Now that I live as a single person because my wife is in a nursing home, I notice that there are certain disadvantages to that status. Disadvantages of a very practical nature that you are not aware of at all if you live with someone. I give some examples.
Let me start with something that belongs to the equally inescapable and indispensable rituals of life: eating. Eating together has something cozy unless the atmosphere has already been ruined for other reasons. You talk and you taste, one stimulates the other.
But if you eat on your own, you are mainly busy chewing and swallowing. A fairly monotonous activity that you quickly make to the newspaper or the TV. That is again at the expense of your attention to the food, so that the food turns into a kind of machine exercise of your jaws, without much squat or taste. You will be ready within ten minutes. Just clear!
In my case, only life also leads to an extremely annoying type of control coercion. Before I leave my house, I check at least three times if all the lights are off and all windows closed. Once outside, the question nevertheless arises as to whether I also closed the skylight in the kitchen to prevent the cat from visiting.
Back. Light light tight, of course. Again outside, now on the corner of the street, I am coming to mind that I should have turned the key of the front door twice in the lock, as my wife always did for the sake of safety. So back again? No, Géévéédéé, this gets crazy. Stays: vague feeling of guilt that only evaporates very slowly.
In short, what you miss is the shared sense of responsibility of the past. You inspected each other’s clothes before departure with a quick can, one walked through the living room, the other did the kitchen – and you were gone.
The control coercion has replaced the social control that is an essential component of living together. You have become the only one who is responsible for everything that happens within your reach.
This also applies especially to your own body. Now I come to a rather intimate area and I have to warn the reader that reading further can be dangerous for his or her (!) Well -being.
There is a pimple on my back. I notice it in a spot in blood in my undershirt, it also feels a bit painful. I try to trace the place in the mirror, squeeze my upper body in all kinds of impossible turns, bending over and back, get another mirror, but the pimple continues to be hidden. When I try to reach him over my shoulder, there is a cramp in my upper arm.
What to do? You used to shout: “Do you want to come and have a look?” Now nobody listens anymore. To the neighbors then? I am on a reasonable good foot with them, but I can hardly ring the bell and ask the neighbor: “Do you want to take a look at my bare back?” Perhaps it is a prudish kind of embarrassment and there are readers who would even find it very exciting – but not seen me. But what then? Have your children come from far away, call friends?
To the doctor then? But if it advises: keeping good clean, a new plaster every day – who has to do that? God help me, but I can’t achieve that either.