Living alone in your 40s and beyond

[Pickles2024]

Just looking for some honest feedback please - anyone out there in their 40s and over who is genuinely happy living alone after being in a relationship? Would you be happy staying single?

Google is divided between terribly lonely people struggling and those who say they would never look back.

I'm in the lonely category really struggling particularly as it was my fault the relationship ended and the regret eats away at me - loneliness is karma I guess but just makes life even more painful

I lived in an unhappy marriage for 12 years. I've been single for 2.5 years and i love it! I have no plans to share my living space ever again. But I would like companionship and at some point I'll try dating. I'm 50.

@potatocakesinprogress - in my mind they are still the one daft as it sounds, it was me who messed up

Mine was unwanted break up too. He left out of the blue after 20 years of marriage and hasnt spoken to me since. The day before he,'d been holding my hand down the street and acting normally.
It was a huge blow but Ive found after a few years im actually much happier without him.
It all takes time.

I was widowed at 45. If that hadn’t happened we would probably have been divorced. I have not had another relationship, and don’t want to - I like being able to please myself. I do have children though, although not near

It might be that writing down the highlights as well as the lows of your relationship and seeing it clearly for what it was might help you recover.

Sometimes we have a tendency to idealise the past, and that might not be entirely accurate.

I think you need to give this some time, OP, and try not to think too much about the whole of your future. You are still feeling the loss of the relationship very intensely, but it won't be like that forever. Maybe you fucked up, but I'm willing to bet, based on your posts, that you actually didn't and that in fact you invested huge amounts into the relationship and lost your sense of yourself, and maybe have low self-esteem. Spend some time taking amazing care of yourself. Have some counselling, make your home as cosy as you can, invest in hobbies and friends and personal development and things that make you feel good about yourself. Take some time for you and what you enjoy outside of a relationship. Coming to terms with living alone, and getting to a point where you love it, can be a process. A lot of that process is about learning to like yourself.