‘We tend to see being single as a stopping-off place before we arrive at a relationship’: Annie Lord, 20s
When my friend Moya and I got out of the taxi in my home city of Leeds, there was a period pad on the pavement, which set the tone for the night out we ended up having. I wanted to get with someone, and I knew it would happen because I tend to have a lot more success in Leeds than I do in London – up there, guys like girls in fake eyelashes who ignore the rule: “If you have your legs out you can’t show your cleavage.” I thought I’d found him at the first bar, when this guy introduced himself to me. He had curtains and a cheeky smile, was big and broad. Nice, I thought, here we go.
He got me a tequila and told me about his tree surgeon business, spun me around under his arm. I liked the way the music meant he had to lean right into my ear for me to hear him talk. It was all going well, except for one thing. It was impossible to ignore the dirty looks his friends were giving me, their eyes running up and down my body. It was so bad that Moya actually went over and asked them whether he had a girlfriend. We couldn’t be bothered with any confrontation so we just moved to the other side of the dancefloor.
In the next bar, I thought I’d met The One again, until it came to him getting me a drink. He said he was skint, so I assumed he’d get me a beer or something, but after queueing for ages together he handed me a glass of tap water. It should have been funny, but it seemed as if he was trying to catch me out. The last guy was the worst; he seemed normal until, out of nowhere, he asked whether I “spit or swallow?”
At the end of the night there was no man, there was Moya and me sitting on the pavement with garlic sauce dripping down our wrists from the overfilled kebabs we’d bought. We waited there, under the buttery glow of a street light, as Uber after Uber cancelled on us, debating what superpower we’d have. And then we got in the taxi home, heads against the windows, watching the lights of the city drain out into the near black of the country roads.
The next morning, I sat at the kitchen table with a paracetamol and a bacon sandwich, ready to be in a mood all day. “Literally, they just kept getting worse,” I complained. Mum sighed. “Imagine if it had worked out though – then you’d just be with one of them.”
The simplicity of her comment smacked me in the face. I spend so much time trying to get to the next stage, to someone kissing me, saying they like me, saying, “I do.” But the thing is, it’s good right here. Moya and I laughed so much that night – at the awfulness of the men, but silly stuff, too; a chicken fillet bra filler shrunken on the floor of one of the bathrooms; when one of the sweets a DJ was throwing into the crowd hit me on the head. We laughed so hard I could feel it sore in my stomach.
We tend to see being single as a stopping-off place before we arrive at a relationship. It’s a time to heal, take stock, to start new hobbies – climbing walls or knitting. To meet up with friends you have lost touch with, get things out of your system, wear less and go out more. It’s a transitional period preparing you for something more stable and secure where “real life” begins. But it doesn’t have to be that; it can be its own destination, like when people go on one of those really long train journeys just because the view from the window is beautiful. I realise now it didn’t go wrong with these men, it went exactly how it was supposed to.
‘Some great dates have not led anywhere because the man wants to marry and have children’: Megan Nolan, 30s
There was a time – until quite recently actually – when I thought there was such a thing as a stable identity and that the point of life was to find out what yours was and commit to it. Until I was 25 or so, that identity was mostly Being In Love. I was a Girlfriend Girl, a Relationship Person, and when one broke up it was usually because another had caught my eye – and if not, it certainly wasn’t far behind. After a youth characterised by romantic anguish and not very much hard work, I decided meaning lay in the other direction and I was going to reject the premise of love and find meaning in my independence. I had relationships, I dated, but I doggedly insisted on self-sufficiency. I might not have been single all that time, but I felt myself to be essentially alone, and was determined to embrace that feeling. I had to, I thought, to survive this world where nothing is guaranteed in a relationship except its eventual end, whether through separation or death.
Now I am in my 30s, and trying to accept how little I know and how everything is constantly shifting, including the identities we feel so sure and protective of. I was wrong about death and endings being the only certainties: change is the other. I am hugely glad I chose to dedicate some crucial years to my work and to cultivating an autonomous lifestyle that is hindered rather than helped by having a partner. I’ve been on my own for about a year now, and though saying goodbye to my last, much-loved boyfriend led to the inevitable “I am going to die alone” stab of terror, being single suits me so well that it has been difficult to dwell on that for very long.
