I’ve lived alone for a year – here’s what I wish I knew earlier

My solo living anniversary snuck up on me quietly. I’d done the paperwork to renew the lease months before. I only remembered my move-in date because it happened to coincide with my friend’s birthday; messaging her sparked a recollection of doing the same thing 12 months earlier, surrounded by cardboard boxes and bits of flatpack. So I celebrated it pretty quietly too – by cooking a nice dinner, burning a posh candle I’d been given years ago, and setting up some fairy lights around my shelves. Oh, and by sending a monthly meter reading to my utilities provider (no one else was going to do it).

But I wanted to mark the occasion in some way, for two reasons. The first is that when you’re a single woman in her thirties, who isn’t a homeowner, parent, fiancee or wife, it can feel like you spend your life celebrating other people’s milestones and trying to squeeze yourself into the spaces in between. And the second reason? Living alone happily is, I’ve come to believe, a bit of a skill, and it’s one that I’m proud to have honed a little over the past year.

Of course, it’s also a privilege. I’m only able to (just about) manage it financially because I moved back to Merseyside a few years ago, after sharing London flats with friends, housemates and assorted rodents throughout my twenties; having done the sums, I know I couldn’t afford to rent alone in a similar place in pricier Manchester, the next city along from Liverpool (not that I’d want to, for deep-seated regional rivalry reasons – apols, Andy Burnham).

There’s no getting around the fact that living solo is brutally expensive. It’s not just the fact most one-beds are priced on the assumption that there’s two of you: it’s fixed costs for broadband, the TV licence, the standing charges on your energy bills. It’s the single-person discount on your council tax that knocks only 25 per cent off the payment, rather than halving it. It’s the reality that, for all the zeitgeisty chatter about how being on your own can be empowering, in practical terms, life is very much set up to be navigated as a pair.

And because of that, it is very easy to slip into a mode of thinking that positions living alone as a sort of stop-gap situation or consolation prize, something that happens en route to coupledom rather than being a legitimate end in itself (is it any wonder, when you’re constantly seen as lacking for not being one of two?). From there, it’s even easier to fall into what I’ve come to call “‘only me’-ism”. As in: should I bother making a proper meal if it’s only me that’s going to eat it? Do I really need to put the heating on yet if it’s only me that’s feeling chilly? And should I go to the effort of properly hanging up my prints and pictures when it’s only me that’s really looking at them, and I don’t even know how long I’ll stay here for?

The answer to all of those questions, of course, is yes, and realising this to be the case was probably my first step to enjoying living alone. In my house-sharing years, I’d surreptitiously hoarded screenshots of the interiors I loved –  nothing particularly avant garde, just tall bookshelves draped with plants, gallery walls and posters from Swedish designers – but imposing my own taste on communal rooms didn’t feel right. Plus, aesthetics were a secondary concern when we were spending so much time trying to rid the walls of black mould.

open image in gallery

Now, though, I can make my space look exactly how I want it to look. For me, that means lots of plants, lots of patterns and multiple colour-coordinated bookshelves (yes, it’s a bit basic; no, I don’t care). In Arrangements in Blue, a memoir-slash-manifesto about solo life, the writer Amy Key suggests that the “creation of [her] own private domestic space is a kind of romance”, which is, I think, a wonderful way to reimagine the act of making a home your own. She also notes that living alone means she hasn’t “had [her] taste neutralised into an unthreatening benign palette by the need for compromise”, another sentiment I love. Of course, I went a bit over the top at first. High on my own ability to rearrange knick-knacks and plonk dried flowers in vases, I told my friends I was considering training as an interior designer. I’d almost definitely been streaming too much Interior Design Masters at the time – when you live alone, you can watch whatever you wish.

The irony of living alone is that however much effort you pour into making your home feel right, spending time outside of that home is incredibly important too. I launched straight into living solo while working remotely from home, which is a bit like turning up to, say, an advanced dance class with no prior training and expecting that you’ll miraculously be able to manage the moves – an intense way to start things off, and arguably a little bit foolish. I soon learnt that my work-life situation means that I need to be scrupulous about planning my weeks to ensure that I don’t get stir-crazy, or get trapped in my own head.

Structure is vital, and so is fostering your own sense of community, whatever that might look like. When I first moved here, I was training for a half-marathon (yes, another thirtysomething cliche) which meant lots of long solo runs; I was spending plenty of time with my own thoughts and the Pet Shop Boys’ greatest hits for company.  Since then, I’ve realised that group classes are a much better fit for me, whether that’s pilates at a welcoming city centre studio or the weights session at the women-only gym down the road, where you can chat in between rounds.

Essentially, if socialising isn’t an incidental part of your day, you probably need to go out of your way to work it in (and ignore the cynical side of your brain that tells you that doing so is naff and try-hard). Right now, I have more hobbies than I’ve had since I was a very earnest eight-year-old. I’ve started going to art classes again, having previously put down the oil pastels when the invigilator announced the end of my GCSE practical exam, half my lifetime ago. I’m part of two book clubs, because my instinctive favourite activity, reading, isn’t exactly sociable. In a roundabout way, living alone has made me more conscious of the fact that my time is my own, to fill with stuff I enjoy. And if I don’t make things happen, meter readings and utility bill wrangling included, no one else will.

Doing this has allowed me to meet lots of new people, including other solo dwellers. When you’re always being told, implicitly or explicitly, that your life doesn’t quite fit into the expected paradigm, it’s important to spend some of your time with those in similar situations. This helps you to sense-check the voice in the back of your head telling you that you’re some sort of anomalous outlier. Recently, though, I must admit that I’ve mainly become pretty jealous of their pets. My family’s allergies mean that a cat is out of the question, but my goal for 2025 is to adopt a dog.

When people learn that you live on your own, the most common follow-up question is: but don’t you get really lonely? The honest answer is yes, a little bit, sometimes. But right now, the independence, the freedom and the sense of fulfilment that comes with doing things on your own terms just about outweighs that. And frankly, I’ve felt far, far lonelier when I was stuck in a terrible Spare Room houseshare, dreaming of an escape route and a living room of one’s own.