Dear Ann Landers,
Thank you for the supportive evidence. Living Together (The Legal Consequences) Unlike marriage, which has legal rights and duties, single people living to-gether do so without the state's approval. When they decide to split they can -without a judge's intervention. In fact, living together single doesn't even have a proper name. It is not common law marriage. Common law marriage is the lawful union of man and woman by declaration, intention and conduct which, in about fifteen states, can be severed only by death or divorce. Single people living together do not pretend to be married nor do they con-sider themselves married. They are single, proud of it and are just plain living together, having sex and exchanging services. The law has a label for such an arrangement. It is called "consortium." So let's call the new relationship con-sortium and the parties to it "consorts." Regardless of your feelings on the subject, there is no doubt that consorts have distinct advantages and disadvantages under the law. Everyone, married or single, who earns a minimum income must pay fed-eral income tax based on a graduated scale. This means the more money one earns, the higher the bracket he is in. Because of the graduated scale, those who earn high incomes are always trying to find ways to split their incomes and lower their taxes. The most common way to get the benefits of an income split is through the means Congress provided-the joint income tax return. So long as there's substantial difference between the income of one taxpayer and the income of his spouse, filing a joint tax return generally saves, because it splits the higher income among two taxpayers, which lowers the percentage taxed. But the joint income tax return is available to married people-not single people or consorts. Married couples, however, face a disadvantage that consorts do not. Mar-ried couples get only one standard deduction. Consorts, since the IRS con-siders them single taxpayers, each get his and her own standard deduction. In dollars and cents, this means a married couple, both working, one earn-ing $10,000 a year, the other earning $17,000, taking the standard deduction, will pay about $700 more in federal income tax than the same couple living together single. While love and income taxes can help in determining whether consortium is what you're after, nothing does more to test the desire to stay together and the extent of commitment than the way you handle your money once you start living together. Married couples, except for a little holding out, usually put the cash and property in a common pot. The status of marriage allows the husband and wife to charge their family-type expenses or "necessaries" to each other's ac-counts. This means a wife can charge groceries and the grocer can collect from either husband or wife, whichever the grocer chooses. These rights, in-corporated in "family expense laws," are creditor's rights predicated on the marriage relationship. But lawful matrimony is not always required. If a cou-ple holds itself out as married, call each other Mr. and Mrs., charge freely on each other's credit, then one of the pair cannot skip out on his financial obli-gation by simply claiming on the courthouse steps that he is not married and therefore "not responsible for his (or her) debts." The point then is to be careful about retaining your separate names and in-dependent credit unless you want to allow your partner to buy family-type expense items on your credit. Allowing your consort to charge to your ac-count is easy. Credit managers are satisfied to have a charge account in the name of one solvent debtor. They are overjoyed to have two debtors to sue. Banks are pleased to have anyone, spouse or stranger, guarantee a loan. But before signing that guarantee, think twice. Long after the romantic haze has lifted and you have slammed the door and moved out, your consort's default can bring the bank to your doorstep demanding that you pay up. Let's assume you have the cash or the credit, and your consortium has deepened to the extent that you want to make a joint investment. There are a number of ways people can own property together whether they are married or single. There are three major ways to hold title to property. The first, and typical consort method, is in your name alone. The second is joint tenancy and the last is tenancy in common. Both joint tenancy and tenancy in common are means of providing joint ownership and have nothing to do with marriage. Single people, consorts, lovers, business partners and even married couples can own property in joint tenancy or tenancy in common, as they choose. The forms of joint ownership allow each joint owner to own an undivided share in the entire property with his partner. For example, if there are two joint owners of a house in the suburbs, each joint owner owns one half of the house. The only way to divide the property is to sell it and divide the cash after the mortgage company and brokers are paid. Joint tenancy is joint ownership with the right of survivorship. That means that if there are two joint tenants and one joint tenant dies, the surviving joint tenant automatically gets the whole. Tenancy in common is joint ownership without the right of survivorship. While tenancy in common will provide consorts with an undivided one-half ownership in the house, the house remains in their separate estates when they die. For example, if consorts Jack and Jill buy a house on the hill in joint tenancy and Jill dies, Jack gets it all. If Jack and Jill have title to the house in tenancy in common and Jill dies, he gets to share it with Jill's mother (or whoever else