It’s been a year now of me living a single\/divorced life. It has been a good year.<\/p>\n
I don’t miss Eric, and I don’t miss our relationship. I can miss what we had some twenty years ago, but the thing we had towards the end was not worth keeping on life support. It was broken, which is so obvious now when I see it from some distance, even though it took me years to realize when I was right in the middle of it. The decision to divorce was absolutely the right one for me. I feel so much better now.<\/p>\n
The bi-weekly lifestyle suits me excellently. Every other week I have Adrian and Ingrid for company – someone to cook for, to watch movies with, to talk about our days. Every other week I am on my own – nobody to cook for, peace and quiet, and plenty of time to get things done.<\/p>\n
I hadn’t realized how much I missed having significant stretches of time for myself. When I have the house to myself, I can breathe out and relax in a way that just doesn’t happen otherwise.<\/p>\n
Cooking and buying groceries for three persons every other week, instead of four persons every week, is a lot less work. And it usually leaves me with leftovers and enough groceries for the other weeks, so those weeks I barely need to do anything. I feel like I have so much more spare time than I used to. And that’s even though I’m working 100% instead of the 80% I used to.<\/p>\n
On the negative side: being solely responsible for everything, big and small. No chore just disappears because someone else noticed it and stepped in before I got around to doing it. There is no one to share the big, scary decisions with – I have no sounding board.<\/p>\n
Also, of course, I have less money. We used to be two breadwinners, me with a really good salary and Eric with an excellent one. Now I still have many of the same fixed costs but only one salary. There is much less left for discretionary spending.<\/p>\n
I worry quite a bit about money these days. Less income, larger loan, narrower margins, smaller reserves, no backup. Should I lose my job and end up long-term unemployed, things could get very bad. Not, like, starving in the streets bad, but definitely lose the house bad. The labour market in Sweden is shaky, especially for those who are older; there are scary articles in the newspapers about highly educated specialists losing their jobs and not being able to find a new one despite hundreds of applications. I am still working on finding a balance between worrying and saving for an uncertain future, and allowing myself to spend now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s been a year now of me living a single\/divorced life. It has been a good year. I don’t miss Eric, and I don’t miss our relationship. I can miss what we had some twenty years ago, but the thing we had towards the end was not worth keeping on life support. It was broken, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[799,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-divorce","category-observing_the_self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21572"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21574,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21572\/revisions\/21574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}