Whether it’s not wanting to be tied down or an aversion to dating apps, a growing number of men and women are remaining solo. It’s just how we’re wired, says Jane Mulkerrins.
Marianne Power is 46, attractive, funny, with a bestselling book under her belt and her own home in a fashionable part of east London. By anyone’s metric, Power is highly successful. Perhaps, that is, bar one societal yardstick: she has never had a long-term serious relationship. “Six months for me is doing well,” she says.
Yet in the past couple of years, she’s come to realise that she never wanted one anyway. “There is a difference between what you actually want and what society tells you you should want, but it’s almost impossible to know the difference because we’re so conditioned about it,” she says.
In her thirties she “made” herself date. “Because as a single woman in your thirties, that’s what you are meant to do. It’s all anyone asks: ‘Are you on the apps?’ "
She met nice people, she says, but, “The whole messaging strangers on my phone, meeting a stranger in a pub — it just never felt good. It felt like going on interviews for a job I didn’t want.” For a long time, she says, “I didn’t realise I didn’t want it, because I thought everyone wants it.” Eventually, though, she realised that, “In a traditional relationship, I felt hemmed in. I just prefer the freedom.”
Living alone in lockdown, however, “That was the first time that I understood why people got married,” she says. “I was so lonely. And I did think, OK, you’ve been foolish and immature and you need to meet someone.” The feelings passed, but not before Power actively invested in close friendships with her neighbours.
What she needed, she’d realised, was companionship — someone to sit on the sofa and watch films with, someone to cook with — and people to turn to in a crisis. “And I have that now. They’ve become this sort of alternative family.”
She also has lovers, who fulfil the sexual side of things, “But it doesn’t come in the form of a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship, and I have no yearning for that,” she says. Nor does she yearn for children. “With every passing year, I am more and more sure that not having kids is absolutely the right thing for me.”
The only thing she lacks, she says, is “someone to put up my shelves and share the bills with. But I have sex, and I have close friendships, and right now I feel very happy in the relationships I have.”
And Power is not alone. A growing band of relationship refuseniks are actively rejecting traditional norms and proudly staying solo. Dubbed the perma-singles, these are not tragic spinsters or desperate incels but eligible men and women of peak marriageable age who are choosing not to pursue long-term partnerships, or even dating.
According to a report in Japan, where the term was recently coined, 34 per cent of singletons aged 24 to 49 have never had a romantic relationship and have no intention of marrying.
When respondents in their twenties were asked about their reasons for staying single, 19 per cent of women and almost 23 per cent of men said that dating was a waste of time and money — a truth that will resonate with anyone who has ever fired up Tinder or Hinge.
The main reason men were reluctant to marry, cited by 43 per cent of the survey’s respondents, was cost, while 41 per cent of women said marriage would endanger their independence.
It’s not such a different picture in the UK. Census figures from February 2023 revealed that for the first time a majority of adults aged 30-34 are now unmarried, rising from 49.2 in 2011 to 58.9 per cent in 2021. And nearly four in ten adults in England and Wales have never been married or in a civil partnership, up from three in ten in 2000.
Isolde Walters can relate to the lack of motivation cited in the Japanese survey. At 35, she’s never been in a long-term relationship and doesn’t date. “I just don’t seem to be bothered. I lack the motivation to meet someone,” she admits.
“I think when I was younger, the thought of not having a man would have seemed like one of the worst punishments that could have been visited upon me,” she says. And in her twenties and early thirties, she did try to date more. But, looking back, she thinks part of that impetus was purely financial. “Subconsciously it was like: I need to find a guy so that we can move into a flat and rent it together, because it’s so expensive. I was spending half my pay on rent.” Now, having bought a flat with the help of her parents, “Meeting someone doesn’t seem as pressing a concern, and it doesn’t get me as excited as other things do.”
There are moments, though, when her single status bites a bit. At Christmas, as the only single person at the table, “I did suddenly feel a bit overgrown and odd.
“I do sometimes think, ‘It’s been so long since I’ve had sex, and that would be nice,’ but I don’t think I have it in me to date someone just to date someone. And my attitude most of the time is: if it happens, it happens.”
My wholly unscientific straw poll of friends and colleagues would strongly suggest that modern dating methods are not doing much to help motivate singletons. Sean Russell is 30 and single, has been in two serious relationships but does not date — chiefly because “dating” today means Doing the Apps.
“Even the word ‘dating’ — it’s a verb, something to do alongside working and socialising. And I have friends, mostly women, who talk about it like a job, with multiple dates lined up every evening. It becomes a chore. And that active pursuit never really appealed to me.”
Russell has tried the apps, after his last break-up, “but I found the whole thing so laborious and didn’t get any joy out of it. It didn’t achieve anything.”
So he logged off again. “I’m a romantic, essentially,” he says. “I see the way that I’ve met people in the past — not through an algorithm — and I cling to that.
“I’d be lying if I said I want to be single. I don’t think I want to be single,” he admits. “But not to the point of it driving my decisions.”
Rachel, who recently turned 40, would call herself “a late bloomer”. Having attended an all-girls school and “without a lot of boys and men in my life”, when she went to university a virgin, she felt a deep sense of shame. “I felt like I had a secret — that I’d never slept with anyone, never kissed anyone. And the secret keeps changing as you get older — then it was that I’d never had a boyfriend.”