I am basically a nightmare to date insofar as I’m a terrific girlfriend – extremely good fun, considerate and curious about the other party, tolerant and flexible – but will also do whatever I want at all times. I lure the person in with my excellent girlfriendness and then announce I am going to be abroad for eight of the following 12 months, or can only see them once a month while I finish this project, or whatever other absurd condition has arisen that makes it functionally impossible to have a relationship. (There’s definitely an unattractive part of me that revels in this habit of mine because it is so at odds with the desperation and need for romantic love that characterised my 20s.)
Being single in my early 30s does feel different to being single in my 20s, not least because a good number of my closest friends are now firmly settled in their relationships, married or owning property with their partner. I have the dating advantage of not wanting children – never have, don’t right now, yes maybe I’ll change my mind about that, no I’m not going to organise my life around the possibility of that change. I had a life-alteringly bad date in March this year, which I swiftly metabolised into a short story, but if I felt strongly that I wanted to meet someone to have children with in the next 18-24 months, I don’t think I could have laughed as hard at that man and how small and insignificant he made me feel. On the other hand, some great dates have not led anywhere because the man has been clear that he wants to marry and have children and that is not something I currently see as a realistic possibility.
I would try out every sort of life there is if I could, but I can’t. I can only have mine, while trying with all my might to remain porous and open to the world’s whims as well as my own. I think practising that porousness is going to be of use when I fall in love again, and it’s going to be of use even if I never do.
‘If odd and isolated are other words for single, so too is free’: Hephzibah Anderson, 40s
I’ve never been one for listing my goals or making five-year plans. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t yet mastered the piano or pitched a podcast, and rarely manage to turn my accounts in on time. What I do know is that, while I still long to acquire a garden and always intend to file my tax return the right side of midnight, marriage has never been an ambition, never mind a priority. Don’t believe me? A lineup of some of my exes may persuade you otherwise.
Now I’m in my 40s and a single mother (by design) with a fulfilling career and a list (all right, a haphazard series of mental Post-its) of dreams and fancies whose pursuit amply fills any spare time. So it’s flummoxing to find that well-meaning friends, family and chatty cabbies continue to insist I get out there and do something to remedy my singleness.
Despite mounting evidence that relationship status is not the determinant it was once preached to be when it comes to health and happiness, the marriage plot insistently shapes our ideas of how happily ever after should look. Uncoupled, we’re incomplete – or worse. Just take a look at some of the synonyms for “single”.
The constant need to justify yourself can be enough to make you wonder if you’re not delusional, and as with so much that has to do with our innermost selves, it can be difficult untangling true desires from socially conditioned aspirations – especially if you’re a woman who wants children.
At university, I was half of one of those couples who essentially lived together, embracing domesticity student-style. I loved my boyfriend – he was clever and handsome, with an edge of wildness, easily the most marriageable man I’ve ever been involved with (and marry he has – twice). But as adult life hove into view, it was my single self I craved, because if “odd” and “isolated” are other words for single, so too is “free”. I still remember the thrill of waking up alone to my own thoughts, and it saw me through some frankly melodramatic breakups to come.
Singlehood evolves. While it felt giddy in my 20s and fraught in my 30s, it’s different again in my 40s. For a start, I can count on far greater understanding from the couples at whose weddings I danced a decade or two ago. And yes, being single with a child is different, not least because the pity that’s a feature of even the most unintentional single-shaming becomes diluted with “I don’t know how you do it” admiration.
There are downsides to being single, of course there are. It’s more expensive, for starters. But other supposed negatives seem overstated – either that or they’re simply not something from which coupledom can insulate you. Loneliness, for instance – lying in bed beside the wrong person is lonesome and bleak. And while isolation is clearly damaging, it’s easy to forget that solitary time is also important. In middle age, when caring for growing children and ageing parents leaves a person sandwiched, there’s an extravagant joy to be had from being alone – a romance, even.
And when you think of the generations of women for whom marriage was a desperate, non-negotiable necessity, there’s enduring pride to be found in independence, a heady joy in the ability to pursue pleasures and possibilities without consulting anyone else. The self-reliance that it confers, both emotionally and practically, is far from selfishness – in fact, chances are you’ll have more time and impetus to maintain friendships and see family if you’re not bound to just one other.
It would be disingenuous of me to say it’s always been this way, but today, if I had to pick just one word to sum up how I feel about being single, I’d say “whole”. It makes those ripples of unexpected attraction – the sense that you could talk for ever to a man you’ve been placed beside at a work dinner, say – all the more delectable.
