One Is the Loneliest Number

Often on my way to work, I see pairs of birds - usually doves - sitting on power lines. My grandmother told me that they mate for life. When I see these pairs of doves, it makes me think of how the entire world seems paired, while I am alone. Oh I know, I know. Poor, poor pitiful me. Morose. Self-pity. All of that. But I still feel it - the feeling of being different, of being an outsider because I don't have a mate, a partner, a significant other.

I know lots of people who are alone, but most of them - my mother, my sister, my friend Debby - are alone because their mates died. It's not like they never had a mate, a husband, whatever... at all. Like me. Oh I've had relationships. None last more than four years. To me, they don't count. I never really had a life partner.

Oh don't get the wrong idea. I don't dwell on this a lot these days. There was a time when I did, though. From my mid-30s until I was 41 and met T, I was consumed with the fact that I was alone when my friends seemed all coupled. I had a desperate fear that I would wind up alone if I didn't hurry up and find a girlfriend while I was still young enough to attract someone. I was so obsessed by it that I got really depressed and had to start taking Prozac. My fears were only confirmed when one girl I really liked told me she couldn't even consider a relationship with me because I was too old for her. (She didn't put it quite that bluntly, but it wasn't too far from that.) I was 37 at the time and at my peak of attractiveness.

Anyway, I did dwell on it on those days. Even lost my faith over it. I prayed and prayed every day for God to, as Joni Mitchell said, "send me somebody who's strong and somewhat sincere." But she never came, and so I gave up talking to God or even believing in him.

I thought about this a lot back then, but for the most part, I haven't thought much about it for quite some time. Until I started seeing those damn birds.