Living alone: All that glitters is not gold
(Sent by Marilyn Mansilla, a student from Merlo, Argentina)

As young adults, we seek for independence. We want to get rid of our parents' control and rules, and most of the times we think that the best way to achieve our autonomy is to live on our own. We feel that living alone will be the "perfect lifestyle" for us: we get our freedom and rights at last! However, it also brings many responsibilities and some difficulties.

In the first place, when we live alone we may not want to care about keeping things in their places or cleaning the house very regularly. Nobody else will be there to complain about how disorganized we are. But the time will surely come when we have to do the cleaning up or get lost in the middle of a chaos. It is true that we can make as much a mess as we like, but then we'll have to put things in their places again.

Secondly, even when we can choose what to eat and so have the opportunity to have our favorite food for lunch and dinner every day of the week, we find ourselves to be the ones in charge of going grocery shopping and cooking! If we don't like cooking or we are bad at it, this aspect of living alone will become a drawback, too.

Thirdly, living alone frees us from our parents, but once we have our "independence" from relatives, we get trapped by taxes and expenses. We have to pay for everything in our own house: the electricity, the gas, the telephone service, etc. In other words, our freedom has a great price!

So in brief, we can conclude that living alone has many bright sides, but it also has some disadvantages that we may take into account if we are planning to leave our parents' "nest"  to live on our own.