Can living alone ever be joyous?

4 min readNov 17, 2019

I have been living alone since quite a while now.

A few years back my marriage fell apart. I moved in with a close school friend. A great guy who supported me and was there with me while I was fighting my way out through my messy divorce. We used to drink our problems while discussing our sorrows and joys and it was a relief in all of my rather tragic life situations.

In 2016, my divorce came through and meanwhile the friend had found himself a life partner. Though my divorce after a long-fought battle was a big relief for me it was also overwhelming. I needed to plan my life from scratch again. The priorities had changed. I was on my own.

I wanted some solace for myself and realised I needed to move away from the chaos and usual affairs of a shared space. I wanted to be left alone.

Luckily for me, I also started a new job the same month my divorce was finalised so things were looking up for me. It was a perfect set up for me to start afresh. I shifted to a 1 BHK rented accommodation and got accustomed to the ways of living alone. I focused on my health and well being. Stopped drinking and started working out. Living alone made me accountable for my own actions. I knew there is no one to fall back on if I act carelessly and something bad happens.

It wasn’t bad. Apart from that one time when I fell seriously sick and there was no one to take care of me.

Come 2018 when I was financially sound and urge to have my own place to call home took over me. I was enjoying the calm serenity in my life after those few tragic years and I was looking for some sort of stability in my life. The kind of stability which is linked with me as an individual and not dependant on someone else to make me feel worthwhile. I know being married and having kids is the kind of stability people usually refer to but I was looking for more than that.

I finally decided to take the next step and bought my own house in January 2018. Before this, I always lived in houses on the ground floor and it was a dream for me to live on a high rise floor from where I could enjoy the rains while sipping hot tea in the balcony or while enjoying a glass of whiskey. I chose the 17th floor as my humble abode.

Moving into the new house was hectic. I had to take care of every minor detail from bathroom fixtures to electric fittings, from kitchen accessories to curtain shades and from arranging a maid to arranging all the basic household stuff. I relied on a few colleagues to advise me on the interiors and few good female friends to advise me on the shades of the curtains and kitchen accessories that I might require.

This is the pic I took the day I shifted to my house.