The Importance of Being Single

 

The agony of weekend loneliness: ‘I won't speak to another human until Monday’

For growing numbers of people the weekend is an emotional wilderness where interaction is minimal and social life non-existent. What can be done to break this toxic cycle asks Paula Cocozza in The Guardian?

On Saturday morning, Peter got up and went to the supermarket. He carried his shopping home, and took care of his laundry and ironing. In the afternoon, he browsed a few record stores and later he cooked himself dinner; always something adventurous on a Saturday night. Afterwards, he hit Netflix. And in all those hours, in common with many of Peter’s Saturdays, not to mention his Sundays, he had no meaningful interaction with another human being. “The only person I spoke to,” he says, “was the lady who came over to verify my bottles of beer at the supermarket self-checkout.”

During the week, Peter, 62, is too busy to be lonely. His commute from Brighton to London means that his working life is “a tunnel” he enters on a Monday and from which no daylight is glimpsed until Friday. But just when Peter re-emerges, he is stymied by an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Instead of providing respite from the stress of office life, a chance to reconnect with family and friends, the weekend looms as a vast emotional and social wilderness that must be traversed before work takes hold again.


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Peter dreads the weekend. But he is far from alone in this. He is one of nearly 200 respondents, from Falmouth to Jakarta, who replied to a request on the Guardian’s website for readers to share their experience of weekend loneliness. The youngest respondent was 16; the eldest in her 70s, and between them, the pain and isolation recurred in countless iterations.

Despite all this, the phenomenon of weekend loneliness has scarcely been studied. “It’s not something that’s been researched at all,” says Pamela Qualter, professor of psychology for education at the University of Manchester. She led the BBC’s Loneliness Experiment last year, and “found that there didn’t seem to be a time of day [nor] a season when people felt especially lonely. But we didn’t ask about the weekend.” So what does weekend loneliness look like, who experiences it – and what might be done to alleviate it?

“We define loneliness as the difference between the desire or expectation of what life should be like, and the reality,” says Kellie Payne, research and policy manager at the Campaign to End Loneliness. For those who experience loneliness primarily – or only – at the weekend, this painful discrepancy is intensified by the sense of being at odds not only with the world outside the door, but with one’s capable, sociable weekday self.

A personal, internal division emerges. Liz is 41, with a rewarding job and family nearby – but she is living two lives. “In the week, I am a contented, fulfilled person. At the weekend, I feel like a lonely outcast,” she says. Increasingly, she finds herself out of step with her social group where she lives in Somerset. She runs her own training business from home, so weekdays are busy. But this is exactly when her married friends want to meet for coffee “and a moan about their husbands”.

Liz would like to see these friends at the weekend, too, but when Saturday comes, “it’s unsaid – but it’s like they’ve closed the doors to me. Weekends are for couples. It would be unheard of to invite me to a dinner party, because I’m single,” she says. “I wake up on a Saturday and feel down. It’s a struggle to pull myself out of bed if I have nothing planned.” When Monday dawns, “it is always a relief”.

For Liz, the loneliness of the weekend is exacerbated by an additional, painful sense that she is not only alone but locked out – “banned from the weekend”, as she puts it. Between Monday and Friday, she enjoys her neighbourhood, but at the weekend, the streets and parks seem to transform. They become questioning, forbidding, to the extent that Liz wonders if she has “absorbed” her loneliness from her environment, now full of couples, families, groups.

“What’s interesting to me is that I’ll sit on my own in a cafe easily in the week,” she says. But the same cafe at the weekend is a space she cannot enter. Even walking the dog takes on a different cast. “I don’t feel conscious at all during the week” – but on a Sunday morning, the same walk feels acutely sad.

“As psychologists we talk about the looking-glass self,” Qualter says. “How your feelings about yourself are influenced by how you think others see you. The public space changes, becomes occupied by other people … It’s no longer your space. You feel uncomfortable because you don’t fit.”

“I hear this a lot,” says Sally Brown, a life coach and counsellor. “It’s like people have two personas. The weekday persona is busy and confident. But the weekend persona is lost and vulnerable.”

