Over the years I have learned to enjoy my own company, that is to say I like being alone and also being a single person. The merits of a single life are just as nobel and rewarding as being in a nuclear family or in a long term relationship with another person. As a single person you have lots of opportunities to just be alone and simply enjoy hobbies, I like to read, paint/draw, journal and watch movies. I work all day with people and I always have to put on a smile and be polite as if I am always on a stage performing for an audience, it can be exhausting somedays and I relish the evenings to unwind in quiet solitude. I have a great job that rewards me too, I live a high standard of living and the fine things that accompany that as well. Yet with all these blessings I still find myself yearning for more.
It is not selfishness that makes me desire something, it is the human need to always be searching for that which always seems to elude us in this adventure though life and all it’s challenges. I see other people around me and can always find someone to be envious of what they have that I do not and usually it is the connection to their immediate family, their wife and children the activities that encompass all that goes with this social dynamic of raising children. The ball games the school assemblies and the menagerie of social interactions they attend by being evolved in this societal norm of life. I yearn to be a part of these interactions but I have no real connection to them due to not having a family of my own.
Sometimes when I am home alone and find my own activities not fulfilling my needs I start to feel lonely and isolated, a depressing heaviness weighs on my heart and at theses times I wish I had had a better out come to my past relationships. To have had a couple children to spend time with or at this time in my life to be assisting them through their collegian years on to what we would hope is a fulfilling life of their own. Those days never came to fruition for me and I have come to accept this reality but you can not stave off the thoughts of what if, why not or just maybes of the calamities of my life.
I feel the need to share part of my life with a woman who can accept my shortcomings and foibles, to take part in living life not changing me to fulfill theirs. To co-exist with a woman who is not in need of clinging to a man to enable her happiness but to partner with me to share the trek of life, to relish what could be not what we wish we would have done. Someone to hold when we need holding and someone that will share the celebrations and the sadness in equal measures because they are connected to me in more than physical or emotional way but through a bond that defies a logical verbal description.
Maybe I am asking for too much, perhaps that is a fantasy that is created to keep me out of a relationship, a defensive tactic to stave off the possibility of having a relationship at all.
Or maybe I am meant to be alone in this journey through life, to be the one that does not, one who never will have, the one to become the guy who is alone unto death. The sad person that everyone knows and feels pity for because he has no one to lie down with at the end of his life, the one who is laid to rest as he was in life, solitarily.
Because I am at my mid-life and the first half of my life has be put in my past, sealed up for posterity as it were, that I reflect on this undetermined future of mine. I am sure I am not the only person to try to rationalize this next step in my life or the current attitude of my life. the future is a blank canvas yet I have this over-whelming sensation that if I do not make adjustments soon I will not be expecting much more than what I have now. A life that is acceptable but not full of higher expectations for fear of intimacy.