Love my friends, but certainly don't want them to hear me in the throes of passion.
Especially when it's with someone you've promised your friends you are "like, SO done with!"
Hey, everyone has a secret dalliance from time to time.
So within three months it was time, once again, to pack my bags and head back to a lovely home life that involves just one girl and her dog.
Now, here's the thing that happy couples don't know about the single life ... it's expensive!
While couples look at gorgeous one-bedroom apartments, smugly knowing that they will be going halves in the rent, we poor singletons are scanning realestate.com looking for anything that's not ridiculously out of the price range for a solo pay packet.
And that's not the only expense we singletons are stuck with. Oh no.
There's the cost of furniture, Uber eats delivery fees that can't be split with a significant other, access to the streaming services that you pay for in full by yourself, buying fresh groceries that won't go stale before the end of the week.
And don't even get me started on the cost of dating. If we want to spend time with someone, it's not a cosy night in with a pizza, a movie and PJs. No, we've still got to launch ourselves into the initial first date.
That involves the cost of an Uber to the date, halves in the wine, perhaps dinner, the uber home. You go on a few dates a week in the hopes of meeting someone special and you're already down well over a hundred dollars. Per week.
Then there's travel. Been invited to a destination wedding? Or perhaps you've been invited to a friend's birthday interstate. Apart from the plane ticket which everyone has to fork out for, there's then the hotel room that you can't split with a partner, the travel to the wedding, and the wedding gift. All of which can be halved in a couple.
By the time you're a year into the single life, you are pretty darn broke.
It's not just expenses you will have to wrangle with as a singleton. There's what seems to be an acceptable bias towards singletons. A recent study found that rental agents are more likely to pick a married couple over a single person to rent to.
In the experiment conducted by the University of Virginia, rental agents read descriptions of multiple applicants for a rental property and chose one. The applicant pool included a married couple and different types of singles.
Although the applicants were similar in terms of wealth and careers, participants consistently chose the married couple over the singles and explicitly stated that the applicants' marital status influenced their choice.
I've also discovered the cost of socialising in your 30s is far more expensive then it was in my 20s when a night on the dance floor followed by five vodka sodas and a Maccas on the way home put me out around $50 to $60.
With friends who are doing gloriously well in their professions, a night out now tends to consist of dinner at a nice restaurant, a cocktail (or three) and perhaps a little money put aside for the cheeky Uber eats order post-hangover the next day.
One too many weekends of laying low can really give you a yucky dose of loneliness. If there's one thing I've learnt about the single life it's that your social life is incredibly important. Interactions keep the ol' mental health in check.
Jana Hocking is a podcaster and collector of kind-of-boyfriends | @jana_hocking | Jana (with a J)
