After a lifetime being single, I finally know the reason why

I’m 47 and have been single for most of my life.

For a long time I thought I was single because men didn’t like me. As a redhead growing up in the 1980s, I just wasn’t the kind of girl that guys fancied.

That stayed the case for most of my twenties, when I threw myself into work, friends and drinking instead. As friends racked up various relationship landmarks, I felt like a weirdo.

By my thirties I realised that the story I was telling myself about being a weirdo that men didn’t like wasn’t quite true. Some did like me… but I would always find reasons that they weren’t right. Then I thought that the problem was that I hadn’t found the right guy.

Then I met a couple of lovely men. Men who were kind and clever… Men who would tick all the boxes that a single thirty something is supposed to want ticked. But after a few months together, I wanted to run for the hills. Now there was no denying the real reason I was single: I was damaged, immature, incapable of commitment, someone who would die alone!

I started all the therapy. I would sort this out! Become a proper adult who had proper adult relationships!

Finally, in my forties, I came across a different explanation for what was going on.

It came via a small grey-haired woman who bounced on to a stage and declared: ‘I’m 63 and I’ve been single my whole life!’ – in the same tone you’d say: ‘I’m 63 and I’ve just won the lottery!’ That woman was Bella DePaulo, and she was giving a TED Talk called: “What no one ever told you about being single.”

DePaulo has spent her professional life researching the single experience, and her personal life living it. She explained that after decades of research she has come to believe that some people are ‘Single at Heart’ – which means their truest, happiest way of life is as a single person.

These people tend to have a few things in common: they need huge amounts of time on their own, they get most meaning from their work and creative pursuits, and they feel relieved when a relationship ends, even if it was a good relationship. That last bit really got me. I was like that. Anytime anything ended, even the shortest fling, and I would feel like I could breathe again.

For years I told myself that I was single because nobody wanted me and that I hadn't been ‘chosen’… I hadn’t noticed that any time I had been ‘chosen’ I’d run. I hadn’t seen that I had been, unconsciously, choosing a single life all along.

DePaulo says that we live in such a couple-focused world it makes it hard to realise that being happily single is even an option. Society pressures us to couple up, from the moment we’re read fairy tales as a child.

She explains the prejudice against single people which she calls ‘Singlism’, which once you see it is everywhere. Are you single and not having sex? Poor thing, you’re not getting any. Single and having sex? Well, you’re desperate. Single and love your career? Well, you’re over-compensating for an empty life… on and on it goes. To be single means you can’t get anything right. No wonder we go through the motions of dating or telling ourselves we should meet someone, even though we’d rather be watching TV.

DePaulo explains that so many of the stereotypes about single people are totally wrong. We are told that to be single means to be (die) alone – but that’s not true at all. Research shows that single people tend to have a web of close friendships and family ties and are actually more connected than couples. Married people may have The One but we have The Ones.

We are told that marriage makes us happier - research shows that’s not the case at all. People may experience a short boost of joy around the wedding but soon go back to previous levels of happiness - unless they get divorced in which case their happiness falls below their previously single levels of happiness.

After discovering DePaulo I made it my mission: I wanted to find out what a good life would be as a single woman in her forties.

I went to a talk by women who had married themselves – an act called sologomy. They had bought rings, shed expectations that a woman’s greatest achievement is to get married and prioritised loving themselves and their friends. I wondered if I should buy myself a ring but then I looked at my overdraft and decided my first act of self-love would be fiscal responsibility.

I read a book called Spinster by Kate Bollick, which explained that the word originally described a woman who spun yarn for a living, therefore had an independent income and didn’t have to marry. It was a powerful position to be in and only became a slur when settlers went to America and babies were needed to populate the country. Then women who didn’t play ball were demonised. I read the history of incredible single women who had done so much to bring in the vote, abolish slavery, write beautiful books – and I felt inspired.

While I had done nothing of any civic purpose I saw myself in the messy, chaotic but alive lives of these women. These women may have resisted marriage but they had great love affairs, they had families and friends and a web of people around them. I wanted this! Singleness, writing and LOVERS!

Love Me! One Woman’s Search for a Different Happy Ever After is about my quest to build this life.

I spent most of the summer doing interviews and have been amazed by the number of people whose eyes light up at the concept of being Single at Heart - even people in partnerships.

One reader got in touch to say that even though she was married with kids, she read the Single at Heart passages and knew that was her. It helped her to understand why she needed so much space. Another who was married without children told me that her and her partner are both Single at Heart which is why they go on holidays separately. ‘I didn’t know you were allowed to do that,’ I joked.

At the end of a talk I gave on the topic, a man came up to me, looking quite stunned: ‘I didn’t know there were other people like me,’ he said. ‘My friends are always trying to set up me up and I don’t know how to say that I don’t want that.’

He asked if being Single at Heart meant you have to stay single forever. I don’t think it does. There are ways of being with people that allow you space.

I explained that right now I’m single with lovers. This time it was him who said: ‘I didn’t know we were allowed to do that.’

I laughed. ‘I think we are,’ I said.

We have been so conditioned - way more than we realise - that life has to look a certain way, that relationships have to look a certain way…

But there are so many ways to live and love and we are allowed to try them all.

We can be single with lovers, Single at Heart with a husband, single with a mad passionate love for dance music/the sea/ cats / trees….

We can be married and live in different homes and holiday alone… We can be celibate and enjoy great sex (with ourselves)… We can have a family made up of friends… we might have children with those friends…

We are allowed to do love anyway, anyhow - as long as we are honest to all involved.

Isn’t that great?

I mean, really?

For most of history women’s financial survival depended on getting married. That is not the case anymore. It’s time to celebrate the freedoms we have, let go of the old stories and try out different happy ever afters.

xx

LOVE ME! One Woman’s Search for a Different Happy Ever After.