somebody would be along to navigate from the passenger seat, I can experience a real meltdown. I get lonesome, too. Like Bridget Jones, I worry that I’ll die here alone and they won’t find me for days and I’ll be eaten by Alsatians.

But I had a real epiphany one morning, standing at the kitchen sink. I realized I was annoyed that I hadn’t got around to having the dripping faucet fixed, and calculated that I feel irritated once or twice a month about being alone. Then I had to laugh, because each of the men I nearly married used to piss me off several times a day.

"You were such a pretty girl," well-meaning friends have said over the years, as if that had anything to do with my forlorn attempts at love, "Why didn't you find a nice husband?" I used to cringe at these questions, flailing away in vain to come up with some reasonable, non-pathetic explanation about how the ones I could catch I didn’t want and the ones I wanted I couldn’t catch, or I’d shrug and say, "I’m still looking, sugar; you available?" Or, as Gloria Steinem observed once, “I don’t mate well in captivity.”

But now, when people ask me how it is that I never married, I reply simply that I’ve had several lucky escapes.


“Enjoy your cats, house and peace, and don't go asking for trouble.”
~ Cathy Madison