Hungry Runner Girl, a blog I read fairly regularly, is getting divorced and she recently made a list about the positives of being single again.
I absolutely love the idea of being happy with and seeing the positives in whatever your situation may be.
So I thought I'd try to make a list of the great things about living the single life for almost a week for me. Some of the things I thought would be good have turned out to be a wash or just wishful thinking.
Having time for going out with my friends (particularly gal time) would be great, but the yoga challenge is still dominating my weeknights, so my routine really hasn't changed at all -- it's just that now I get into an empty bed. If he were gone and I wasn't doing all the yoga, I would have taken advantage of making social plans more. If I can squeeze in yoga from 12-1:30 today, and then volunteer from 4-7 tonight, I have an invite to a woman from book club's house for wine and snacks -- ladies only, her husband and daughter have some outing planned. So I might try to fit that into the day, but really, it will be my only social evening event the whole time he's gone.
It's kind of fun to be messy, but it is also already irritating me. I haven't been making my bed, which is funny, because I always made my bed when I was single. Well, I shouldn't say always. My mom would argue a lot about that! But I started in college because I lived in the dorm and it was just weird to hang out with friends with an unmade bed. But now that I'm alone for a few days (and busy), I haven't been making the bed, I've been leaving dishes in the sink, I've left the blender on the counter, etc. I never do that stuff when my husband is home because (a) it drives him crazy, (b) when he is equally messy, it accumulates very fast and the house gets very cluttered, and (c) he generally cleans up after me, which makes me feel guilty. If I leave dishes in the sink when he's home, either he assumes the dishwasher is full and stacks his too (and then it's double the work to clean up) or he loads my dishes and his own (like I said, then I feel guilty; we are both competent working adults so I pretty firmly believe that we should each clean up after ourselves, but if I want to wait until after work to load my coffee cup, sometimes it's too late and it's been done for me). I guess the guilt free mess is kind of nice, but like I said, having a mess kind of drives me crazy too.
Granny panties are fine I guess, but they aren't worth the lack of sex, and they don't look right with fitted clothing anyway, so it's not like I really get to wear them even when he's out of town.
Unlimited red onions on my salad should be a bonus to being alone, but in reality, he never seems to care even if I eat a ton of onions (as long as I brush my teeth and/or he eats them too). So I am not really eating more onions than usual.
Sole control of the remote would be great, but the yoga challenge means no evening TV (and I usually get the remote in the mornings anyway, since I'm usually alone and even when he's home, he doesn't care), and most of the shows I do watch are ones we watch together, so even on Saturday when sole control of the remote could be fun, I can't watch anything that we watch together.
Not having to shave my legs would also be a single treat maybe if it weren't yoga challenge month. But stubbly legs during "Japanese ham sandwich" would drive me crazy and kind of gross me out. And since my husband has never complained about stubbly legs (I credit his ex with setting the bar low on that, it's nice he doesn't care), in reality, leg shaving is happening at the same pace as last week, which means pretty much daily during yoga challenge, about double or triple the usual rate.
Having the bed to myself isn't really a bonus because I pretty much sleep in the same place where I'd sleep otherwise.
Basically, the bonuses to living alone for a little while for me pretty much come down to two things: uninterrupted sleep and absolute control of the thermostat.
The uninterrupted sleep is actually more accurately characterized as half-interrupted sleep. Because obviously, if I have to pee, I still wake up. Now it's just no waking up when someone else gets up! Or when someone else tosses and turns. Or when someone else snores or has a weird dream or gets a text or gets called to work.
The uninterrupted sleep is even more lovely because of sole control of the thermostat. We're lucky in that we're both similar in temperature preferences (we both would rather be warm than cold, and generally keep our house warmer than most people do), but having a preference difference of just five degrees is still somewhat significant. My ideal sleeping temp is about 3 degrees warmer than our compromise (and his is about 2 degrees cooler). So now I come home from yoga to a warm house, and then get into a warm bed, turn the ceiling fan on, and feel just like I'm on a tropical island in the sun with a lovely breeze.
So there, making the most of my present situation!
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