Naps. July 25, 2008
Posted by Onely in Great Onely Activities, We like. . ..Tags: naps, single and happy
trackback
Being Onely means coming home after working in the park (volunteer gig) for three hours on Saturday mornings and snarfing down food with the fridge door wide open and checking email or watching bad cable television while luxuriating in smelly, dirt-covered clothes before stepping into the shower and making it last as long or as short as you want – no one’s waiting and who cares if you run out of hot water – and then curling up back in bed to sleep for as long as you damn well please. — L
Onely.Org 
i’m curious about this definition of onely. ok, so i’m married and have my own guilty pleasures, similar to “nut-sucking” (though not nut sucking because plain ol’ powdery salt sounds yucky). and i feel i fulfill these private, usually uncouth, wonderfully rejuvenating activities when needed and quite successfully. i’m thinking someone could be onely and have roommates and have a lot more trouble than i do. so what’s up? i mean, if being coupled means that you can’t be alone to enjoy your own stuff and your own smelly body in your own private time, i don’t know why anyone would want it. except for the tax breaks. and the respectability. ha! alright, maybe not so outlandish.
one thought that comes to me a lot when i read onely—among other thoughts—is this: we have somewhat similar feelings about our situations. you discuss the ways in which society shames and bullies the uncoupled, and how you are made to feel. but being coupled completely (i.e., married) has its own stigma—though, granted, not near as offensive or difficult to shake. living on the east coast, i was reminded again and again that being a young, married woman was the most pathetic thing one could be. it was “so midwest” of me. i’m assuming most people thought that my most important accomplishment was getting married. next, it would be having 2.5 kids. if i could have just introduced my husband as my sex slave! oh well.
We probably can roughly categorize people into these groups: who are single happlily, like the writers here at Onely, who are single unhappily, who are single with mixed feelings, who are in a relationship happily, who are in a relationship unhappily and who are in a relationship with mixed feelings. Having been in all these groups at different times myself, I think that being in a relationship unhappily is the worse of all. So I hope that everyone who feels unhappily stuck with someone else snaps out of it and would end the miserable relationship soon.
The key here it seems to me is the word HAPPY. Who cares if one is single or in a relationship, what matters more is whether one is overall happy and fullfilled at where one is at the end of the day. But what makes one happy? That’s for each of us to figure out I guess.
As for the discourse on bias against being single or being in a relationship, it somehow reminded me of this quote (supposedly from Walk Whitman but can’t find the original) from Naomi Wolf’s Promiscuities “How can I value femaleness if I do not value maleness equally? How can I ask a man to celebrate my difference, and the way I choose to express it, if I do not celebrate his?” The dynamics between females and males are not quite the same as between singles and couples (for lack of better term here) but you got my point:)
[…] of ”success” for us grad students/new scholars. (Tangentially, this reminds me of the Other Lisa’s comment about her experience of stigmatization-because-married while being in grad school — related, […]