In her twenties and thirties, “Modern dating and hook-up culture didn’t come naturally to me, so I largely didn’t engage with it,” she says. She’d go through phases of trying online dating but “none of it resulted in long-term relationships or the depth of connection I hoped for”.
One summer in her thirties, she attended 13 weddings. There was, she says, “the fatigue of perpetual hope. You think, well, who might I meet at these weddings? Then you don’t meet anyone and you’ve just had an exhausting summer of 13 weddings.”
Eventually, she reached “a turning point when I realised, oh, maybe I’m not going to get this wedding [for myself]. I’m not going to get all these other things that people have had. And there’s some grief with that initially, but it ceases to sting as much over time.
“So much of your twenties and thirties is spent focused on these benchmarks,” she says. “Now I think we don’t get everything we want when we want it.” She’s confident “that I am going to have a great partnership, because I also believe that we don’t long for things deeply that aren’t meant for us”.
Now, she says, “The grief is around not having had more sexual experiences, knowing men and experiencing more physical intimacy at different stages of my life.”
While I’d hesitate to call myself a perma-single, the numbers might bear it out. I’ve dated a lot, been in a couple of serious long-term relationships and cohabited with a partner, and there’s usually someone I’m vaguely seeing or sleeping with or somehow auditioning. But I have spent far more of my adult life flying solo than not, and my default position is firmly — and cheerfully — single.
I’ve always simply assumed that’s probably just how I’m wired — with a bit more lone wolf in me than most. I fall in love hard but seldom. And while I’m certainly not opposed to the idea of a long-term partnership (my parents have been happily married for 53 years), I’ve never harboured any great desire to get hitched, and am truthfully slightly mystified as to why any woman would want to in 2024. (I know it confers legal protections, but is a more lucrative divorce really the best reason to walk up the aisle?)
In the name of frontline journalism, over the years I’ve been sent to see a coterie of love coaches, relationship gurus and even a psychotherapist, to seek their wisdom and see if they could get me off the shelf.
While their manners and methods have varied widely, these “experts” have all identified two things:
1. That I am hopelessly drawn to extremely alpha men, ideally with a side of unavailability. “You haven’t graduated from the Prom Date to the Life Partner,” one relationship expert pronounced, which, while perhaps fair, felt a bit judgmental.
Another presented an alternative explanation to the cod-psychology theory of such an attraction signalling low self-esteem, as that definitely doesn’t apply to me: perhaps, she posited, I am somewhat emotionally unavailable too. Women who consistently choose emotionally unavailable men, she told me, may be ambivalent about traditional paths such as marriage and motherhood in part because of a terror of a loss of independence. Hello, Japanese survey.
2. That I’m not in any way unhappy being single (my psychotherapist told me so), or very motivated to change that.
And they’re right. While I would tell you that I’ve always been open to relationships, my prioritising of a career in which I sometimes travelled for half the month might suggest a different story and, deep down, probably a reluctance to relinquish independence and autonomy.
Certainly, the idea of going out (or logging on) and looking for an abstract “someone” to “settle down” with fills me with as much dread as the first of those two words: “settle”. When I meet someone I like I’m all in, but spending time actively searching for that elusive chemistry feels, to me, like trying to nail mist.
The question of whether I wanted kids and how to manage that while single was one that nagged at me for a while, though. I spent a year pursuing IVF with donor sperm, ultimately unsuccessfully, but I answered my own question, leaving me free to move on with my life.
And now that I’m out the other side of it, without the time pressures of biology, I feel less urge than ever to try to nail that mist. And since I’m not looking for the father of my children, what’s so wrong with slightly unavailable alphas?
Answering impertinent questions from others, however, would seem to be part and parcel of being a perma-single. Clare Morton has been in two long-term relationships, including one engagement. At 46, she has been single for more than a decade now. " ‘Oh, you’re single? Have you been married? Have you got any kids?’ They blurt out all three questions without taking a breath sometimes,” she says. “And it’s taken me a long time to come up with a good response, but now I just say, ‘I didn’t meet the right guy at the right time,’ and that’s pretty much the truth.”
She is, she says, “slightly confused, because I never thought that I would not be in a long-term relationship at this age. But I am at peace with it, and have done so many fabulous things I would not have been able to do otherwise.”
She’s built and run a successful interior design business, “which was all-consuming and didn’t leave much time for dating, and while I’ve always been open to a relationship, I’ve felt creatively fulfilled”.
But she misses physical affection and sex, “and the support of a partner, because running a business by myself and making all the decisions can be incredibly lonely”. And, while a huge advocate of solo travel, “There are times where I’m somewhere amazing and look around at all the couples and it does make me lonely, because I won’t have anyone to reminisce or make memories with. Did that dolphin trip even happen?”
But, like Rachel, she remains optimistic. “I do feel like the person will come,” she says. “And it might not be the person I thought it would have been 20 years ago. It might be somebody very, very different.”
In the meantime, though, as Power points out, making perma-singledom a positive means swimming against a strong tide. “There is still the hangover of this idea that a woman’s greatest achievement is being picked by a man.
“For years I had this feeling of, oh, I haven’t been chosen, there’s something wrong with me,” she says. “I couldn’t see that when I had been chosen I’d run a mile. Sometimes if you look at things clearly, you can see that when you weren’t chosen, you really didn’t want to be chosen.”
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London