Solitary Refinement, Part 1

The point is that there is a technique about living alone successfully, as there is about doing anything really well. Whether you view your one-woman menage as Doom or Adventure (and whether you are twentysix or sixty-six), you need a plan, if you are going to make the best of it.

The best can be very nice indeed. As nice, perhaps, as any other way of living, and infinitely nicer than living with too many people (often meaning two or more others) or with the wrong single individual. You can live alone gaily, graciously, ostentatiously, dully, stolidly. Or you can just exist in sullen loneliness, feeling sorry for yourself and arousing no feeling whatever in anybody else.

Your choice in this matter need have nothing to do with your income. If it's a small one, you'll probably find more other solitary dwellers living at about your level than you would if it were large-and these odd numbers will prove to be your greatest assets as last minute dinner-guests, fourths at bridge, and theater companions.

If you have lived alone for a long time, you will have your own scheme of living, and our words of wisdom will only give you a few scattered suggestions. But for the benefit of those who are new at this particular game of solitaire, we will start at the beginning.

The beginning is your attitude - your approach, so to speak. For the basis of successful living alone is determination to make it successful. Whether you belong to the conservative school that calls it will-power, or the modern school that calls it guts, the necessity is there. You have got to decide what kind of a life you want and then make it for yourself. You may think that you must do that anyway, but husbands and families modify the need considerably. When you live alone, practically nobody arranges practically anything for you.

This business of making your own life may sound dreary - especially if you have a dated mind and still think of yourself as belonging to the Weaker Sex. But it really isn't. You can have a grand time doing it. You can-within the limitations imposed on most of us, whether we live singly or in herds-live pretty much as you please. To be sure, you will have nobody to make a fuss over you when you are tired, but you will also have nobody to expect you to make a fuss over him, when you are tired. You will have no one to be responsible for your bills-and also no one to be responsible to for your bills. You will be able to eat what, when, and where you please, even dinner served on a tray on the livingroom couch-one of the higher forms of enjoyment which the masculine mind has not yet learned to appreciate.

You can, in fact, indulge yourself unblushingly-an engaging procedure which few women alone are smart enough to follow. Being Spartan becomes pointless when there is no one to watch your performance. Even unselfishness requires an opponent-like most of the worthwhile things in life. Living alone, you can-within your own walls-do as you like. The trick is to arrange your life so that you really do like it.

It may seem difficult at first-especially if the move wasn't your idea anyway. A great many people take this step after a death, divorce, or some rearrangement of relationships that seems like a catastrophe. They are pretty sure to feel a little sorry for themselves, slightly expectant of sympathetic attention, and all too ready to have a chip on the shoulder. This is only human. Everybody feels sorry for herself (to say nothing of himself) now and then. But anyone who pities herself for more than a month on end is a weak sister and likely to become a public nuisance besides.

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