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 phased out by impeccably polite Muslim refugees in electric cars who inexplicably get paid less. The people at parties who used to smoke joints now have pockets full of gummy worms. The ones who thought they had low self-esteem have been diagnosed with ADHD. At some point, single women in their late thirties discovered the roiling vacuum in 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 unrecognisable. The whole experience is 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 100% empirically valid):

1. Forget trying to figure it all out. How to do it right, I mean. It’s impossible. It’s not that there are no rules, it’s just that by the time you manage to work out half of them, they’ll all have changed again. The best course of action now is to try to get used to the feeling of being awkward and confused. If you lose weight and blink a lot people might mistake you for being helpless and occasionally offer you a ride home. On the best days you’re going to feel like a stricken Victorian lady who’s stepped out of a time capsule into an episode of Black Mirror and on the worst ones you’ll lay in bed scrolling through images of abused rescue puppies in Albania thinking, How could I possibly resist those eyes? But you must. Resist at all costs. Unless your ambition is to die alone under a fur-matted duvet smelling of poop, do not get a puppy. Now is NOT the right time.

2. Stop listening to your married friends. Talk to them obviously, eat their food and drink their wine, just don’t actually waste your energy absorbing anything they say. Just because they love you (and vice versa) doesn’t mean they get it. Condition yourself to regard them the way you did your parents from roughly the age of twelve to twenty-seven. Cultivate empathy and understand they are people who sweetly delude themselves into thinking they have a grip on reality because they drive cars and have pensions. Forgive them in advance and this time round try not to roll your eyes? It’s not nice.

3. Once you start having a sex life again, do not tell your married friends anything about it. Under any circumstances! Especially if you have children and are a woman it’s imperative to pretend you are a nun. No one will actually believe it but still, tell them nothing. Unless of course they are having an illicit affair, in which case tell them everything. And if you naively confide in them, understand they will not be happy for you or even remotely curious. Prepare for stricken faces and zero follow up questions. Instead they will wrinkle their noses and say things like, Ew dear! Really? and, depending on your postcode, trot out some bollocks about feminism. This is not because they disapprove of sex but because they forget what sex actually is. Good sex, I mean. Like the kind you have with a new person whom you seriously fancy and have met in the past hour-to-three-years.

4. DO NOT force your married friends to think about it because if you succeed and they think about it too much and then they will start having flashbacks and commit suicide and your godchildren will cry at the funeral which will make you feel guilty — so just don’t, ok?

5. Remember: When your married friends talk about things like “marriage,” and “relationships,” they are talking about their marriage and their relationship. When they talk about “sex” they are talking about their sex. When they talk about “the future” they are talking about their future. And their future is not your future any more than their husband/wife is your husband/wife. Because you don’t have one at the moment. Thank god.

6. It’s possible you’ve lost a great deal in the process of becoming single (financially, emotionally, your pride, etc.) and because of this it’s natural to be slightly bitter and fixated. But try, if at all possible, to remember what you’ve gained: POSSIBILITY. You have literally no idea what’s going to happen next. This is very exciting because odds are it will be better than what happened before for the simple reason that you’re way less stupid now (in theory). And hey, if it isn’t better? You can just change it up again. History now demonstrates you are fully capable of doing just this.

7. Think of yourself as a travelling minstrel. Embrace the joy of the open road. Remember why you are on it: Not just to escape the gaslighting or because of your partner came back from that work conference a night early. You are here for adventure! Be curious and interested. Talk to all passersby, especially the weirdos. Take loads of photos and save them in the ‘hidden’ album in your phone in case your kids get hold of it.

8. But before you strike out, remember to order new curtains. You’ll need them. Take a few months (or years or everything that’s left) to just rest. Lick your wounds. Re-connect with old friends and be open to making new ones. Ideally these should be the kind of friends who’ll feed you hallucinogenic chocolate and make you sign up for a life drawing course. Your basic litmus test for any new friend should be that they should are highly intelligent in a slightly insane way and improbably good looking. Also that they would never use an idiotic term like ‘failed relationship.’

9. Relationships don’t fail. They don’t even end! Relationships just evolve and get bigger, more complicated and worse, like the world and your bum.