‘What I wanted more than steamy sex with a stranger was steamy sex with myself’: Sangeeta Pillai, 40s
I was single. He was cute. Our eyes met across the burnished oak dinner tables in a manor house hotel in the New Forest where I was staying.
I’d booked myself a solo pampering weekend in a fancy hotel, as I do a few times a year. Luxurious countryside setting. Spa treatments. Lavish dinner for one at the restaurant. I’d just come out of a long-term relationship, which I ended, consciously choosing myself over a man who was full of empty promises. I thought of this weekend as going away on a date with myself.
As I tucked into my cod and samphire dinner, I felt his eyes on me. He smiled. I smiled back. There was a definite sizzle of lust streaking its way across the dining room. My first thought was: I had a lush hotel room waiting for me upstairs. Egyptian cotton sheets and a soft hotel bathrobe. All I had to do was snap my fingers for a night of passion. But I didn’t. Because what I wanted more than steamy sex with a stranger in my hotel room was steamy sex with myself. Yup. I had packed my favourite sex toys and my sexiest pyjamas to come to this hotel. Because this break was all about me. Treating myself. Loving myself. So I went back to my hotel room after dinner, alone. And (ahem!) I played with my fabulous toys.
Here’s the thing you need to know about single women in our 40s and 50s. We are not driven by our biological clock, settling for someone because we want babies. We don’t need a partner to do things with. We are happy going on holidays, going to the theatre, eating dinner, all by ourselves. We don’t need a man to “complete” us – we are complete in ourselves.
Most women my age have done a lot of painful and transformative inner work through therapy, body work or spirituality. We really know who we are and what we want. Most men I meet haven’t done that work. I’m talking about men in their 40s, 50s and 60s flopping around like 15-year-old boys.
My many female friends say the same thing. The men they meet and date still aren’t sure what they want, stuck in a never-ending merry-go-round of fleeting relationships, unable to choose any one woman. I do feel compassion for them, because they’ve never been taught to look inwards, so they have no idea of what they want and are stuck in a permanent relationship chaos. But here’s the beautiful bit. Many women in their 40s and 50s are coming into their own power. I certainly am. I feel fierce. I feel strong. I feel age has turned me into the most powerful version of myself. Someone I couldn’t even imagine in my 20s and 30s.
I’d love to meet someone to share my life with, but it won’t be just any man. I will not settle for someone unless they are worthy of my time, my love, my energy, my body. So until I meet a man who knows his own power, I’m staying single.
‘Singledom for me is about the joy of being selfish’: Patrice Lawrence, 50s
I’m now in my mid-50s and have proportionally been single for more years than I’ve been in relationships. So, in spite of that vague longing for a romantic life triggered by Christmas perfume adverts, why do I like being single?
Singledom for me is about the joy of being selfish. I’m the oldest (by a long way) of three siblings and the only girl. I could change a towelling nappy from the age of nine – kite and triangle – and provided childcare for my night-nurse mother from 12. As – finally! – my social life kicked off in my late teens, I was still the default babysitter. When my mother went to the Caribbean for three months, I was designated weekend carer for my young brother. So many parties missed!
I enjoy the pure self-indulgence of eating what I want, when I want, of taking baths at strange times of the day, of meandering around art galleries at my own pace. If my armpits look like I’ve got Milli Vanilli in a headlock that’s my business and my business alone. And no, I don’t get lonely. I have a solid group of mainly female friends who I can holiday with, go to gigs with, share successes and cry with. Their love has lasted longer than all my relationships.
On a more fundamental level, singledom for me is a shield against rejection. Being a writer is bad enough for that. There is a tight ball of hope when I submit a manuscript or an idea. It sits inside me, slowly unravelling until I hear a reply. Do I want that feeling to take over my whole life? Am I good enough? From my teenage years in Sussex, when peers were copping off and pairing up, I learned that Black girls were not good enough. On a French exchange trip when I was 15, a boy went down the line of English girls and asked every one to dance with him apart from me. He had a face like a pancake that had been thrown against a wall, but still … Later, when I eventually got to cop off and pair up, I was the exotic other. One boyfriend used to sing Billy Ocean’s Caribbean Queen to me. I was born in Brighton. I suppose that doesn’t scan so well.
