Amy Key on the Struggles of Being Single in a World of Compulsory Coupledom

The average rent of a 1 bedroom apartment in my city is $2,526.  Most apartments are closer to $3,000. So you can imagine my panic when my roommate told me she was moving out because she got a job back in Los Angeles.    

Rent for my 2 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment was $2,600, a steal by Bay Area standards but far too expensive for me to pay on my own.  

I had no choice: I had to return to the hellscape of Craigslist and find someone else.

I tried not to have a mental breakdown.  How many times have I had to find a roommate?  And what always happened?  I eventually found someone.  There was never a time where I couldn’t pay rent.  I’ve never found myself destitute or homeless.  Even in the worst case scenario (I couldn’t find a replacement), I could always find a less expensive place or move back in with my parents.

Yet finding another roommate was discouraging to say the least.  Potential roommates on Craigslist were borderline deranged.  One ad I stumbled upon showed a seemingly normal girl with her boyfriend taking a selfie: 

“I’m 23, looking for exclusively female roommates to hopefully get to know each other and start searching for a place to split the bills on.  (I’m the girl in the pic (duh) but the guy is my bf so no funny business, you’ll regret it).” 

A psychotically jealous girl who views anyone female as a threat?  No thanks.

Responses to my ad weren’t much better.

Though I specifically said female roommates, my inbox was flooded with men who apparently didn’t know how to read.  Some responses were polite but too-the-point (“Is this room still available?”); others were sad (“I’m good people; I’m just in desperate need of a social life”); still others were absolutely insane (“I need a spot to grow medical grade weed”).

Though I don’t begrudge someone the chance to smoke some Mary Jane, I didn’t want to host a growing operation.  And I certainly didn’t want some bitch to beat my ass for even glancing in the direction of her boyfriend.

It’s in moments like these that I envy my married friends.  Their lives had a sense of stability mine lacked.  They didn’t have to worry about their husbands announcing one day that they’re moving back to Los Angeles.  They never had to worry about suddenly having to pay all the rent. 

Though I had a nearly perfect partner, we lived in different cities and, for various reasons, didn’t have immediate plans to move in together.  Sifting through Craigslist, I felt myself sink into self-pity: why couldn’t I afford a home of my own?  I wasn’t asking for anything extravagant….just a simple 1 bedroom apartment.  God, why didn’t I have a trust fund or substantial inheritance? 

All my friends who’ve reached traditional signifiers of adult “success”—the Beaver to Cleaver suburbs, the white picket fence—were only able to because they had husbands to help pull their economic weight.  How could I, a single person on a rather normal income, ever be able to afford my own place? 

In her lovely, lyrical memoir, Arrangements in Blue, poet Amy Keys beautifully limns the struggle of being single in a world of compulsory coupledom.  Though I’m not single in the literal sense of the word, I could relate to Key’s struggles. 

A life without romantic love feels lacking for the obvious reasons: lonely nights without a warm body to snuggle, attending weddings without someone to slow dance with, eating Chinese take out alone on a Saturday night…again.  

But it’s also disheartening for more practical reasons: without a partner, you don’t have someone to walk the dogs when you’re sick or split the rent or take out the trash.  You don’t have someone to lug heavy boxes up five flights of stairs or hang picture frames or reach too high shelves or come with you to the car mechanic.  Uncoupled, you don’t have someone to share the burden of domestic existence.  You alone have to cook dinner and scrub the toilet and scrounge up thousands of dollars for your dog’s vet visits.  As Key writes with staggering self-awareness:

“Occasionally when I prepare a meal, as I do several times most days, I resent clearing away the dishes.  And sometimes when I try to get the duvet in its cover, I feel a pathetic sense of unfairness that it is only me who has responsibility for it.  And when there are issues to resolve—a broken boiler, a leaking tap, an unexpected bill—I know the flaring up of my irritation and presumed helplessness is stirred not only by inconvenience but by a roaming sadness that needs a grievance to attach itself to.  I have always wanted a home that felt like I wanted romantic love to feel—warm, intimate, symbolic in all the aesthetic details of it, and after the inevitable addictive whir of lust, secure.” 

I always dreamed more of a home than a wedding.  Some little girls dream of chiffon white gowns and a teary-eyed exchange of rings—I dreamt of Spanish tile roofs and high vaulted ceilings.  I’ve always had a specific vision of the home I’d live in one day.  It would be a 1920s bungalow in Los Angeles or a victorian apartment in San Francisco’s Haight and Ashbury.  Tons of natural light.  Walnut wood floors.  Original crown molding. 

My home would be filled with one-of-kind vintage details: rounded archways, crystal doorknobs, built in bookshelves.  I envisioned sipping my coffee at a Parisian cafe table in a black and white checkered kitchen, snuggling up with a book in a green velvet reading chair.  There would be some modern touches of course (air conditioning, stainless steel appliances) but overall my home would have an Old World color and character.  I looked forward to the day that I’d walk through the door and see my belongings, my inner sense of beauty expressed in the exterior. 

