ETHICAL

THE ETH ICAL SLUT
and grew together as they went along, with partnerships forming
and separating and reforming on their own timetables, and everyone
responsible for the whole gang of children. This adaptive arrangement
worked very well for quite a few years-not forever, but for a good,
happy, memorable long time.
Dossie writes:
Single Soliloquy
Someone at a workshop once asked me: "Don't you get lonely, living
alone?" I was startled, and it took me a second to understand that he
wasn't trying to make me feel bad. What an ache he innocently opened
in me. I had to say: "Yes, of course I get lonely." And yet ...
I have lived about half my adult life single. Some things are hard to
do by yourself. I recently bought my first house. How I yearned for a
partner in that scary endeavor! But I managed, somehow. I dealt with
my fears, and with realtors and mortgage brokers and roofers and
inspectors, and now I have a sweet little home in the woods: like me,
mine to share with others, when and how I choose.
Nothing lasts forever. Someone asked me if I feared being alone in
my oid age. I am now in my sixties, and you bet I'm afraid of that. I
saw my mother live to be ninety-three in the house she shared with my
father during their thirty-seven-year marriage: only he died of cancer
when they were sixty-five.
Nothing lasts forever. I still crave the thrill of falling in love, the
dream of a romance so magical it could never fade. And I know better.
When I have fallen in love in the past, the long-term outcome has been
a crapshoot: sometimes great, sometimes disastrous. After eight such
relationships, I must admit I have no idea how to predict the future of
any passion: whether we will grow into a solid and sustaining kind of
love, or whether we will grow to hate each other.
Now I am a person who prefers burning passion to sweet reason.
And I don't consider myself very good at compromise. But my compromise
for my own survival is to learn to live single and to make a very
good life of it: a lifelong commitment to myself.
Long ago, I thought of singlehood as being "between old men":
some condition ot waiting for the next one-and-only to show up. It
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