But is Liz really projecting her loneliness on to others, and imagining the way they see her – or does society read people who are alone in too predictable a manner? Peter believes he passes through his Brighton weekends undisturbed because he is regarded as a harmless eccentric. “The bachelor is something of a social misfit, but an acceptable one,” he remarks.

A person who enters a public space alone will often be read as best left alone. Mark is 32 and recently returned to London after a couple of years travelling. Going to the pub to watch football one weekend, he took a seat at an empty table for six. Quickly the pub filled. But Mark sat alone and undisturbed for 20 minutes before anyone asked if they could take one of the five free seats around him. “I guess they think you are going to be bringing extra people, or you’re weird,” he says wryly.

Brown, who sees many clients in their 30s and 40s, thinks this disconnect is “related to those transitional times when your peer group may have moved on to a stage you haven’t yet reached”. And, of course, may not wish to reach. Mark’s friends, like Liz’s, are mostly in relationships. “It can happen really fast. All of a sudden, your group isn’t there any more. You are second-tier friendship, relegated to week nights. You’re not in the couples’ dinner party or playdate scene. You start to lack confidence in connecting, so hesitate to suggest things. You assume you are not welcome at the weekend and withdraw … It becomes a toxic circle.”

Brown’s belief that loneliness at the weekend arises out of life’s transitions resonates with Kate. At 61, hers is a different kind of shift to Mark’s or Liz’s. Kate sees herself moving “from motherhood to single life again”. She uses the word “transition”, especially when she reminds herself, while she sits alone on Saturday nights, that she has raised her girls well, that the loneliness is just another challenge to overcome.

Kate, who lives in Cardiff, has two grown daughters whom she raised alone. Her weeks are busy with work and friends, and sometimes her children, if they happen to be nearby. But her weekends, like Peter’s, are “very long and quiet … I will not use my voice or speak with another human until Monday.”

For Kate, the silence of the weekend is wrapped in another sort of silence. She cannot speak of her loneliness to anyone, least of all her children.

“They would be devastated,” she says. “In a way, promoting their education, encouraging them to be social and confident … That has been to the detriment of me. The more they achieve, the further from home they have moved. But I wouldn’t change it, because it was my duty as a mother.”

Seven times during the course of an hour-and-a-half’s conversation, Kate worries that sharing her loneliness with her children would “burden” them. The word feels heavier each time it lands.

While silence protects her daughters, and preserves their sense of Kate, and Kate’s sense of herself, as “strong and capable, someone they can talk to”, it compounds her remoteness. Although she exchanges WhatsApp messages with both children every weekend, these seem to make no impact on Kate’s underlying isolation.
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘The idea of being retired is horrific – then all days will be like weekends.’ Illustration: Monika Jurczyk/The Guardian

She has a “wonderful relationship” with both daughters, but their closeness makes the pain worse – because how can they not see?

I wonder if Kate’s daughters ever ask her what she did at the weekend, and Kate says she has been wondering about this, too. They don’t. “At some level – not consciously – they are worried about the answer.” In the meantime, her children’s absence weighs “like a bereavement” and the loneliness hits hardest at certain predictable moments.

Just as Peter sits down to his adventurous dinner, picks up his cutlery and feels instantly lonely – despite his efforts in the kitchen – so Kate reels from her plate.

She is at the opposite end of the culinary spectrum to Peter. “One of my favourite go-to meals is a couple of boiled eggs and a piece of toast,” she says. It’s a classic comfort meal that Kate routinely enjoys. But last weekend, she sat down, cracked open the egg, “and I thought: ‘I can’t do it.’ I have had that meal so many times, I just couldn’t eat it.” She threw the food into the bin.

Kate is approaching retirement. “But the idea of being retired is horrific – because all the days will be like weekends.” So what can she, or anyone, do to try to stem their weekend loneliness?

Sarah, who is 44 and lives in Surrey, asks herself this very question. “What can you do to alleviate your loneliness? We’re all struggling. Everyone I know has less money to spend.” She, too, is a single parent; and as her daughter, 18, becomes more independent, Sarah feels increasingly lonely at weekends. “What exacerbates the loneliness is that I’m a very sociable person,” she says.

