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I spent most of today at my new house, directing the movers and then unpacking box after box of items: glasses, dishes, books, clothes—even someone who tries to continually pare down, as I do now, can accumulate more than she realizes. A was around for the first part of the morning, carrying boxes out from the car, then went to the office, leaving me with the fellas.
“Does this go in the master bedroom?” one mover kept saying, and I have to admit I blushed a little as I said, “That goes in my room, end of the hall.”
Four years ago January, I was ending a 25+ year relationship, a marriage that had gone sour like an expired carton of milk. When I moved into what I called “the post-divorce apartment” near Stanford, I made a point of telling my friends—and the people I dated—I would probably never live with anyone ever again. A couple years later, I’d relented enough to make jokes—and talk seriously—about buying a place to live with my best female friend, but I didn’t do it—the whole idea of compromising with others in order to live together seemed not worth it, as any divorced former mother of a teenage boy might attest.
And so here I am, November 2008, embracing my own Red State/Blue State moment of change. After all those statements about never living with someone, after wanting to make sure my independence was something I wouldn’t (once again) mistakenly give away, A & I are moving in together. (You know it’s real when you mix your books, and your pots and pans, and actually have discussions about which artwork to hang, as opposed to hanging whatever you want.)
But that’s where the room of my own comes in. In this cozy little house, already filled with books, I not only have a (shared) office, I have my own space. My room, my way, with a door that closes tight, good lighting and lots of my favorite things. When Virginia Woolf said a woman needed “a room of her own,” I don’t think she meant that a committed couple that moves into together should each have their own space, but that’s exactly what we’ve done.
Hanging at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, I shared these thoughts with a twitter friend who told me she was on her second marriage, to a man much older. “Honey, of course we have our own rooms!” she said, raising her eyebrow, “After all, we’re grown-ups!”
“What do you mean?” I responded. And Mary (not her real name) explained that while she and Charles (not his real name) were deeply in love and happy after 6 years of marriage, they both still wanted their own space. “It’s not just that sometimes he snores,” she concluded, “It’s that there are some thing we each want our own way—and that’s okay.”
For me, coming out of the post-suburban lifestyle back east into the relative freedom of California, these are new ideas. When my 46-year old friend Annie married her 55 year old new boyfriend John after a three month courtship 5 years ago, they set up house together in the traditional way, just like two 20-somethings going for the master suite in the starter home. But many of the older couples I know who live together—married, or not—have living arrangements that demonstrate a very different understanding of personal space.
And of course, that personal space reflects different ideas of personal freedom. While A and I have become a very committed couple in the 18 months we’ve been together, we also value our individuality. Keeping my own room is a way to demonstrate that, as close as we are, I don’t want to merge too fully.
And yet, no question but that we’re meshed. We go to the gym together, we cook together, we walk together, we see friends together—there’s a huge chunk of my life that has nothing to do with A—and yet he’s crept into so many places in my world, and vice versa. It’s gotten so I can walk around the new ‘hood and I know which of the big Victorians he’d like best—and then we walk together, and yep, those are the ones he notices.
But maybe the difference, this time around, is that this bonding is a gift. It’s not just a gift that we found one another; it’s my time and attention that is
