Love in Solitude

My previous essay led me to the solitude I know, and know to return to. It helped me think out some things, but it felt unfinished.

What happens to solitude when someone else enters?

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I grew up with solitude. Partly context, partly my nature. I spoke to the moon, found friendship in flowers, and learned that cats were my people. I learned early I could be my own company, in a world of wonder.

Then I married. And I learned what solitude had been protecting me from.

I left my marriage when I was 32. It was the beginning of choosing myself. A difficult road lay ahead, but it led my son and me somewhere good, somewhere meaningful. I wanted to know who I would become without the constraints of a life not for me. I wanted my son to witness that in the woman who raises him.

Be true to yourself, I wanted him to know.

As shown, not as told.

Being married to a man ill-equipped to see me, or to understand my world, never mind love me, had not been the way.

The absence of relational safety with men over the years deepened my solitude. I chose men who came with unspoken conditions attached. I sought approval.

I would have to be someone I was not.

Be true.

With years of therapy, trauma work, and the gradual unmasking of a self that had been suffocating under decades of layered adaptation — so woven into my being there had been no room to breathe, to be — something emerged. Each new breath was relief, grief, and fear of the unfamiliar.

I took my space.

Thank you, solitude.

Once I had taken my space, I met someone who offered relational safety in a romantic context. It was different this time. What I noticed was my solitude did not diminish. It became the ground for something I hadn’t experienced before with a man: genuine co-regulation.

My nervous system did what it cannot do alone. It co-regulated. It settled not only from within but also between, on shared ground. No diminishment of myself. Just two people, each capable of their own company, choosing not to be alone. Each seeing the other clearly.

The choosing matters. And it complicates things in a way that took time to fully feel.

Relational safety, unlike solitude, is contingent.

Solitude, once found, travels with you. It asks nothing of anyone else. Relational safety depends on the other person remaining present; on context, or circumstances neither control. The nervous system knows this. Every genuine intimacy carries risk. Not as pessimism, as simple fact. To be with someone is to be inside the possibility of a goodbye.

The nervous system carries what it has learned. That safety associates with aloneness or unpredictability. That love and loss are structurally linked. This is not abstract. It lives in the body as a bracing that resurfaces even in the presence of someone safe. An old prediction before the new evidence registers.

Found solitude is not the opposite of relational safety. It is its necessary infrastructure. Without real internal ground or the capacity to return to oneself when the contingency of intimacy makes itself felt, relational safety becomes something to cling to rather than something to inhabit.

My nervous system still reaches before it remembers. I have said goodbye.

The goodbye lives in me still, unresolved. I let it live. But underneath is something steady. The self that exists independent of whether it is witnessed by another.

I am intact.

This love did not exist to fill an emptiness or to comfort fear. It existed with the fullness of a self that has learned to be at home in its own company.

If love returns, it won’t feel like bracing for pain.

It will feel like recognition.

Me and another. With love between.