Pain produces insight and energy but not balance or detachment. Getting through a lonely evening like a patient surmounting a fever, and praising myself for not succumbing to the worst excesses of self-pity, was surely not a sign of indomitable spirit. If that was the best I could do, I might as well get married! At those words my back stiffened. I'd be damned and gone to hell first. I saw that more was involved here than a simple matter of pleasure or pain. I had begun to have a stake in living alone.

In 1984,I wrote a polemic, "Against Marriage," in which I argued that we marry not for the adventure of self-discovery or a shared inner life, but for emotional solace of a primitive sort. What comes with the solace is insularity, an amateurish relation to solitude, and hard questions about the inner self that go unasked for years at a time. Fear of loneliness, I said, is at the heart of the matter. To secure against a fear one must move into it, live with it, face it down. To live without love or domestic intimacy, I generously allowed, was indeed to be half alive, but, I concluded, what we want now is to be real to ourselves. The two-shall-become-as-one myth is no longer useful. Living consciously is the business of our lives. If one cannot win over loneliness, at least one can learn that it's not fatal. Such knowledge becomes a strength, an ally, a weapon.

Writing these thoughts became my comfort and my necessity. To write clearly on the subject, I felt, was to be renewed if not redeemed. I did not notice the rhetoric riding these pages, swelling their sentences, confining thought. I had persuaded myself that to write the problem out was to put it behind me. Not only me, as it turned out: The piece, which appeared in The Village Voice, produced an uproar. I was challenged on a dozen scores, and I replied on all of them. In my own ears the replies were reasonable, but the more I explained the more entrenched I became. Before I knew it, an insight had become a theory, a theory a position, a position a dogma.

I was a born ideologue; I thrived on having a position. Now I had one: To live alone is to face down loneliness. It became a litany that in the bad times strengthened me, gave me stamina and self-control. No need to review its contents. All I had to do was keep repeating the mantra.

Years passed (that's what they did: they passed). Things remained in place. Then suddenly, without warning or consent, I was thrown back on my own dogma, and after that nothing was in place. Teaching in a southern university town,

I met a woman my own age, divorced with grown children away at school. She suggested I share a house with her. I thought her a sympathetic soul and decided, after years of living alone, to chance it.