Ask Amy, February 19, 2024. “I don't know how to tell my family I crave being alone.”

Amy sells the LW a bill of goods.

Link to the original letter here.

My take: To recap, the LW loves her partner and family, but wants “to be fully and completely alone in my own home for weeks on end.” She is not, she adds, “talking about downtime or a weekend away.” She says she has “healthy relationships” with all her loved ones, and asks how to do this without hurting them.

The correct answer is that there’s no way to do this without hurting them. But Amy doesn’t say this. She just says she wants the same thing! “Every year for the past 15 years,” she writes, “I have spent one month alone — isolated and away from family and friends — and so I well understand this distinct drive.”

Amy suggests that the LW and her partner get “creative” about solving this problem. For instance, “You might rent a place nearby where you trade off living in the house for two weeks at a time, perhaps spending an occasional night together.”

Well.

Since Amy wants to make her own experience the benchmark (seldom a good idea, by the way), I’ll use mine. I’m pretty sure my own “healthy relationship” would regard “rent a place nearby” as an exploratory separation, if not an actual one. I’m confident he’d be pretty unhappy about it. I certainly would, if he suggested that to me.

If this LW wants to get her “weeks on end” of alone time, I guess no one can talk her out of it, now that she has Asked Amy, and Amy said to go for it. But when the LW is ready to return to her loved ones, she should expect a cool reception. She will have put the partner and kids through something they’ll experience as a rejection, no matter what she chooses to call it. She’s likely to have some rebuilding to do.

Chance this letter is fake: I believe her, unfortunately.