On Feeling At Home

What six years of living alone has taught me about sharing my space again

There’s a particular pleasure in living alone, which is a good thing, I guess, considering I’ve been doing so for almost six years. If you’d told me when I first moved into my current place that I would eventually come to love living by myself, I probably would have found it hard to believe.

You see, from birth, I’d more or less cohabited my entire life. My family home was tiny and filled with souls. Growing up, this used to frustrate me greatly. There was always somebody there. Privacy was scarce, silence even scarcer, and the idea of having an entire room, let alone an entire home, to yourself seemed like the ultimate luxury.

But it was also a house filled with love. With the benefit of age, I can look back on those years with enormous fondness and appreciate how lucky I was to grow up surrounded by a family who loved each other. The noise that irritated me then is something I can feel strangely nostalgic for now.

When I eventually left home, I moved in with boyfriends. This gave me some of the freedom I had always wanted and, importantly, the chance to create the kind of home I had spent years imagining.

From the very beginning of my nest flying, I knew exactly what I wanted. A home that was warm, inviting, deeply comfortable, stylish and mine. While other eighteen-year-olds were preparing to move into student halls at university, I was relishing the prospect of making a home. I wanted to choose furniture and paint walls. I wanted cupboards filled with proper glasses and lamps in all the right corners. It’s something that has always been deeply in me.

And so, for the next twelve years, I made homes while always sharing them with a significant other.

With my second serious relationship, this was pretty easy. He admired my taste and was mostly happy to let me make our home as I pleased. Over the years, we learnt how to live together. We discovered each other’s irritations and peculiarities and eventually found a gentle rhythm that allowed us to coexist in relative peace.

Then, in 2020, our relationship ended, and at thirty years old I was faced with living alone for the first time in my life.

I found myself an apartment in a smart part of Edinburgh. It wasn’t exactly what I had been looking for, but it had good bones, and I knew almost immediately that I could make something of it. There were rooms to paint, furniture to find and all the usual things that have always excited me about starting again somewhere new.

The problem was that home is rarely just a place, or a collection of objects.

So often, home is a person.

And I was now living completely alone.

It took me the guts of two years to become properly comfortable with that. There were evenings when the silence I had spent so much of my childhood longing for felt deafening. Coming home to an empty apartment took some getting used to. There was nobody to tell about the inconsequential thing that had happened that afternoon, nobody in the other room, nobody coming home later.

Slowly, though, something changed.

The silence stopped feeling quite so much like loneliness and started to feel like peace. I became used to my own company. I stopped seeing an evening alone as something that needed to be filled. This apartment became less associated with the life I had lost and more associated with the one I was building.

So when I say there is a particular pleasure in living alone, I mean it wholeheartedly. It just took me a while to discover it.

When you live alone, everything remains exactly where you left it. The bathroom is always free. Nobody eats the thing in the fridge you had been thinking about all afternoon. If a lamp is switched on, it is because you switched it on, and if there is a wet towel abandoned somewhere inappropriate, there is nobody else to blame.

You can eat when you like, sleep when you like and spend an entire Saturday rearranging furniture without having to explain yourself to anybody. You can come home and close the door on the world. After enough years of it, you become so accustomed to the freedom that it is difficult to imagine living any other way.

But recently I’ve had the pleasure of seeing my home through somebody else’s eyes.

And I’d forgotten how nice that can be.

Their shoes by the door. Their toothbrush next to mine. Their body stretched out on the sofa. The dishwasher suddenly filled with twice as many glasses. Cooking for two instead of one. Waking up and remembering there is somebody else in the apartment. Having to lower the shower head after they’ve used it.

I could go on. The list is endless.

They are such small things that you barely notice them while they are happening, but there is something lovely about seeing traces of another person appearing amongst your own.

I’ve always created my homes with enjoyment in mind. Of course I care about how things look. I can spend an unreasonable amount of time deciding where a chair should sit or whether a particular shade of brown is warm enough. But comfort has always mattered to me more.

I want people to walk into my home and relax.

I want sofas you can actually lie on, chairs you can sit in for hours and rooms that don’t make you feel as though you ought to be on your best behaviour. I have never understood the appeal of a show home. Beautiful things are there to be enjoyed. A home should be lived in.

I entertain frequently, and I love it. I love having friends around my dining table, cooking for people, lighting the candles and seeing every chair occupied. There is a particular atmosphere that happens when a home is full of people enjoying themselves, and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of it.

But having guests is different.

When somebody comes for dinner, you are hosting. You prepare for their arrival. You offer them a drink. You cook. You fuss. Eventually the evening reaches its natural conclusion, coats are collected, goodbyes are said and the front door closes behind them.

There is something much more intimate about somebody staying long enough to gradually stop behaving like a guest.

At first, you show them where everything is. A few days later, they no longer need to ask.

They know where the glasses live. They know how the coffee machine works. They help themselves to something from the fridge. They leave something on the bathroom counter without wondering whether it is in the way. They disappear into another room. They fall asleep on the sofa.

And eventually you stop feeling any responsibility to entertain them.

That, I think, is the bit I had forgotten.

There is a lovely ease to being in the same home as somebody without needing to be doing the same thing. One of you can be reading while the other is answering emails. Somebody can be cooking while the other wanders in and out of the kitchen. There can be stretches of silence that nobody feels compelled to fill.

They are simply there.

Seeing somebody relax so freely in my home recently, and treat it as their own for a few days, gave me an unexpected amount of pleasure. Not because it made me suddenly dislike living alone. Quite the opposite. I think the years I have spent learning to enjoy my own company have made me appreciate the distinction.

I no longer need another person in my home for it to feel like home.

Perhaps that is why it feels so nice when I want them there.

For almost six years, this apartment has been the place where I have learnt how to be alone. I have painted it, decorated it, rearranged it and filled it with things I love. I have spent countless evenings here by myself and many more surrounded by friends. Somewhere along the way, it became unquestionably mine.

And I still adore living alone.

I love the independence of it. I love closing my front door and knowing that everything on the other side belongs to the little life I have made for myself. I worked hard to become comfortable with my own company, and I don’t think I will ever again be frightened by the prospect of being on my own.

But perhaps there is another pleasure to be found in having a home entirely of your own.

Watching somebody else become comfortable in it.

Cooking for two.

Finding another toothbrush beside yours.

Becoming accustomed to those shoes by the door.

And, after they’ve gone, noticing that they’re not there.

Nicolas x