Like me, Keys has a very precise picture of home:

“I’ve always desired a home that possessed the quality of being lived in for decades, a worn-downness, the slow accumulation and proliferation of cutlery, pots and pans.  I wanted to live around handed-down things, to feel the edge of the bedspread fraying sweetly with continuous belonging, radiating cosiness.  A blue Formica table and yellow curtains in the kitchen.  A garden where sedums and moss would work their way into the cracks in the boundary walls.  A tin full of wonderfully odd buttons.  Mirrors with their fog of age.  I’d sometimes spot this kind of home in films, and I’d freeze the frame to get a picture, try to break down what within the set design had caught this essence of my grandparents’ home and how I might recreate it.  This was a richer fantasy for me than the idea of a wedding list, than a matching set of good plain white china.  I wanted every object around me to be imbued with my story, or at the very least a story.”

Ironically, most women require a romantic partner to have a “room of their own.”  Though she yearns to have her own house, one where every “wall and surface” throbs with her “material personhood,” Keys can’t afford her own place without someone to split the bills. 

In our world of compulsory coupledom, getting married and buying a house are the crowning achievements of adulthood.  To not achieve these things by a certain age (usually 30) can feel like a colossal failure.  As Key approaches her forties, she can’t help but feel behind her friends who are mortgaged and married:

“As my friends paired off with their mortgages, renovation projects, and pregnancies, I had to turn to living with strangers.  My discontent that I’d fallen out of step with others my age morphed into humiliation.  I felt having to share located me in an infernal adolescence, and worse, the fact that I lived with flatmates exposed my lack of a romantic partner in situations where the home came up in conversation.  In those moments, I felt a bizarre shame, the kind you might feel if you’re still a virgin in your twenties or you don’t start your periods until much later than your friends—a failure to hit an imaginary deadline for graduating into real life.  At work, in almost every team I managed, I’ve been the oldest and the only single person living in shared flats in the team.  I sometimes worry if to them I’m a cautionary tale.”

Those of us who don’t have/live with a partner must navigate the occasionally maddening labyrinth of living with strangers:

“Living with strangers brought about so much negotiation, miscommunication and mutual resentment…I wanted to know how the shared space might be used, no unexpected visitors, I wanted my supermarket flowers flesh in the vases each week, the toilet roll always stocked up, for there to be wine on the rack.  I wanted to be able to use my nice cups and plates, not feel scared someone might treat them carelessly, that they might not know they were worthy of protection.  I also felt resistance to living with someone who had a partner; I didn’t want to be alongside romantic love, for it to nestle in my own home, with none of it for me.  I wanted the home life I’d observed in the orbit of some of the couples I knew—comfortable, predictable, somehow more adult than my own.”

Love is always a kind of osmosis, a process by which our our personality passes through a semi-permeable membrane and intermingles with that of someone else.  As our relationship progresses, we resemble our partner more and more: we adopt their preferences as our own, we trade taste in books and films.  In a way, love requires we compromise ourselves. 

But what happens if we’re usually without romantic love?  if we’ve never cohabited with a partner?  if we’re used to doing things on our own?  Do the solitary and single have more difficulty compromising than their coupled counterparts? 

After you’ve been alone for so many years, you become used to doing things your way: you think toilet paper should be folded over with the loose end draped over the top, you believe it necessary to wash the sheets at least once a week.  Your habits harden—it’s more difficult for “I” to meld into a “we.”  You can’t imagine having things in your home that you haven’t carefully curated.  You shudder at the thought of having to dedicate an entire wall to your future husband’s Star Wars figurine collection.  You don’t want a man to bring his weird, juvenile things and ruin your Pinterest-worthy aesthetic.

“I’m not looking to be with somebody forever or live with someone.  I don’t want someone in my house,” Whoopi Goldberg once hilariously said.  If you live alone, you can probably relate.  It’s difficult to cohabitate with someone, to always have to consider another person’s preferences and tastes.

Though Keys longs for the intimacy and affection that accompanies a romantic partnership, she also cherishes her independence.  She loves that her home is truly hers: she doesn’t have to negotiate about the proper placement of a Van Gogh portrait or consult another party about the purchasing of an arm chair.  Keys is free in every sense of the word: she can paint her bedroom a distinctly feminine color like dusty rose; she doesn’t have to consider if her boyfriend/husband will like the new Persian rug or hallway mirror.  But she worries that long-term singlehood has made her an uncompromising spinster:

“I fear I might not ever be able to give an inch should I want to share a home again.  A wall for a partner’s record collection.  A bike in the hall.  A plant I find ugly.  A rite of passage—we’re moving in together—feels remote not just because I’m single, but because I’m unsure how able I am to co-create a home, to be moderated by another’s aesthetic and practical needs and wants.  I don’t think this unyielding creature is who I want to be.”