It’s not that men never noticed Ellie*. “I was just not one bit interested,” she says. While her friends were out collecting “horror stories” and boyfriends, then later, husbands and children, her focus was “finish school, go to uni, get a job, do all that stuff”. That focus paid off with a career in science, but by the time she turned 37 she was still a virgin, “and I felt like a part of me was missing”.
Sally* was never interested in marriage or children, but she has had “some lovely relationships along the way”. Her struggle has always been with monogamy. “Because for me, that was never important.” For the past decade, the 54-year-old marketing executive has been happily partnered to “a really open-minded person”, which meant she “didn’t need anything more than that newness of sexual adventure”.
