"Why I'm embracing being single"
By the time I'd hit 40, most of my friends have ticked all the various life boxes: they'd dated in their 20s, settled down in their 30s, got married, had kids, bought houses. In short, they had done everything that was expected of them. I, on the other hand, was doing well to be seeing someone for more than a few months and had experienced every version of being a single wedding guest: being put on the kids’ table, being propositioned by the best man whose pregnant wife had gone for a nap and, of course, the classic drinking too much and crying in the toilets because nobody would ever love me.
In those moments, I felt the acute loneliness of not being chosen, of not following the path my friends were on. Being endlessly single made me feel like a failure. A tragic Bridget Jones cliché. After all, everyone – including Uber drivers who regularly gave me lectures on the need to settle down – knew that to be a single woman in your 40s was to have got life wrong. So, what was wrong?
For a long time I thought I was single because men didn’t like me. Being a redhead growing up in 1980s suburbia meant that I was not one of the pretty ones – the poetic phrase ‘Ginger Minger’ still rings in my head. In my 20s, I rarely got chatted up in bars the way my friends did, so I threw myself into work instead. A few years later, I was shocked to find that quite a few men were interested but it never lasted long.
Then one day, after listening to me describing another romantic failure, my mum made a radical observation: "I never actually thought you’d get married and have kids." When I looked annoyed, she reminded me that she’d told me that as a teenager. I had blanked it out of my memory, but then I remembered my feeling back then was that Mum was saying nobody would want me. This was not what she meant at all. She was simply saying that she didn’t think a traditional couple setup would suit me. "I think you’d feel trapped. You’d hate domesticity," she argued.
She added now that it wasn’t in my control whether I met someone or not; it was one of those things that either happened or it didn’t. I told her that of course it was in my control – I could get on the dating apps and date more. "Well, do that then," she said. "I don’t want to," I replied. Her response: "Well, maybe you don’t want what you don’t have." Could it be that simple?
After that conversation, I went home and googled: can you be happy and single? I read lots of articles about how it’s good to be single for a while before dating someone new, or how being single was a great opportunity to get to know yourself and what you want in a partner. None of the posts seemed to be saying you could be single for ever and happy.
Then I found a TED talk by a woman called Dr Bella DePaulo. As a lifelong singleton at 63, DePaulo believes that some people are what she calls Single At Heart, which means that being single is the life that suits them. These people tend to be very independent, need a lot of time alone and are driven by creativity, she explained. I ticked every box. It made sense of my life and the choices that I’d made.
For years, I told myself that I was single because nobody wanted me and that I hadn’t been ‘chosen’ – but any time I had been ‘chosen’, I’d run for the hills. I hadn’t realised that I’d been – totally unconsciously – choosing a single life all along.
My greatest joys have always been work, travel and freedom. There’s nothing tragic about that – quite the contrary. It’s such a privilege to live in a time and culture that allows me to live like this. I decided that I was going to embrace being single instead of feeling ashamed of it.
I started reading about the history of single women. I learned that the word spinster originally meant a woman who spun yarn for a living and therefore had an independent income and didn’t have to marry for financial security. It was a powerful position to be in.
I learned that single women had been an important force in history – helping to bring in the vote for women, helping abolish slavery, not to mention writing and creating beautiful things. I read a book called Spinster by Kate Bolick about historic female writers whose main love was always their work.
These women didn’t want to define themselves by their relationships but they did have full love lives. Some had one lover, some had several. All had deep friendships and companions.
I wanted to be like them. We have an idea that to be single means to be alone – but that’s not true at all. Research shows that single people tend to have a web of close friendships and family ties. Married people may have ‘the one’ but we have ‘the ones’.
I wanted my single life to be full of love and passion so I signed up to tantra workshops to shed some of my Catholic shame around sex. It was a revelation to discover that a single woman can have a beautiful, intimate sex life.
But that isn’t to say being single was perfect. Living alone during the Covid-19 lockdowns was painful and taught me that while I didn’t need a husband or a boyfriend, I did need close relationships. I did need hugs and people to share my day-to-day life with.
I realised I had to create an alternative family and was blessed with the right people to do it with: my neighbours. During the pandemic, we realised that there are four single people in my building. We went from quick hellos in the corridors to becoming very close when the restrictions lifted. We now have keys to each other’s flats, to water plants, eat dinners together and watch movies. We even go to doctors’ appointments together if we need that kind of support.
I’ve learned that as a single woman, I need to be much braver about asking for and accepting help. If you live with others, they see when you’re struggling. Living alone, you have to tell people. You have to ask for help. So, when I’m ill and people offer to bring food, instead of saying, ‘I’m fine,’ I’ve learned to say, ‘Yes, please.’
I’ve also found ways to use my mothering instincts. I am ‘second mother’ to my best friend’s son, who I bathed as a baby and now cheer on at football. I’m also very close to my friend’s twentysomething daughters, who joke that I’m a cross between their big sister and their stepmother. And when I need a bit of energy, I go to my friend Sharon’s home, where her 11-year-old twins show me dance moves.
So, if you’re single and struggling, ask yourself, what do you enjoy most in life? Is it freedom and work, like me? If so, celebrate that. Or is your great love animals or the sea? How can you embrace that more? I have a friend who has finally admitted, in her mid-40s, that she’s happiest on her own in her garden. For a long time she worried that this made her antisocial, but now she’s leaning into what she wants to do, not what she thinks she should want to do. And on the flipside, if you really hate being single, that’s okay, too. One
of my closest friends felt ashamed of how much she wanted a partner. She thought it made her unfeminist and old-fashioned – but, of course, that’s not true. For her, partnership was important and since finding it (after many years of being single) I’ve seen her blossom. I’m so glad she never gave up on the love she knew was right for her.
The most important way to love ourselves, I think, is to get to know ourselves and be honest about who we really are and what we like and want. The answers will be different for each of us. And don’t worry if you don’t really know what you want. It can be hard to differentiate what we truly want from what society tells us we should want. We’ve been read fairy tales about princes and princesses since before we could walk, so it can actually feel quite radical to ask, ‘Do I even want a relationship? What would life look like if I didn’t prioritise that? What are the things I might want in a partner? Are there other ways to meet those needs?’
I found journalling helpful for unpicking my thoughts; also making friends with people of different ages and different walks of life. It’s easy to feel like the odd one out when you’re surrounded by couples, but if you’re in a more eclectic bunch, your relationship status will be the least interesting thing about you.
For me, tantra workshops have been a wonderful way to meet people exploring different ways of relating, but for you, it might be walking groups, dancing, volunteering. I’ve also realised that nothing is for ever.
Right now, I’m 46 and have a life full of friends and lovers. It could be that I fall madly in love and get married next year or I could be single for the rest of my life. I honestly don’t know how life will go, none of us does. Everything is temporary.
I believe the most any of us can do is to fully embrace life as it’s happening. To let go of all the fairy tales and to enjoy how things are right now. When you give yourself permission to do this, you might realise that the thing that society tells you is the absolute worst thing to be is actually quite fabulous... you have found a different happy ever after.
Love Me! One Woman’s Search For A Different Happy Ever After (Picador) by Marianne Power is out now
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