inherits from her). And so, your dream house becomes a part-nership with the in-laws you never wanted in the first place. All of this living and loving has so far ignored the possibility that your con-sortium will be fruitful and multiply. When you are worrying over abortion, adoption and paternity suits, think, too, of the bastard you bring into the world. Bastard, by the way, is the proper legal name for children bom out of wedlock. His name is on the Ups of every waiter you don't tip and every cab driver you cut off. The bastard's rights to support and inheritance are se-verely restricted and the bastard's father's rights barely exist. Historically bastards belong exclusively to their mothers, and the father's interest has been largely Umited to supporting the child. While the law is making some strides in recognizing a father's rights to custody in the event the mother dies, the states can decide the father's fitness for custody of his own bastard almost as if he were a total stranger. And we've only just begun to look at living together and the law. While the Social Security laws are making consortium respectable and lucrative for the old folks, insurance companies won't let you insure each other's lives or pro-tect each other's health. The Army won't treat a consort as a dependent and the Mann Act is still on the books (and even sometimes enforced), making it a crime to cross state lines with an immoral intent even if you are crossing state lines totally on a voluntary basis to vacation together. As a rule, there is neither alimony nor attorney's fees to pay when you de-cide to call it quits. This may be a powerful incentive for the once-burned, but now in California it appears that the courts may be requiring some con-sorts to pay for the value of services rendered to them during consortium. Clearly then, living together single is at least as complicated as divorce. If this keeps up we may have to do what our grandparents did-simply stay married. credit: Barbara B. Hirsch, Attorney, Chicago; author of Living Together: A Guide to the Law for Unmarried Couples, and Divorce: What a Woman Needs to Know. Loneliness "The world is shrinking," Thomas Merton wrote a few years before his tragic death. "There is less and less space in which man can be alone. It is said that if we go on increasing at our present rate, in six hundred and fifty years there will be only one square foot for every person." Merton, a cloistered monk, valued solitude and loneliness to the extent that he found too much togetherness in the silent community life of the Trappists, so he moved out to the woods to live alone in a tiny hermitage. But for most people, loneliness is something to be avoided like the plague. Their great fear is to confront the dreadful inner bleakness summed up in the poet W. H. Auden's lines: "Alive but alone-belonging where?" Loneliness is all around us. You see it everywhere-in the jammed streets of a strange town, in a room rocking with laughter, on planes and trains with people packed in like so many sardines with nothing to say to each other. You can be lonely in a house filled with friends and family. It is creased in faces like the lines of a weathered farmer in an Edward Steichen photograph. It is in the watery eyes of the old and the innocent eyes of the young. It is in the glances of the middle-aged, guarded against a world filled with strangers. You can touch loneliness in the rigidity of old bodies under thin blankets, in aching limbs holding themselves tight against the cold winds of life. You can feel it in the tension of a woman turning away from pain, in the stateli-ness of a widow standing alone like half of a giant oak. You can taste it in food that has no flavor because it must be eaten alone. You can smell it in the drinks the falsely cheerful raise against the New Year which they hope will treat them more gently. You recognize it in the poor ap-petites of those who have run out of friends or family when they say, "I'm not very hungry tonight." You can sniff it in hospitals and nursing homes. It is the scent of cleaning agents that don't quite cover the odors of people suffering or dying by them-selves. It hangs in the air around the women who were ladies before the last century ended as they cry out for their long-gone mothers and their play-things. Walk into any singles bar and you will see the essence of real loneliness. It is not difficult to sense beneath the sophisticated trappings and snappy con-versation, the fake smiles, small talk, manufactured gaiety-the exchange of a thousand glances, glazed over with more desperation than seduction. They are clues to the emptiness of the lonely heart. Life, then, may in some way be defined as a struggle to understand and re-spond to loneliness. It is a task that is never fully accomplished. It is part of every man's journey toward a sense of himself, of his own human dignity and worth. Loneliness is normal for the person who tries to understand the meaning of his own gifts, his special inheritance and the unique opportunities he possesses to contribute something to humanity. We may never think of loneliness as a friend, but constant companion that it is, we cannot afford to count it as an enemy. The proper understanding of and response to loneliness can, in fact, be an asset. Without loneliness, our journeys to self-discovery or to the heart of life's meaning would be impossible. Loneliness lights up the values that are truly significant because it is the edging of man's deepest needs. Without the spur of loneliness, man might never look more deeply into himself or begin the search for values that ultimately humanize him. Loneliness enables a