A Solitary Woman (Quiet Place To Live Book 1)

More than women have enjoyed the solo wedding experience since it launched last year, according to Akai Natsumi of Cerca Travel. Not everyone wants to get married. But many women still want to wear the wedding dress that they dreamt about as a child. Many women feel very gratified and impressed by the experience, they often shed tears. Rise of 'dark tourism' in Japan unveiled.

The desire to be solitary is not a new concept in Japan, a nation famously home to an estimated 3. Hand-in-hand with the rise of the solitary Japanese are shrinking marriage and birth rates, prompting the government to wring its hands over how to encourage younger generations to find partners in order to avoid a demographic timebomb.

The nation, however, appears to be resolutely relationship-shy , with one in four unmarried Japanese men aged 30 and over revealed to be virgins according to statistics compiled by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. Accessibility links Skip to article Skip to navigation. Tuesday 18 December By Danielle Demetriou , Tokyo.

Rise of 'dark tourism' in Japan unveiled The desire to be solitary is not a new concept in Japan, a nation famously home to an estimated 3. The wealth generated by economic development and the social security provided by modern welfare states have enabled the spike. One reason that more people live alone than ever before is that they can afford to. According to Durkheim, this cult grew out of the transition from traditional rural communities to modern industrial cities. Now the cult of the individual has intensified far beyond what Durkheim envisioned.

Not long ago, someone who was dissatisfied with their spouse and wanted a divorce had to justify that decision. Today if someone is not fulfilled by their marriage, they have to justify staying in it, because there is cultural pressure to be good to one's self.

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Another driving force is the communications revolution, which has allowed people to experience the pleasures of social life even when they're living alone. And people are living longer than ever before — or, more specifically, because women often outlive their spouses by decades, rather than years — and so ageing alone has become an increasingly common experience.

Although each person who develops the capacity to live alone finds it an intensely personal experience, my research suggests that some elements are widely shared. Today, young solitaires actively reframe living alone as a mark of distinction and success. They use it as a way to invest time in their personal and professional growth. Such investments in the self are necessary, they say, because contemporary families are fragile, as are most jobs, and in the end each of us must be able to depend on ourselves. On the one hand, strengthening the self means undertaking solitary projects and learning to enjoy one's own company.

But on the other it means making great efforts to be social: Living alone and being alone are hardly the same, yet the two are routinely conflated. Research shows that it's the quality, not the quantity of social interactions that best predicts loneliness. There's ample support for this conclusion outside the laboratory. There is also good evidence that people who never marry are no less content than those who do. According to research, they are significantly happier and less lonely than people who are widowed or divorced.

I found some measure of all of these things.

Colm Toibin, 56

On balance, however, I came away convinced that the problems related to living alone should not define the condition, because the great majority of those who go solo have a more rich and varied experience. Sometimes they feel lonely, anxious and uncertain about whether they would be happier in another arrangement. The rise of living alone has produced significant social benefits, too. There's good reason to believe that people who live alone in cities consume less energy than if they coupled up and decamped to pursue a single-family home. Ultimately, it's too early to say how any particular society will respond to either the problems or the opportunities generated by this extraordinary social transformation.

After all, our experiment with living alone is still in its earliest stages, and we are just beginning to understand how it affects our own lives, as well as those of our families, communities and cities. No one told me when I was small that I could live like this. On Saturday I wake at six and relishing the day ahead. I teach on Mondays and Tuesdays; I have to reread a novel for each class and take notes on it.

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Nothing makes me happier than the thought of this. All day I will read and take notes. But normally I go nowhere except to the fridge if I am hungry to see what's there, or to the sofa to lie down if my back is tired, or to the rocking chair if I feel a need to rock. Normally there's not much in the fridge. In the kitchen there is an oven I have never opened. They are all over the apartment.

That is the best part. No one sighs about books and notebooks piled up. All of the notebooks have stories half-written in them, or stray sentences in search of a home, or musings that are none of anyone's business. If I like, I can go to one of them and add some paragraphs.

Or worry that someone has, in my absence, opened one of my notebooks and found that they don't like the tone of what is written there. No one told me when I was small that there would come a time in my life where people would be judged by the quantity and quality of take-out menus for local restaurants. And that I could, without consulting anyone, at any time, make a phone call, order some food, and it would soon arrive at my door.

And then there is music when night falls. There is no one to question my sanity, my taste in music, or say: Did we not hear that yesterday? And then there is the small question of alcohol. No one told me when I was a teenager that there would come a time when I would not bother drinking.

No one told me that when Saturday night came, I would long to talk to no one and wish to go to bed early, and that my only moment of pure and capricious pleasure would be taking a book to bed that was not for class the next week. Otherwise, my life as a nun is a lesson to others, a pure example of good example. It has its rewards in the morning when I wake in silence with a clear head, ready for more. What with a childhood amid a vast family, then the convent, I was rarely alone. One set of grandparents lived next door, the others across the road.

Many aunts, uncles and cousins were only a yell away. The convent was black with nuns, its dormitories and classrooms packed with other girls. I left home when I was Almost immediately, I fell in love with a man who was, vaguely, married. An open marriage, it would be called today. I was 26, and I have lived alone since. I very much liked being in love and repeated it all too frequently. But I also hated it. My chubby legs are battling to get out: Often it was boredom: When I was in love and thought of marriage, I always came to feel like that child in the pram.

Tussling with this incapacity came to an abrupt end once I started to work. I had been raised to think of work as a prelude to husband, children, home. Once I started Virago , in , and then, from , working at Chatto , too, boredom vanished, and the days and years fled by.

What do I like about living alone? The greatest blessing is the number of friendships you can indulge in, the number of people you can love. This can become frenetic but you can always cross through a night in the diary with BED in capital letters and there is no one to say nay to that. I can decorate my house to suit my eccentricities — not everyone wants to live with jugs and thousands of books. Every object in my home reminds me of one loved person or another. Knowing all my friends are dotted around, going about their business but available at the end of a phone is enough.

There are, and have been, great tediums. Men — Auberon Waugh and Lord Longford spring to mind — have occasionally insisted to my face that I was lesbian.

I felt this to be an insult to women who are lesbians as well as to myself. But there is so much to do, and to think about, and so many friends to love. They are my rock. Having lived alone for the past six years, sharing my home with anything bigger than a cat is not something I enjoy.

This doesn't make me an oddball. When Superman needs a break from saving the planet, some time to himself, where does he go? His Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic Circle. I have what I like to call my Flat of Solitude in north London. My solitude is not total. She knows where I keep the sugar.

I know to put the toilet seat down. I know she checks my internet history. It's a well-oiled machine. A change that will involve me no longer eating packets of microwavable rice and soy sauce for every meal. The spectre of co-habitation is looming on the horizon. There are, of course, some things that I won't miss about solo living.

It's to do with my Wii. I am living alone for the first time at the age of Until now, most of the changes that arrived with age were mercifully gradual — the need to turn the television volume a bit higher, say, and the first few grey hairs — but this change has been huge, sudden and, for me, cataclysmic. All my life I have been surrounded by people.

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As a child, I grew up in an extended family. At college, I lived and worked in a lively and energetic community.