On living alone

and walking around naked (a lot)

the view from desk, Lisbon, April 2025

Since I moved to Lisbon I have mostly lived alone.

This was always baked into my move, the quiet certitude that I would prioritise solo living above all else. I didn't mind compromising on an apartment's location, or square meterage, so long as I could experience living without housemates. After so many years in the other cities I'd called home, living in cramped spaces with people I often barely knew, squabbling over bathroom slots and who would cook dinner when, having my own space felt like what I was meant to graduate into, a natural end-goal for my living situation. Peace, silence, an ultimate sense of agency. And now I had moved somewhere where I had the privilege of making this a reality.

I spent a lot of my first six months in this city smugly luxuriating in what I had sold to myself as the ultimate freedom. Traipsing naked around my apartment, making as much noise as I was humanly capable of, leaving little messes for future me to resolve. I spent a lot of that time vaguely grinning, sure that I had unlocked some supreme level of adulting that had been denied to me. I am liberated, I told myself.

In truth, I have hated living alone.

There are practical realities that I hadn't considered. Figuring out who water plants when you're away. Budgeting more time for household chores and cleaning now that you're solely responsible. Blah, blah. The supreme level of adulting I had unlocked came with some less glamorous labour. Okay, fine.

But really the experience was stirring something in me that felt much more existential. For every naked walk to the kitchen there was a long, cavernous spell of loneliness. I'd make an elaborate late night meal and suffer a pang of discomfort at the realisation that I wouldn't be sharing the spoils of my hard work. Friends would come over and make the space come alive, but always momentarily, before it settled back into a morose silence. What I had constructed as a freedom, to have full dominion over my living space to an absurd degree, started to feel like a container. Living alone meant being alone. And being so alone was not something I knew how to contend with.

Of course my experience is subjective, and informed by all the component parts that make up me. I am chatty, I am energised by others, I buckle under a mountain of chores. I have friends here and all over who live alone and excel at it, who seem to juggle the added work and the built-in isolation with zeal and fervour. I am not making a case for abolishing solo living.

But I am questioning how deeply it has ingrained itself into the aspirational blueprint for those of us who, either by virtue of our identity or our choices, sit outside of the societally-approved diktat of relationship > mortgage > children. Living alone is often presented to us as the valid alternative. There's a heavy stigma around maintaining housemates beyond our 30s (despite the fact that it will be the economic reality for many millennials and Gen Z-ers without inherited wealth) and most other intentional living arrangements (multiple couples living together, groups of friends living together, moving back in with relatives) are viewed with suspicion, as woo-woo, juvenile or cultish.

I am far from the first or most informed person to name this, and it exists within a wider context. We are increasingly lonely, encouraged to atomise further and further, our traditional kinship systems in the Global North in dire need of an update. Digital technology is proffering connection and leading to more isolation and the marked degradation of our social skills. People have stopped talking to strangers and started talking to complicated predictive text generators. Young people, particularly young men, are proving to be increasingly friendless, and finding a home in radical misogynistic slop online. But what to do and where to point? The problem is so deeply rooted, and so multi-pronged that my usual instinct, to put capitalism on trial and make a case for its dismantlement (or reformation) is feeling less and less helpful. We are down the rabbit-hole now. I'm not sure how we crawl out. After all, crawling out would require us to work together, to be in solidarity, and it seems we are losing the ability to do so with ease.

I have a housemate this month. He's Portuguese, a friend of a friend, and has come to Lisbon for a bit to work remotely. I awaited his arrival nervously, unsure how well I'd do at adapting to a new presence in my apartment, a new body to share things with, to work around.

And as I've tip-toed (fully clothed) to the kitchen in the radiant spring mornings, careful to not clatter and bang my various kitchen implements as I make breakfast, as I've walked to the bathroom and seen the door shut, a line of light emanating from within, I've found myself sighing enormously with relief - because of course I can adapt to someone else in my living space, I am human, I have been doing it since I was born, as have all the people who have ever lived before me. I am not working around my new housemate, but working with him, engaged in a dance our bodies hold the memory of. We are, briefly, in community.

I don't want to romanticise it, but it does feels like the most human thing possible, to be compromising, to be making space for each other, to witness each other in the drudgery and mess of life. I thought I would find freedom in retreating from the thorniness of the communal, but I have never felt more free than returning to negotiating my life around someone else. I can't believe I fell for the dupe.

So maybe this is the first step for crawling out of the rabbit hole? Seeing how we are being encouraged to break off into bits and resisting it. Rejoicing in the complicated mess of the whole, safe in the knowledge that it won't always be fun but it will at least be experienced together? I don't have it all figured out, but then again, I never do.

Anyway. I've gotta stop writing. It's my slot to cook lunch.