Unattached: Empowering Essays on Singlehood

Because despite what Instagram might tell you, you’re not too late for anything; there are many ways to live your life. We don’t exist to be chosen or desired by some man – it’s a myth that we grew up with, de-centring us from being the protagonists of our own lives.

We’re allowed to love being single. We’re allowed to value this time in our lives for all its freedom and possibility. We’re allowed to stop spinning our wheels, and start loving our lives. That

I know that putting less effort into dating sounds terrifying, because we associate that reduction in effort with an increase in

the amount of time we’ll be single. But we’re allowed to recognise that those two things aren’t correlated at all. Relationships happen, love happens. We can’t control, plan or cause these things with all of our toiling away in the dating space.

Because it’s a truth universally acknowledged by all women that men, marriage and motherhood is an absolutely exhausting, draining and tiring endeavour. But we don’t talk about that. The realities of maintaining a relationship, household and family are still brushed under the carpet and hidden behind closed doors while we continue to tell women tha

A truly important thing to understand about being single and actively dating is that dating is one area of life where effort doesn’t match reward. If you want to learn a new language, you study, and then you know a new language. If you want to bake a cake, you mix the ingredients, bake and enjoy. But not in the dating space. You can put all the eff

ninety-two undergraduates who had experienced a recent romantic break-up reported, on average, five positive types of personal growth that they thought might improve their future romantic relationships. These ranged from boosted self-confidence to learning how to be a better partner and, perhaps most crucially of all, how to choose

allowed stories of how people met to broaden our minds? What if these stories served as reminders of the infinite number of ways people meet and fall in love?

People meet at work. They meet at conferences. They meet on planes, trains and buses. They meet through friends, they meet at bars. They meet on the actual street sometimes. It’s endless, and if there are endless ways people come together, maybe that knowledge can help single people let go a bit. Maybe we’re not as in control as we thought we were,