I have flirted with the idea of dating apps, though flirting with anyone I meet through them fills me with horror. The likelihood of meeting someone is negligible, anyway. I’m a Black middle-aged woman. The algorithms do not run in my favour.
Perhaps my singledom may waver in the future – and I will have to pay someone good money to bury this article. But for now, I will savour 3am audiobooks, 2pm baths, the unconditional love of my friends, and I will be happy.
‘Leave the single folk alone. They may not need fixing’: AL Kennedy, 60s
Sometimes a long-running TV series will broadcast a rogue episode. We’ll only recognise a solitary character and they’ll be surrounded by strangers and out of context. On the one hand, this is a chance to learn a lot about that person. On the other, more worried, hand, this isn’t what we’re used to and we hope things become more normal again very soon.
For those of you who are in couples, throuples, communes, human centipedes – I don’t judge – single people are life’s rogue episodes. Turn up regularly with no partner, with not even a hint of someone who shares your tears and your Netflix password, and you’ll find no one really knows what to do with you. You’re their worst possible future – what would happen if everyone died, or ran away. You’re uncanny.
And where do you fit on dinner tables? And you aren’t quite properly insulated, socially speaking, so do you need more attention than usual, or less? And if nobody knows you intimately, who explains you, verifies you? (For some reason that does seem to be required.) And if you’ve been single a very long time – which could mean anything over 12 hours – then what exactly must be wrong with you? Are you sexually weird, traumatically weird, extremely weird? Are you wanted by Interpol, living a double life? Do you sleep in a grubby wedding dress? Are you going to ransack the bathroom for razor blades and pills? Or husbands? Wives?
No. Just stop. Leave the single folk alone. Maybe they’re an only child with all the interior space and self-containment that suggests. Maybe their days are rogue episodes, full of coincidence and friendships, adventures, wide circles of influence and support.
Or maybe they only look single and are Something Else. They love and are loved, but live in different houses, different countries. Maybe they’re low-maintenance, or high-absence, or intense in syncopated, unconventional rhythms. Maybe they’re baffled by your round-robin email newsletters and family Christmas cards.
I’m the only daughter of an only daughter, who raised me alone. Writing is hideously time-consuming and tough on heterosexual women’s relationships. Whisper “writer” on a date and your opposite number will dive through a bathroom window faster than you can yell “chlamydia”. Either that, or he’ll want to be written about and you’d better hope that window won’t hurt your head as you merrily leap from the cistern towards freedom.
I was single for decades. That’s decades of confessions, complaints and propositions from the non-single. Have you seen some relationships … ? I was meant to want that when I had coincidence and friendships, adventures, wide circles and so forth? My health meant I have no children and that was sore – very – for a while, but other people’s kids need available honorary relatives, godparents, extras. That’s me.
Solitaries are unmodified by intimate compromise. So do they become weird? I’m something else, have been for years. That’s not weird, that’s bespoke. Unclassifiable love is still love. Probably everything worthwhile a human can do is an expression of love. I needed solitary decades to reach any understanding of what that requires from me.
We’ll probably all reach moments when we’re all we’ve got, alone. If solitude isn’t fearful, it helps us see reality, who we are, and really see others. When we’re in company being useful, happy, kind, ourselves – we can stay. If not, we can go. I love that.
So leave the single folk alone. They may not need fixing. Let them sit quietly in public, if they want, pausing in their adventure. They may be having the time of their lives.
‘I’ve never regretted marrying, only the time it took me to break out on my own’: VG Lee, 70s
I married at 19, and left the relationship when I was in my mid-30s. Almost overnight, my family and the few friends I had took a step away from me. I think they hoped that a few weeks renting a shabby one-bedroom flat in London would bring me rushing back to my hard-working husband and comfortable home in leafy Hertfordshire.
But from the very first day of my new life – disoriented, a little fearful – I also felt relief. I remember buying a bright-blue blind from Habitat and a duvet set; blue again, patterned with white snowflakes. There was nobody to insist on a joint decision before purchase, to query my choice of colour or ask, “Are snowflakes really us?”
No. They were really me.
I believe that marriage is still seen as a mark of success; two people have found each other attractive and lovable enough to commit, in principle, till death do them part. Fine, but that view can feel like a negative judgment on those who choose or are forced through circumstance to live alone.
