Alone

The Bakla Review, aka TBR, left the following comment after reading “I’m Mister Lonely” post:

A friend once told me: our tragedy is that we’ve become experts at being alone. You know, that I’ve learned how to be happy by myself. I used to say, “Ha! Good for me!” I still do sometimes. But is that a good thing, really? Or a fatal flaw? Sometimes I think those people who just can’t live without a partner may be on to something. They seem to be embracing (and feeling) a kind of life I’ll never know, probably because I’ve “learned” to. Is it a death of some kind of innocence? Did we kill it?

* * * * *

I always believed in the idea of moderation and the mid-ground principle.

In as much as a lone wolf sounds like a throwback to the nomad era, having a “people-who-need-people” people can also be grating, especially if it’s the “I can’t live without someone beside me!” Okay, not grating, just pathetic. Extreme independence can be as sad as extreme dependence.

Thus, the wonderful middle ground beckons.

But of course learning to live a life of moderation takes, well, a moderate amount of time. And the road to moderation is fraught with swinging from one extreme to the next. So you ask yourself: Would you rather be someone who can be alone, or someone who has to be with someone? I’d put my bet on the former. I’d rather hook up with someone who chooses to be with me because he just wants to, not because he needs to.