Barbara Feldon - Living Alone and Loving It

When I was a kid the greatest thrill I experienced at the circus was watching the flying trapeze artists. High in the pastel lights at the top of the tent, a young woman in sparkling tights swooped through space secure in the grip of her partner. Suddenly, he would let go and send her flying above the gasping crowd. Then, just as shed begin to fall, another partner would swing down to snatch her up. I imagined that I was her in thrilling flight, tossed from one pair of masculine hands to another.

It felt sublime.

Years later, I realized how ardently Id always hoped to find salvation in the arms of a man; a deep, intimate, soul-satisfying union with a strong partner who would cherish, comfort and in many ways support me. For a while fate bowed to my wishes, but when it finally balked and I found myself alone, I felt as if I were falling through space. There were no outstretched arms in sight and I hadnt rigged a safety net.

As a child I absorbed the idea that all true happiness was mated happiness. Period. Every grown-up I knew was married. In our suburban Pittsburgh neighborhood there was a daily choreography of fathers leaving in the morning and mothers, at twilight, bathing, dressing, powdering and combing in preparation for their husbands return, a dance that echoed my grandparents routine. When my dad appeared each evening he stood near my mother as she cooked in the steamy kitchen and shared the news of his day at the office; they sipped scotch on the rocks and, in my eyes, looked as glamorous as Myrna Loy and William Powell. I gazed from the doorway, dreamy with desire to grow up and play Mothers role in my own intimate drama.

As I progressed from envious onlooker at older girls weddings to bridesmaidlaunching friends through the wedding march to star in white tulle at the altarI welcomed the inevitability of a coupled future and its foreverness. Although I entertained embryonic notions of an unconventional (whatever that meant) life as an actress, my imaginings never consciously perched on the idea of living my life without a mate.

Immediately after graduating drama school I raced to New York City where I lucked into the most conventional of unconventional apartments, a sixth-floor walkup, cold-water flat in Greenwich Village complete with regiments of cockroaches. It was perfect! When the picture was further embellished by meeting and falling in love with a Belgian who looked like a movie star, spoke with a French accent and ordered arcane wines, I knew I was finally starring on the silver screen of my life.

I regretted giving up my Village padmy first taste of independencebut family pressure and my ardor for Lucien overcame my resistance and I prepared to marry. Then, minutes before the ceremony, I was attacked by a sniper of ambivalence and balked at the vow to obey. I sprinted to the ministers study to plead that he remove it from the ceremony, but he refused and laughed off my distress with, Oh, just say it and dont mean it. Unsatisfied, I stood at the altar where I had dreamed of standing, where my mother and grandmother had stood. But instead of feeling joy over a sacred bonding, tears ran down my face at having sworn to a vow (and the servitude it implied) I couldnt tolerate, a vow that Mother and Grandmother had repeated without flinching. To me it hinted that my life was no longer my own.

My reaction was a symptom, an early, tiny crack in the veneer of mated roles. I had pictured marriage as a mosaic of bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscopebut turn the kaleidoscope slightly and the shards of glass fall into chaos before forming a new pattern. I felt my life was about to change, and a different kind of lifefor better or for worsewould bring more role challenges than I had imagined in my mating dream.

My marriage slowly slid from fantasy to chastening reality, but the breakup was made smoother by an uptick in my career and a necessary move to Los Angeles to play Secret Agent 99 in the 1960s television series Get Smart . I soon fell in love with my colleague Burt Nodella, with whom I lived for the next twelve years. While our relationship as a couple eventually reached an impasse, we continued to be the dear friends that we are today.

I quickly fell in love again (there was a pattern here) but was startled when, for the first time in my romantic history, I was anticipating a permanent relationship while my partner was veering away from commitment. A number of my single friends were experiencing parallel adventures. Often partners approached relationships so burdened with bruises from childhood, former love disasters and unrealistic expectations that the romance was overwhelmed. Some simply chose to delay commitment to concentrate on a career; others were exploring the option of living single. For me, now that living alone had become a reality, I experienced it as a negative, a lonely but temporary vacuum between partners; I couldnt imagine it becoming a chronic condition. As the years passed I was forced to view it differently. Theres an old saying: Wisdom is accepting the obvious.

The obvious includes the soaring divorce rate. Now there are a startling number of people living alonenearly twenty-six million projected nationwideand according to the 2000 census, the number of people living alone is now greater than the number of nuclear families. A husky 48 percent of Manhattanites live alone. Weve become a mighty horde! Whether we are casualties of emotional wars, single due to the death of a companion or unpartnered by choice, for the first time in history, living alone is an established way of life.