I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a

“I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to a single life.”
Thus spoke Charles Bukowski, the poet of the streets, the philosopher of solitude, a man who drank deeply from the bitter cup of existence and yet found a strange beauty in its loneliness. In these few words, Bukowski captures a paradox as old as the human heart — the yearning for union, and the simultaneous hunger for freedom. He speaks not as a cynic who despises love, but as a man who has seen how easily marriage — that symbol of togetherness — can become a prison for the spirit. He would be “married,” yes, but only to freedom itself; wedded not to another person, but to his own independence, his own untamed way of being.

Bukowski’s life gives this line its origin and truth. Born into poverty and pain, he lived much of his life on the margins — in cheap rooms, among strangers, surrounded by noise and silence. He had known passion, but also the disillusionment that often follows it. To him, the world of love was filled with contradictions: desire gave way to routine, and companionship often dulled into captivity. When he said he’d be “married to a single life,” he was not mocking marriage, but declaring loyalty to authenticity. He refused to compromise the voice of his soul for the comfort of convention. To him, solitude was not emptiness, but clarity — the condition in which he could breathe freely, create honestly, and live without disguise.

The ancients too knew this tension. The philosopher Diogenes, who lived in a barrel and rejected society’s customs, once said that he had “married the truth.” He too chose the hard road of self-