Diary of a 30-year-old woman living alone 6

I've recently taken a break from living alone in London, probably less than two months with my partner in Italy. He is a native Italian. Although his parents live only five or six blocks away, he still insists on renting a house by himself. The biggest difference from living alone in London is that both his rented house and his parents’ house have a common space: the living room.

The thing I hated the most as a kid was the living room. Our family used to live in the dormitory building allocated by our father. In the 1990s, being able to live in such a 70-square-meter dormitory was the envy of all urban newlyweds at that time. I was born in this 6-story dormitory building. Each 70-square-meter apartment has a layout of two bedrooms and one living room. In addition, there is a balcony, a toilet, and a kitchen. Big enough for two people. So our family never had dinner in the kitchen because when my dad and I sat on the mazza, my mom didn't have room to cook in the kitchen. So, since I was a child, my family has always had dinner in the living room.

The standard configuration for dinner in the living room is: a family of three sits around a small knee-length dining table, my mother and I sit on the Maza, and my father sits on the sofa at one end of the small dining table. Before I could move my chopsticks, the TV was already turned on. As long as I can remember, our family always likes to watch a traffic education program on a city TV station during dinner time. Usually, it will report on the traffic accidents of the day and warn citizens to obey the traffic rules. The strangest thing is that our family does not have a car yet, but we have only watched traffic shows for so many years.

As the TV blared, father and mother remained silent except to communicate basic household decisions, such as paying utility bills. Sitting on a small bench, I wondered since I was a child why my father and mother didn't communicate often. Once they communicated, they would quarrel loudly and even fight. At that time, I was so confused that I could only silently cast my eyes on the traffic policeman on the TV screen, listening to him explain the traffic rules that motor vehicles should turn and let go straight, which I didn't understand until later in the driving school.

After living alone abroad, although I only have one bedroom and one bathroom, I often feel relieved and free because I no longer have to hide the embarrassment of having dinner in the living room. Although the kitchen is a public space, the relationship between roommates is loose, and it is enough to greet each other casually when they meet each other. The best thing is that even if you eat in the kitchen with your roommates, you will still be separated from your roommates before going to bed, and you can always return to your own space.

I am used to this kind of loose kitchen society, and I still feel a little uncomfortable after coming to Italy. The subject's parents usually eat in the kitchen unless there is a football team they support playing that night. When four people sit in the kitchen and eat, it is inevitable to "socialize" (for me it is social, for them it is the most normal family relationship). In order to deal with this kind of social dinner, I usually start by praising the delicious food cooked by the object's mother, and then silently observe what they are talking about, and find the right time to join their conversation. Dinner conversations tend to cover a wide range of topics, from specific recipes for a southern Italian dish to sex scandals involving Italian politicians, from the subject's mother's latest colon exam to Italian immigration policy in the Mediterranean. Later, according to my observation, it turned out that this kind of dinner conversation was not prepared in advance, but rather a casual chat. Although it was not difficult, I would remember those awkward dinner moments when I was a child, and subconsciously wanted to be in this kitchen. Find a TV screen in the house, to put my embarrassed eyes.

The living room itself is a space for family socializing, but in a family with an unstable marriage, every inch of space in the living room seems so redundant, and only the TV screen flashing irrelevant traffic programs can be weak. They devour the awkwardness and strangeness in the air, let the people in the living room avoid conversations with each other during the short half-hour dinner time, or they also tacitly believe that avoiding conversations is one of the best ways to avoid conflicts. It's just that in this living room with only the background sound of the TV, I also slowly learned this way of socializing while sitting on a small bench: reducing verbal communication can be used to avoid conflicts in intimate relationships.

But in an intimate relationship, apart from the utility bills that we have to bear together, there will always be some friction, and we will always want to share some of our thoughts with the other party, and we will always need to listen to the other party's recent confusion and achievements. It was these kitchens in Italy without TVs that made me have to tap my ability to socialize at dinner, listen more and express more, instead of timidly looking for a TV screen to put my embarrassing body.