To counter this, she keeps herself in a state of perpetual readiness for last-minute invitations. “It’s good to be seen as someone who will say yes – because you get asked again. I’ve been very lucky to be an emergency plus-one in quite a few situations,” Sarah says. She is aware that this won’t sound lucky to everyone.

She has filled in for her best friend on a trip with her friend’s husband to Secret Cinema. And she has made up the numbers at a wedding. “There is a kind of currency to being a couple,” she says. “That’s the word I want to use – a currency that makes couples worth more in social situations.” (Conversely, of course, the cost of living is lower for them, too.) So does being available at the last minute represent a kind of personal devaluation?

“I think that’s fair to say,” she says. “I’d much rather be turning up with someone. But I really appreciate it when I’m included. I love it. I think it’s important to be the person who says: ‘Yes, sure, I can sit next to whoever.’”

Sarah and I are speaking on a Saturday afternoon. If she were not talking to me, she says, she would be writing an email or doing housework. She has a natural positivity and a bright voice that belie the sadness she feels on her most solitary weekends. If her daughter goes to university next year, the weekends, and weekdays, will further quieten. Like Kate and Peter, Sarah is conscious of the life change that looms.

So she is quietly hatching plans – to move, maybe, depending on her daughter’s movements. And in the meantime, she offers to babysit for friends, hopes for a leisure revolution for single people, and says yes to as many invitations as possible.

“It comes down to keeping the communication lines open, and initiating,” Brown, the life coach, says. Some of her clients have resolved their divided lives by adding structure to their weekends. Loneliness creates passivity in friendships, Brown warns. “There is a sense of ‘I can’t make this happen … It has got to happen to me’”, which can make people who are lonely less inclined to make an effort.

With some clients, Brown has mapped on paper their social circles and groups. “It’s amazing how many people they come up with.” Others’ “proactive approach” include cultivating regular haunts (because being among fellow regulars can feel a bit like being among friends) and attending groups or clubs through the website Meetup.

“That journey can involve some extra loneliness if you find a group you don’t fit with,” Brown warns. I think of Peter, who dropped out of a walking group after a woman berated him for describing himself as “a sad old bachelor”. (“You mustn’t say that,” she told him. “You must say you’re alone and happy.”) Or Kate, waiting for her children to ask what she did at the weekend. Or Mark, who sometimes finds Meetups “a group of lonely, desperate guys”.

“It’s about keeping going,” Brown advises. “If after two weeks you’re not connecting, move on.” Loneliness is complex, she notes. “It can impact those who crave time to themselves after a week at work”; a double bind in which company is both a salve and an impediment.

Peter, for instance, used to volunteer, but, he says, “it cut into what little weekend time I had”, which makes me suspect that as well as hankering for connection, he also cherishes his time alone. “People talk about the difference between being alone and being lonely,” he says. “I am slap bang in the middle of that.”

Meanwhile, Kate is thinking of fostering children. When Peter retires, he might travel the UK and explore a new culinary continent: veganism. Liz has been broadening her group of friends, “meeting new people who aren’t so stuck in the couple thing”. Mark is considering a move to a livelier part of London. And Sarah reminds herself, on her loneliest Saturday evenings, when no last-minute invitations materialise, “to look at all the positives. It’s really hard, but try to embrace the aloneness, the solitude.”

Is single the new black?

Sreemoyee Piu Kundu in The Hindu

Last evening, I went out with my college friend to a popular coffee shop in Kolkata, crowded with young lovers bedecked in the colours of Saraswati Puja, a festival that heralds the beginning of spring.

At the table beside us sat a couple who looked like typical millennials — they constantly clicked indulgent selfies, pouted non-stop, uploaded everything online immediately, with the boy checking and declaring the number of Likes triumphantly by thumping on the table.

‘Young love… wait till they are married and saddled with kids, pets, maids, homework and in-laws,’ my friend smirked.
Feminist type

‘We’ll be told we are eavesdropping, bad manners,’ I winked. My friend was about to say something when the girl at the table, who wore a purple sari and backless choli, raised her voice.

We stole a fleeting glance.

