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Woman in love, loves being alone

By Amy Dickinson, Tribune Content Agency on

-- Happily Solitary

Dear Solitary: Many women in your age-cohort would envy your perfect situation. You've been married, you've raised children (partly on your own), you've likely spent your adulthood giving your all to the many people in your life. And now you want to be untethered, independent, and on your own -- most of the time.

When explaining my own need to be alone to my companionable husband, I quoted from Virginia Woolf's famous essay, "A Room of One's Own": "Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time."

Burning like a beacon is affirmative. It is also depleting. Being alone allows a person to recharge, dance in her bathrobe and pluck her eyebrows in peace.

Being alone most of the time, but with a standing date with someone you adore is ideal.

Like Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman," your guy "needs you more than wants you, and wants you for all time." The right mate for you is a secure, grounded, and loving man who can manage his own longing.

 

You should continue to be authentic and honest and yes -- tell your guy that you love him, and that you also love this arrangement, just as it is.

Readers will want to weigh in (and also give me credit, I hope, for working both Glen Campbell and Virginia Woolf into a response).

Dear Amy: Every couple of months, reminders are sent to all of the employees in our office to please clean their personal outdated food items out of the fridge.

Without fail, this instruction goes unheeded and there are only one or two of us (and -- big surprise, always women and never a male colleague) that haul out, gut, and clean the fridge.

...continued

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