Real life?

When my aunt was dying, she told me she had always hoped her husband would die first because he would never manage on his own. She was right. He died less than a year after her. Despite her attempts to warn him of what was to come: having to remember to pay the bills (which she had always done), taking care of the house and garden (ditto) and, worst of all, doing everything on his own, he wasn't prepared for widowhood. He set the house on fire a couple of times preparing food, drank too much and then had a heart attack. But it was the loss of his wife that killed him.

I was once told by a friend who had lost her husband very young that marriage, the state of two, was the ideal situation. I'm not sure how she knew that, although she obviously realised that our society regards coupledom and, these days, serial coupledom as the norm. I wondered at the time if her reliance on marriage as the perfect state made being on her own as a young widow with children even more difficult.

To me, the most frightening thing about losing a spouse for my generation of baby boomers is that they seemed to marry straight from their parents' houses, so they never had to stand on their own two feet or depend on their own resources or manage money or get used to being on their own. Losing a spouse (or partner, as I should probably say these days) has to come as a terrible blow for these people.

I've been told by a married friend from this generation (with two salaries coming in over a period of 30-odd years) that ideally everyone needs to have 'a couple of thou' in the bank for emergencies. That to me just sums up the arrogance of the couple world: single people (standing on their own feet, depending on their own resources, managing their money and living on their own) don't have that luxury. We struggle to meet the mortgage payments and to keep the car on the road (the one we need to get to the job we probably don't enjoy).

I'm convinced that us single people are the ones who keep the economy moving, not couples.

I've never been involved in a marriage/partnership but I've found myself wondering about what I consider this state of co-dependency. Do couples at some point sit down and talk about what will happen if one of them dies? I'm single and always have been but I've made my will, appointed a couple of nephews to make sure I'm not left in a vegetative state and written out my funeral arrangements. Do married people do that?

Or do they live as if they will always be alive and together?