how be single again without offending your married friends

or yourself

The first thing you realise after finding yourself suddenly single again in your forties (or beyond) is that you’ve made a terrible, irreversible mistake.

Turns out while you were busy making Japanese quick pickles, booking your kids into coding camp, renovating the loft and deleting passive-aggressive texts from the person you are now call ‘my co-parent,’ instead of the one who inexplicably blames me for everything, the world decided to move on. Stuff happened; you missed it. It’s fine. I’ll catch you up.

So remember the people who used to binge drink every weekend? Well they all found Zoom therapists and sobered up. Meanwhile other people began taping their mouths shut in bed at night for reasons that apparently have nothing to do with sex. Single men willingly acquired houseplants en masse and mostly managed not to kill them! Racist blow-hard cabbies were deftly phased out by impeccably polite Muslim refugees in electric cars who ask you if the temperature is okay but sadly get paid less. The people at parties who used to smoke joints now have pockets full of gummy worms. The ones with low self-esteem have been diagnosed with ADHD. At some point, single women in their late thirties discovered the roiling vacuum in the pit of their gut wasn’t broodiness (as The Daily Mail and their GP had led them to believe) but burn-out caused by epi-genetics and a surplus of disposable income. Cheating exes morphed into malignant narcissists. Tattoos and botox were officially normalized. And somehow, in all this, the cost of a pack of cigarettes rose higher than a flight to Madeira.

I know. I’m upset too.

The upshot is, just like the bum on which you are now all-too luxuriously seated, the universe expanded incrementally without your consent. And now that you are finally free and hoping to use it to your strategic advantage again, it’s like: Hold up, I don’t actually recognise this thing. I think maybe mine got mixed up with someone else’s?

Alas no. Anyway, you’re here now so I’ll give you my considered and hard-won advice (warning: you might not agree with all of it, but every point that follows is completely 100% correct):