The Economy of Solitude: an Aroace in a World Made for Two
When people picture loneliness, they tend to imagine something dramatic (or cinematic): crying in the dark, empty rooms echoing with regret. But for me, loneliness is quieter than that. It’s logistical. Mundane. It’s every time I have to move a piece of furniture by myself or plan a holiday around other people’s romantic schedules.
I’m aromantic and asexual. In Poland, there isn’t much language or visibility for people like me. The scripts for womanhood here are still oppressively narrow, scripted by Catholic conservatism, patriarchy, and a deep suspicion of difference. Deviating from those expectations is seen as a curiosity at best and a moral failing at worst. In many ways, simply naming who I am feels like an act of defiance.
This isn’t a confession or a declaration of pride – it’s simply a fact. And while I’m content with myself, I won’t pretend that clarity erases the friction of existing outside the couple economy. Because that’s exactly what it is: an economy.
Most people move through the world assuming that eventually, they will merge their life, finances, and domestic labor with someone else’s. That assumption is an invisible safety net – a structure so deeply normalized it doesn’t even register as a privilege. You don’t realize it exists until you notice you’re the only one without it.
The Cost of Doing It All Alone
When you’re permanently single, the rent is always your problem alone. Every lease application wants a second signature. Every bill is nearly double. You are the only person who remembers to buy toilet paper or schedule the plumber. If you lose your job or get sick, there isn’t automatically another adult to absorb the crisis. No one automatically picks you up from the airport or helps you hang the new shelves. Even planning a trip involves checking whether anyone can spare the time or space to come.
While I’m not ashamed of any of this, it can be exhausting in a way that rarely gets acknowledged. And in a place like Poland – where social safety nets are eroded by neoliberal policies, and the minimum wage barely covers survival – those practical gaps can quickly become existential ones.
I’ve spent the better part of my working life so far bouncing between contracts, freelance gigs, and periods of unemployment. I’ve hustled for invoices to be paid on time, queued at the job center, trying to explain what I do for a living, and absorbed the shame our society attaches to instability. There were months I didn’t know how I‘d pay rent. There still are. When people romanticize the freedom of single life, they conveniently ignore that freedom under capitalism is usually just another word for precarity. Especially when you struggle with your mental health, and there are weeks and months when you fight to get up from bed, not to mention work and survive.
People like to say, “You’ll find someone,” as if romance is the only imaginable solution to economic instability, or the only acceptable anchor for an adult life. This is by design. The entire structure is engineered to reward coupledom – tax breaks, shared insurance, housing policies that assume “household income” means two earners. Even the price of a hotel room makes more sense when you’re two. It isn’t only emotional labor that gets outsourced in a partnership – it’s the cost of living itself.
When Together Becomes the Default
Yes, it’s also the culture: the steady sorting of lives into categories I never belonged in. In my twenties, everyone was improvising – sharing flats with roommates, splitting taxis, drifting in that provisional adulthood. But at some point, most people peeled off into pairs. They moved in together, merged budgets, planned futures. It was gradual, almost invisible – but I felt it.
It can be hard to build lasting interdependence when everyone else is oriented toward couplehood. Found family is a beautiful idea, and sometimes it works in practice. But it’s also true that the majority of people are alloromantic and allosexual. They’re building lives with partners. Their time and priorities are shaped by those bonds. It doesn’t mean they love me less, or that I love them any less. But it does mean I’m rarely anyone’s default person. I don’t take this personally. It’s simply the reality of how social structures work. It means I’m often a satellite orbiting other people’s constellations.
I don’t mind orbiting. In some ways, I even prefer the autonomy it grants me. But I also see how capitalism thrives on isolation – on the lie that we should all be fully self-sufficient, hyperproductive, and cheerfully alone until we find a sanctioned partner. Romantic relationships become a privatized safety net, an unpaid welfare system that distributes the burden of care and survival onto individuals instead of communities. If you don’t buy in, you pay the price.
It’s not that I don’t have people who love me. I do – friends who show up, who care deeply, who make my life rich in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I was younger. But there’s a way the world is built that quietly insists that romantic partnership is the baseline. Everything else is an exception, something temporary until you “settle down.” In reality, I’m settled. This is my life. I’m not waiting for an upgrade.
Writing a Manual No One Wrote
I don’t think my life is lacking because I don’t want a romantic partnership. But I do think it’s lacking a manual. There are no stories about how to grow old contentedly as a single aroace person. No movies about a woman who never partners up and is perfectly fine – maybe a little lonely sometimes, but mostly occupied with work and friendships, and her own plans – not as a prelude to some eventual romance, but as a valid, dignified state. I’m often struck by how invisible people like me are in the collective imagination. I’m not afraid of being alone, but I do think about how systems and institutions often fail to imagine someone who remains single, by choice, forever. So I have to be deliberate about imagining my future. No one taught me how to build a life that doesn’t revolve around couplehood. No one ever said, “Here’s how you age solo without shame.”
Despite all of this – or maybe because of it – I feel a certain clarity about what I want and what I don’t. I don’t wake up wishing I were different. I don’t spend my days longing for a relationship I’ve never desired. My life is full of connection, creativity, and affection. I have people who remember my birthdays and check on me when I’m sick. I feel loved, even if my version of love doesn’t look like the stories I grew up with, but it’s real. This is the part of aromantic and asexual life that doesn’t get much airtime. The part where you are simply content, your solitude isn’t a tragedy but a practical circumstance that requires a little extra planning, where you can acknowledge the costs – financial, emotional, social – without resenting yourself for incurring them.
If anything, the greatest act of resilience is not just surviving a system designed to erase me, but refusing to internalize its judgment. To make choices without waiting for permission. To find fulfillment outside the scripts handed to me. To keep imagining a life beyond couplehood – and maybe capitalism? Or patriarchy? And every system that tells me my worth depends on being chosen. To insist that a person – a woman alone – is still complete.
So I’m writing my own manual as I go. A manual with chapters on radical resilience: how to arrange the plumber yourself. How to take up space in a culture that thinks you’re an outlier. How to believe that you’re worth celebrating, even if no one will ever throw you an anniversary party.
It isn’t a sad story. It’s just mine. I don’t know exactly what my future will hold. But I know it will be mine, shaped by the same steady autonomy – and quiet refusal to comply – that has carried me this far.
