Just don't expect me to answer the door

Living alone can make you strong - but it can also make you unsuitable for civilised company. ELIZABETH HEATHCOTE reports

When my mother was between husbands she lived on her own in our family house. The thought of her rattling around there, the lonely widow with no one to know if she was murdered in her bed, really upset my sister. One day when she came to visit, she found my mother standing at the front window waiting for her, eating butter beans cold out of the tin, and she burst into tears. My mother told me the story afterwards. "I don't know why she was so upset," she said perplexed. "I've spent 25 years cooking for people and listening to their problems. I was perfectly happy."

I never intended to live alone, it happened by accident - I shared a one-bedroom flat with a boyfriend and we split up. And at first I hated it. I dreaded coming home to the dismal certainty that nothing would have changed since I left in the morning; that feeling as I shut the door that nobody was due back, ever. On the rare occasions I spent an evening in, I'd wander aimlessly between rooms and feel like a failure, like everyone else had a life except for me. I despaired at the idea that my future was on hold until another boyfriend came along and fought against the whole concept, planning how I'd get my friends together and live in a shared house, adapt us all to the changing demographics of the new millennium.

Then one day I realised it was too late for any of that because without really noticing how or why, I'd started to enjoy myself.

It would be impossible to list all the blissful pleasures of living alone, but they correspond closely with the list of things I used to hate about it. I love that feeling when you open the door and everything's just as you left it. I adore the fact that I don't have to see anyone from dawn to dusk unless I really want to. I just can't get enough of the freedom - to eat what I want, when I want, how I want; to go out/stay in/paint my kitchen some god-awful colour/live my life in pyjamas. To wander from room to room aimlessly. Which just goes to show what cheap greeting cards and Westerns have been telling us for years - that one man's loneliness is another man's freedom.

But like all the great pleasures, if it's taken to extremes living alone can lead to problems, principally in that it encourages you to develop odd and slightly anti-social habits that may in the long term compromise your ability to function properly in civilized society. It's no coincidence that the most eccentric and mad people live on their own, and it's not just because no one else will live with them. It's to do with having this place in which you can be completely unselfconscious. And once you've gone through that barrier, boy do you let yourself go.

I was staying at a friend's for the night and was shocked when she burst into my bedroom in the morning and screamed "Shut the f--- up!" I'd woken to sun shining through my window and felt so happy to be alive that I was belting out old Church standards at the top of my voice without being conscious that I was doing it. (It goes without saying that she was another solo-dweller - who else would complain like that?)

It also goes without saying that in the privacy of my own home I talk to myself, but sometimes I forget and do it when I'm on public transport. I do it in the middle of the night as well, if I happen to find myself awake, and once my neighbour gave me a knowing wink on the stairs which left me baffled until I realised that he must have heard me through the wall and assumed I'd been nattering post-coitally to some conquest. Occasionally, I cry in front of the mirror to a slow record the way I did when I was a teenager, which can be difficult to explain if the window cleaner happens to be visiting.

On longer stints without human contact, my appearance can go worryingly to pot. I'll get up in the morning and it just doesn't seem worthwhile getting out of my pyjamas, so I don't. But my flat can get cold (and daydreaming doesn't do much to warm you up), so I'll put track pants on top, and a fleece, and then another fleece half an hour later. And then thick woolly climbing socks, and sandals on top of them. And then a furry hat and scarf. And then I'll forget and pop out to get some milk, blink in the bright sunshine and realise that everyone else is wearing jeans and T-shirts, or a suit. But by then they've seen me and it's too late. Once, after I'd seen no one for three days, I popped out for a snack and didn't recognise my own reflection in a shop window.

Even normal things, like food, can seem weird to the uninitiated. I progressed quickly from the too-self-conscious-to-eat-much position to the fantastic- dinners-for-one, and stopped thinking that cooking myself delicious treats was at all unusual. Then, one Sunday, on the way home from the market, laden down with two shopping bags bursting with ingredients, I bumped into an acquaintance. "What's in there?" she said. "Oh, just stuff for my Sunday night chicken casserole," I replied casually. "Why, who have you got coming round?" she asked. I stared at my carrots and made up some names.

My friend Lucie likens the experience to listening to a Walkman - it takes you to a place where you can be utterly cut off from the world and act accordingly. On her first day with her first Walkman, she took it to the gym and was pounding away on the step machine when she felt the need to pass wind, so she let herself go and heard the squeak over the music, which was on full volume. She looked up to see whether anyone else had heard and the man who'd been working away on the rowing machine next to her had stopped frozen mid-tug and was staring at her, horrified. I swear that it would never have happened if she hadn't been living alone.

All of which might go some way to explain why my single solo-dwelling friends are marked out by their resilience to long-term relationships (personally I like to think that we're just having too good a time by ourselves). Or maybe it's because of another side effect of living alone which follows on from getting used to your own company as sure as night follows day, and that's getting set in your ways.

I remember when I was young, some grown-up talking about a bachelor in his forties. "The trouble is, he's got set in his ways," she whispered, as though he'd got some particularly noxious venereal disease that disqualified him from marriage. I realised the dangers one Sunday when I met up with two fellow single, solo-dwelling friends, one male, one female. It was like three unshelled conkers going on a day trip - each of us spiky and constantly bashing into each other. We'd all become people who were used to doing exactly what we liked, when we liked, and not having anyone we needed to fit in with. Eventually we compromised and found a middle ground (obviously, or we'd have had to abandon the whole expedition, go home and never attempt to seek human company again). Even so, it was all a bit touch and go: the stakes were raised higher each time a joint decision had to be taken.

Which of course is why some people consider that learning to enjoy living on your own is the enemy if you are considering ever living with a lover again. "I'd stay in every night just about and watch TV if I didn't stop myself," says Camilla, who lives alone in the splendour of a three-bedroom Victorian house in Newcastle. "But I make myself do things because I've got to remember how to be more flexible just in case I ever do meet anyone I want to be with."

Maybe she's got a point but I'm not convinced. I think that if you really fall in love, you're going to remember how to compromise pretty quickly, and knowing you're capable of flourishing by yourself is going to prove essential ammunition in the relationship later on - the solid ground that will stop you getting taken for granted. Besides, if you're the sort of person who's controlling about how the washing-up is done or precisely when the bath gets cleaned, you're going to be just the same when you're in a relationship.

For everyone else, living on your own is about discovering who you are and not feeling guilty about expressing what you want, and for a lot of women in particular, that's progress.

Try it sometime.