‘Let me tell you straight… I have no interest in being married. I am extremely independent, love my job, enjoy solo travel, I can’t give up my flat… and anyway, I am… umm… commitment phobic…’ She made a face and pushed away the boy’s left hand.

Was there a ring in there?

My friend and I exchanged looks.

‘Dude,’ the boy sniggered, taking back his arm defensively, adding almost under his breath, ‘You don’t want to grow into a sexless spinster, living alone with a bunch of cats in a cold, lonely apartment at 40.’

I’d just turned 40 in December, on the 14th. The last word stuck to me, more than the rest of his bhavishyawani.

I waited for the girl’s response.

‘Besides, I don’t think you are commitment phobic, you’ve had a string of flings, haven’t you?’ the boy clicked his tongue, resuming sheepishly, ‘I would say you are nothing but a bloody feminist.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ the girl retorted in a shrill octave.

The boy asked for the bill.

‘Nothing,’ he shrugged his shoulders.

‘No, tell me,’ the girl met his eyes.

‘It means that you hate men… that you think you are better and can survive alone. It means that you are too opinionated and have a foot-in-mouth disease. It means you want multiple partners, and maybe you are a lesbian. It means you have jholawala, nari morcha type principles… it means you are lonely, lousy and lost…’

* * * *

Single women reportedly constitute 21% of India’s female population, being close to 73 million in number. These include unmarried, divorced, separated and widowed women. Between 2001 and 2011, there was an almost 40% increase in their numbers. Media reports say that the Women and Child Development ministry under Maneka Gandhi is slated to revise policy for the first time since 2001 to address the concerns around being single and female, which include social isolation and difficulties in accessing even ordinary services. .

There’s been a huge growth in this demographic, and ministry officials have said that government policy must prepare for this evolution by empowering single women through skills development and economic incentives.

The policy revision also aims to address concerns related to widows and universal health benefits for all women. And yet, a little over a year ago, and despite the social relevance of the subject, when I actually discussed the idea of a non-fiction book on single women in my circle of single women friends, I sensed a reluctance to talk freely about what being single really meant in India.






Some of them, 40-plus, shyly confessed that they’ve just created their nth profile on a matrimonial site, but made me swear I would not tell anyone else lest they be laughed at. Others clandestinely admitted to flings with married or younger men.

They spoke of serious struggles with basic life issues such as getting a flat on rent or being taken seriously as a start-up entrepreneur or getting a business loan or even getting an abortion (statistics collated by Mumbai’s International Institute for Population Sciences claim that 76% of the women who come for first-time abortions are single).

They confessed to a gnawing sense of loneliness, the looming anxiety about the onset of old age, health issues, of losing parents, siblings and friends over time, of personal security, of being elderly and alone.

I started introspecting on my own single life. When did I begin to realise it wasn’t so much a choice as a culmination of circumstances that I must eventually get used to and learn to adapt to, despite the occasional speed-breaks. That being single wasn’t only about relationship-centric fears.

It also covered physical and mental health, living with parents vis-a-vis alone in another city, the nauseating, never-ending pressure of marriage, the need for sex (a friend insists on calling it ‘internal servicing’), the desire to birth one’s own children, coupled with a general all-consuming pressure to conform to the larger majority, the statistic that sells — married people — who seem to be swallowing you up and swarming in population, be it virtually or really.

* * * *

‘Get her uterus removed,’ the gynaecologist declared. It was three years ago and I was at one of Delhi’s prestigious hospitals. She was the third gynaec I was consulting. I kept going back to her every Wednesday at 4 p.m., waiting on the claustrophobic ground floor, complaining of how my menstrual pain had gotten severe in the last few cycles, even unbearable. My mother accompanied me on most occasions, vouching for me, a lingering sadness in her ageing eyes. Perhaps she was just as fragile. In ways that we could never show each other.

‘But she’s so young, only in her 30s?’ my mother stuttered, protesting, as if against a looming death warrant. The doctor was busy talking with the nurse about a woman in labour. Not very interested in the ones who didn’t qualify in her estimation. Those like me who kept coming back — same complaint, same pain, same marital status.