In the past, when I enjoyed brief affairs I felt my coupled friends silently urging me on, as if I was a racehorse galloping towards the finish line. Will she get there? Well, no she won’t. My heart was never involved. And perhaps that lies at the root of being a committed long-term single woman. I love many things, but I love and value myself more.
Recently I attended a wedding. The bride and groom were patently in love; kissing, touching. I threw confetti, toasted the happy couple as they cut the cake, all the time thinking about my own wedding – a far smaller affair, more than 50 years earlier. On that day, I felt beautiful and special. I’ve never regretted marrying, only the length of time it took me to find the courage to break out on my own. Had I stayed, there would have been little personal space outside those joint decisions, for me to find my way to becoming a writer, to finding fulfilment in a tiny house near the sea. Best of all, I have friends; they are the glue that holds my world together.
I’m now in my 70s, and nobody wonders any more about my relationship status. I’m off the hook, fairly content to be seen as a stereotypical elderly woman living alone with her cat. Mostly I’m invisible, but probably historically I might have been burned as a witch. To my neighbours, I have the potential to be boring, bossy and inquisitive; acceptable were I a detective like Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher, but otherwise best avoided. I’ll take that.
Am I happy? Of course there are cold winter mornings when I wish that someone would bring me a mug of tea in bed or change the lightbulb in the kitchen, but that’s nowhere near enough to make me relinquish my hard-won freedom. To quote the Moomin character Snufkin: my life is “one part expectation, two parts sadness, and for the rest just the great delight of walking alone and liking it”.
‘I can go, do, eat and behave exactly as I wish’: Joan Bakewell, 90s
I have enjoyed living on my own for 20 years now; years in which I have come increasingly to cherish the single state. For me, it has many blessings.
First, for anyone who has been through an acrimonious marriage and a rancorous divorce, the sense of freedom when the pain goes away is a matter for rejoicing. After the storm, the rainbow. There is the negative pleasure of the things I no longer need to do: tempering my behaviour to keep disagreements at bay, watching for unexpected bills that might land in my lap; also I can sign off the lawyers who have seen me through the tangle of money and property settlements … all gone. How wonderful is that – raise a glass!
I am now in my 90s, with the experience of two marriages behind me, so I am not looking to raise children, create a family home, embark on an extended network that includes schools, surgeries, neighbourhood families, sporting events and holidays planned to suit everyone. I have done all that and it’s behind me now, leaving good memories, but it’s not something I want to revisit. So my horizons are narrower. I am responsible only for myself and can indulge my own tastes to the full.
And what an abundance of options open up for someone who is single: I can go, do, eat and behave – within the constraints of money and the law – exactly as I wish. First – and most importantly – friendship. Bereavement leaves many widows bereft and lonely. But they don’t stay that way. They join groups: golf clubs, Friends of the Royal Academy, the WI, the RSPB. They volunteer: the National Trust, Citizens Advice. Living alone means your diary is yours alone, too – so meetings, events and invitations are open for you to choose.
Then there’s lifestyle. The decor is entirely your own: Farrow & Ball or Regency stripes, Ikea, Harrods or eBay – your choice. Eating. You can indulge your favourite foods at exotic times: herring for breakfast, Eton mess at bedtime. (Both for me.) Travel: Uber or the underground.
All these choices nurture a self-reliance that makes life itself easier. The only mind at work on plans – holidays, friends, working hours – is your own. Gone are the power tensions that can infect even the most dedicated of bonds. Struggles reminiscent of Strindberg’s Dance of Death are strictly for the stage. The single person blossoms in ways they never expected: they can take up painting, decide to write a novel, travel on impulse to exotic places. I went alone to see the Roman ruins at Leptis Magna in Libya; I travelled to Tromsø to see the land of the midnight sun. On each occasion, new friendships popped up – not eternally pledged bonds made for a lifetime, but more than passing acquaintances. Life felt enriched, not barren.
Ah yes, but what about the loneliness, the isolation, the late-night tears into the pillow, the watching a sunset without sharing it, what then? Yes, there are bouts of such moments in every life, shared or not. Life is a pretty inexplicable enterprise, after all, and if you’re in search of certainties, then head for the nearest church or mosque and ask for comfort there. If, like me, your life is full of doubt and confusion, then you share the human condition as most people know it. The great consolation is that there’s nothing lonelier that being locked in relationships that have become jaded and worse, where there’s no time for introspection, independent thought and the pleasures of the world as you choose to enjoy them.