person to crack through the shield forged by the narcissism that isolates him in his own self-concern. Without loneliness a man would never sense the need to respond to others. He would never attempt to bridge the gap that makes him finally a full-grown, mature person. Being lonely can strip us of our pretenses. It forces us to feel the bite of truth, as in the words of Thomas Wolfe-it is the "surest cure for vanity." Loneliness, then, is not all bad. It reminds us that we are alive, that we have felt the warmth of the sun, that we have been close enough to others- and they to us-to know the beauty and the agony of longing for each other. We have made a difference to someone, and they to us. Loneliness is a sign that we have been touched by love, and what can be more beautiful than that? Loneliness has many faces. There is the loneliness of the person who is misunderstood by his colleagues or friends. Probably no experience is so devastating as being misread by those on whom we count for real under-standing. They are terrible moments and can shatter, temporarily, the lives of the best-adjusted person. It is easy to arrive at wrong conclusions about others in this day of pop psychology and amateur analysis. The loneliness that follows estrangement is difficult to shake because the bridges to healing relationships seem to have been burned. There is an everyday loneliness that has never been identified-the loneli-ness that fills the hours when we can do nothing but wait. It is the loneliness of lovers who are separated by jobs and miles and circumstances they cannot control; the anxiety of a person waiting outside the hospital room where a loved one is critically ill; the endless waiting in doctors' offices, in long lines for buses to come or planes to go, for the darkness to give way to dawn or for the beginning of a vacation or the end of a school year. The loneliness of a marriage gone sour is one of the worst agonies of fife. It happens when people drift away from one another because they have stopped sharing-or caring. The extramarital affair is often the result of a man or woman in search of someone who will listen to the problems that his or her spouse is not interested in. Prostitutes frequently describe how the men who buy their time are more eager to talk about their troubles than to experi-ence a sexual release. Often the "acting out" of sexual behavior has its roots in the personalities of people who are lonely and groping for a way to make contact with some-one who will respond to their needs as humans. One should not be too hard on individuals whose chief fault is reaching out, even if they reach out in ways we do not approve of. Such an effort is, in the long run, healthier than isolation, which charac-terizes the life of the loner who scorns friends in the name of "loftier" values. The loners practice a crippled religion. They are the most miserable of all. But they dare not let themselves feel the pain of their loneliness be-cause they cannot or will not admit it. How tragic that they do not know what it means to be close to another person. Many sexually related behavioral patterns are the result of loneliness. Reading pornography and attending X-rated movies are the pastimes of peo-ple who have difficulty in their relationships with themselves and others. They are attempting to ignite some flame that will light the way for a short time at least, to restore a sense of warmth and remind themselves that they are human. It is not surprising that in a world which offers them so little shel-ter they should look in dark and unsatisfying places for relief. What then is the lonely person to do? He must first come to terms with himself, with his assets, his personal worth. He must learn to value himself so he feels he is giving something worthwhile when he offers his friendship. He must not be passive, waiting on the sidelines for someone to rescue him. Nor must he allow himself to be absorbed by the crowd. He should not count on being carried along in singles bars, group sex, political demonstrations or on following the current trends and opinions of others. Life kills us unless we face it with something of our own. A lonely person cannot, then, wait for friends to assemble around and take care of him. Friendship, for each of us, begins with reaching out. It is an ac-tive process. Those who wait to be saved from loneliness will experience even more anguish and injury than the individual who makes himself vulnerable by moving toward people. It always hurts to try to be a friend to man. It wears us down and wears us out, but it is still more rewarding and healthier to choose the active role rather than the passive one. The concept of trying to help others as a practical approach to dealing with our own loneliness may sound corny, but it works. You need not have much to give, but whatever you have-give it freely. Volunteer work in hospitals, worthy causes, visiting the elderly, reading to crippled children, assisting the handicapped, being a good neighbor, investing ourselves in constructive ac-tivities break the shell that encases us in our aloneness. When a person asks that age-old question, "What can I do about my terri-ble loneliness?" The best answer is still, "Do something for somebody else." credit: Dr. Eugene Kennedy, Ph.D., author of Living with Everyday Problems and The Trouble Book, published by Thomas More Press. 10 REASONS FOR LONELINESS

DEAR ANN,
The best column you ever wrote has been in my wallet for several years. It is barely readable, but I'm sure you can make it out. Please run it again so I can carry it around for another decade. YOUR FRIEND DEAR FRIEND: With pleasure. Here it is: