It’s not an easy thing: learning to live with someone else again. I am in the middle of it, and I am not finding it at all easy, to tell the truth. I had been living on my own for eight years, most of them filled with a wonderful sense of independence, just a few times when I wished I were not so alone, not so dependent on my own abilities.
And then, early this year it changed. Closer to seventy than sixty, I embarked on my, almost certainly last, attempt to live with another adult human being. I have really tried hard – I swear – to make it work, and some days it does. Sometimes, however, it’s a very trying and difficult path I am walking. I just do not know how to lean on someone. Well, I really don’t want to lean on someone else, and he would prefer me to do so. Intellectually I know that what we are doing is very challenging, and I am not generally one to shrink from a challenge.
I don’t mind physical things being done for me. I hate digging and lumping things about, anything that stresses my muscles or hurts my back is anathema to me. But I don’t need anyone to think for me. That I can do on my own. In the brain Olympics I am at the Gold standard, thank you! So when someone, albeit from the kindest of motives, tries to tell me what he would do in this circumstance, and I’ve already thought it through and come to my own conclusions, I’m liable to get extremely difficult and intransigent. It doesn’t make me a nice person to know, nor easy to live with. I do not feel like spending my energy trying to change a person I like – me, or a person I am finding it increasingly difficult to like – him. I don’t want to change him, I just want it to be easier than it is to do this living together thing.
But it’s not going to be, and I am not one to give up – not without a fight. And, to be honest, that’s what this is: a fight. We never stop fighting. I cannot stop criticising, he cannot stop making suggestions about how I might do something, and I cannot give in, swallow my words, smile sweetly and behave like a girl. It’s not where I’m coming from. I was a rabid, radical feminist in my twenties and thirties, and am proud of all we achieved. We all hated men together, as befitted us at the time, and we made great big changes in the way women are perceived today. Without us then, women would not today be running around dressed in clothes that barely cover their more private parts. The wonderful lacy thong line, more often than not visible above drop-waisted jeans, and the multiplicity of bra-straps to be seen with strappy tops, none of these would have been acceptable today without our fight for equality.
And I am glad we moved the fight on. But inside me is the fighter still fighting. What I need is someone my own age with the liberation and attitude of today’s younger man. They know very well that women are their equals, can think equally, and have an equal ability to think things through for themselves. Without this I think my new, last, relationship is bound to founder. I wonder, is there anyone out there with a useful, non demeaning suggestion which might help me? Anywhere? Speak out, now! I’m admitting I need help. Now that’s a rare occurrence.
Dianna Moylan (editorial team)
