On Love + Red Lipstick

Some thoughts on being alone + being in love, red lipstick for Zooms and dinner dates, and this Friday—a new ATA Playlist:)

The other week I was reading my friend Shani’s newsletter Cheaper Than Therapy and she was talking about the topic of solitude…a “sickening amount of it” as she put it. It made me start thinking about being alone. Or, more accurately, remembering it.

I lived in my first (and tiniest) studio apartment—aka: The Doll House—for the entire decade of my ‘30s. I was nearly always single, and on the rare occasion someone slept over, I might have been wondering (enthusiastically?) when they were going to leave. Despite a nagging hum of societal/generational box-checking, never not there in the background, I began to love being alone. Even craving it…and I frequently felt guilty and self-conscious because for a good chunk of that formidable “prime partnership potential” decade, I almost never wanted to do anything else. After reading Shani’s essay, I dropped a comment at the end and immediately regretted it. Mainly because I wondered if I was just waxing romantic/nostalgic and not actually remembering being alone the way that it was when I was actually living it.

Since the digi-sphere has a clever way of distorting what we say and how we say it/type it, I called Shani to explain. But as we were talking, I realized that I didn’t have to. She already knew what I meant. About deeply loving those years of solitude, not knowing exactly when/if they would end.

And then loving them even more.

My closet doors will always be the home of amateur decorating with magazine tears + ephemera…a tiny reminder of when I lived alone.

Photograph by Jen Steele

There’s a reason I’m always drawn to May Sarton’s “House By the Sea” or the movie Under the Tuscan Sun…personal stories about women who escape to an unknown place and end up excavating a piece of themselves they didn’t even know was there.