“Why don’t you find her a husband soon? With her history… first Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome… now endometriosis…and, of course, her weight… is she interested in having a baby anyway?” I pushed my chair back impatiently, fighting back tears.

‘Shall we try Ananda Bazaar? They have a ‘Cosmopolitan’ section… more your type,’ Ma had whispered on our way back, as I looked away.

Beleaguered. Belittled. Barren?

* * * *

Nita Mathur (name changed on request) was born in a conservative Uttar Pradesh family, and grew up watching her mother ostracised for not bearing a son. I met the 34-year-old HR professional in an upscale South Delhi café a month before her marriage, which had been arranged by a family astrologer. Nita was preparing to return to Kanpur, her hometown. ‘I grew up with a gnawing guilt that I was born a girl… I wanted to get out of Kanpur at any cost. I battled with my father and uncles to come to Delhi to get an MBA degree,” she told me.
Like a virgin

For Nita, living alone in a Delhi PG meant life on her own terms, earning her way. She started dating, had sex. “It was, strangely, a way to get back at the closeted patriarchy I had been forced to deal with as a girl,” she said.

But her single status and living alone was a stigma for her parents, who wanted Nita married, and her sisters after her. They pressurised her, using tears and threats. “My mother always cried on the phone, warning me that life as a single woman, though seemingly attractive, would return to haunt me later. She told me my behaviour would affect my sisters’ lives….”

Nita finally agreed to marry. And since she could not tell anyone that she was sexually active, she decided to have a hymen reconstruction surgery. “It was the first question my to-be groom asked when we were granted half an hour alone.” Nita spent ₹60,000 on the half-hour procedure.

In an April 2015 report in indiatimes.com, Dr. Anup Dhir, a cosmetologist from Apollo Hospital, said, ‘There’s been an increase of 20-30% in these surgeries annually. The majority of women who opt for this surgery are in the 20 to 30 age group.’

* * * *

I went to visit a single friend in her 40s who lives in a plush apartment complex in Thane. As my rented car entered the imposing iron gates, a lady security officer asked which apartment I was visiting. When I told her my friend’s name and flat number, she smirked: ‘Oh, the madam who lives by herself? Akeli? Not married?’

In the course of my interviews with 3,000 single urban women across India whose voices are integral to breaking the stigmatised silence around singlehood, I came across Shikha Makan, whose documentary Bachelor Girls is on the same subject.

Shikha spoke of being in the advertising industry, of keeping late hours. “From the first day, we felt uncomfortable. The watchman stared at us, as if he wanted to find out what we were up to.” Once, when she returned home at 2 a.m., a male colleague escorted her home. But when they reached the gate, the watchman stopped them and called the society chairman who accused Shikha of running a brothel. He threatened to throw her out.

“I called my father, who gave him a piece of his mind, and we continued to stay there. But we felt extremely uncomfortable. Then, the harassment started; someone would ring our bell at 3 a.m. or write nasty stuff on the walls. We decided to leave.”

* * * *

Ruchhita Kazaria, 35 and single, born to a Marwari family, started her own advertising agency, Arcee Enterprises, in 2004. She has since faced backlash for trying to conduct business without the backing of a husband’s surname or the validation of a male partner. Running her own company for the past 12 years has led to Ruchhita believing that “women in general, unfortunately, are still predominantly perceived as designers, back-office assistants, PR coordinators, anything but the founder-owner of a business entity.”
Sans arm candy

“In October 2014, a friend asked if I was “secretly” dating someone, probably finding it difficult to digest that a single woman could head a company minus a male counterpart and socialise sans arm candy,” she wrote to me. Within 15 minutes, the friend had sought to enrol Ruchhita with couples and groups that participated in swapping, threesomes and orgies, encouraging her to be a part of this ‘discreet’ group, to ‘hang loose’.

With single women, it’s their sexuality that’s always at the forefront of social exchanges, not their minds or talents.

* * * *

‘What did you say?’ the girl at the next table squeals, her eyes glinting.

The boy’s chest heaves as she shoves in the returned change into his shirt pocket.

‘I am a feminist,’ I say, suddenly, protectively.

Then before the boy can say something, I add, ‘and I am single, 40. So?’

The girl pushes her chair back.

