Category: Unbound

This may shock you, but I am in my mid-30s and am perfectly happy to be single.

And I refuse to whip myself up into a frenzy of hand-wringing just because I never seem to have a boyfriend, never mind a husband.

It’s true that, if I judged my whole life according to my search for love, I could make myself miserable. But just because I have so far failed to find Mr Right does not in any way make me a failure as a human being.

My 80-year-old grandmother is appalled by my attitude, and thinks I ought to be taking drastic steps towards settling down.

But I shouldn’t be valued solely for my ability to attract a man — I’m a successful journalist, a good friend and sister — and I’m not going to conform to some ‘desperate’ vision of how a single woman should behave.

Frankly, such stereotypes no longer match the reality. Single women are no longer outcasts, or even unusual; in Britain today, there are more of us than at any point in history, more and more of us in our 30s, 40s and beyond.

If you’re aged between 25 and 44, you’re also five times more likely to be living alone than you were back in 1973.

And yet the way we talk about single women has been slow to catch up.

The most familiar ‘singleton’ in fiction, for example, is still the hapless Bridget Jones — a character more than 20 years out of date, who popped up married and with a baby in the latest celluloid instalment of her story.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-5605213/The-rise-alpha-singles.html#ixzz5EtjN7mTF