Living Alone...or not?

One of the tough things about living alone is having to kill spiders.  I'd rather give that job to someone else.

I'm looking for a new place.  I have two major problems with my current apartment:  bed bugs, and downstairs neighbors that scream at each other every day.  I have other, more minor problems with the place, like street noise gets bad sometimes, my neighbors steal my netflix movies (I can't prove it, but two have gone missing), I have to mow the lawn and shovel snow.  My kitchen floor leans, so I always feel like I'm about to fall over.  My downstairs neighbors control the thermostat, and they like it HOT in the winter.

I'm looking for either a 1 bedroom apartment to live by myself, or a 3-bedroom apartment or townhouse, and I'll live with my friend from work and her teenage son.  Those are two very different options!  On one hand, I'd love to have someone to talk to when I get home.  Lonely evenings have been really tough for me. And it would be really nice to split the bills with someone.  On the other hand, I've gotten used to being by myself.  And it seems a little risky to depend on someone else to cover their half of rent and bills.  We're good friends, so I trust her a lot more than I would a stranger.  But she talks about moving to a bigger city, and what am I supposed to do if she decides to move away?  She knows that I'm in a better situation financially, so what if she starts to take advantage of that and I have to pay more than my share of the bills?

One of my other options is that my mom's friend runs a business on the first floor of a building (that her mother-in-law owns), and she's moving the business. They are going to remodel and rent it out as an apartment.  I can wait for them to remodel and then see if Iike the apartment.  It will probably be a 1-bedroom, and my mom said that the rent will probably be cheap.  The location is really good, too.

Decisions, decisions.  I still find it odd to make all these life decisions without my husband.