‘I’m Payal,’ she swallows hard.

‘I’m Riya, 54, divorced, two kids, that’s my son,’ the lady sitting behind them walks over to the girl’s table.

‘Amio single, feminist, war widow,’ says another woman who has just walked in. ‘Can I have your table please after you leave? Bad knees!’

The boy looks genuinely puzzled.

‘I hate cats. But I love sex,’ my friend pipes up.

We burst out laughing.

‘Single, huh?’ the boy barks.

‘No, but my husband is away on work in another city, so maybe, umm, okay, just feminist,’ she grits her teeth.

Five of us then make a curious semi-circle. Standing around the girl, who wraps her hands around her shoulders.

We watch him stomp off and leave. The girl looks at me. I hold my friend’s hand. The older lady touches my back. The woman waiting for the table clumsily clicks a selfie.

And just like that, in the middle of an ordinary, noisy restaurant, we become the same. A statistic. A story.

Think loneliness is about single people looking for love? Think again

Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian

It’s hard to feel alone inside a long and happy marriage. But it’s easier than it looks, perhaps, to feel lonely. Last week, Italian police officers responding to reports of screaming and crying inside an apartment in Rome found something unexpected behind the door. Jole and Michele were a devoted elderly couple who had ostensibly got themselves worked up over a sad story on the TV news, but some gentle questioning elicited the fact that both were struggling with terrible loneliness. After 70 years of apparently loving marriage they still had each other, and yet that clearly was not enough.

This being Italy, the officers rather charmingly cooked them a meal of spaghetti with butter and parmesan and stayed to chat, before doing the washing up and posting a flowery account on Facebook of how loneliness can suddenly sweep over you “like a summer storm”. The story went viral because it’s so heartwarming, and yet on second reading it’s also rather unsettling. The lonely are not quite the people we think they are.

It will be 20 years ago this summer that the first Bridget Jones novel was published, a timely reminder to ignore the spectacularly awful sequels and remember just how neatly the original skewered some of the myths about lonely singleton life.

Bridget was famously terrified of dying alone and forgotten, but ironically the one thing she wasn’t was lonely: she was riotously surrounded by friends and family, even if they did all keep harping on about her getting a proper boyfriend. It’s smug marrieds who can all too easily collapse in on themselves, severing old friendships they will come to regret in the process. (Anyone who thinks that having a baby means you’ll never feel alone again, meanwhile, has yet to find out how it feels to be home with a howling infant, desperately trying to engage the postman in conversation because he’s the only sentient adult you’ll see for hours.)

It’s all too easy to become consumed by family life and then wake up in middle age, ostensibly at the centre of a rich and busy life, struggling to remember your last meaningful conversation. That feeling may not be loneliness yet, but it’s a first step on the road.

For while the cavernously empty feeling endured by the bereaved or unwillingly single can indeed be a terrible thing, and life-shortening to boot, it’s not the only kind of loneliness. A recent University of California study found that while almost half of its elderly subjects confessed to feeling lonely at times, only 18% of them actually lived alone.

Unhappy marriages, atrophying into long silences and separate lives, might have something to do with that, but the story of Jole and Michele suggests something else: a distinct kind of loneliness stemming not from the absence of significant others but from a feeling of disconnection with the wider world, a sense that you’re no longer part of something shared and human. Is it just a coincidence that the Italian couple’s crisis seems to have been provoked by a run of news stories – violent attacks, abuse at a kindergarten – revealing human nature at its coldest?

Fleeting loneliness comes to all of us occasionally, but it solidifies into something deeper and darker for those who start to perceive the world as a harsh and hostile place, one that wouldn’t welcome efforts to connect even if you try. It’s that nagging feeling of rejection, of not belonging or standing somehow apart from others, that is the true hallmark of feeling lonely in a crowd, and it’s by no means the preserve of the old.

Interestingly, a recent Brunel University study of over-50s found more than half of those identifying themselves as lonely had been that way for over 10 years, suggesting the feeling had become part of the fabric of their lives. (The same study, by the way, found levels of loneliness had barely changed since the second world war; so much for the idea of a modern epidemic, caused by fragmenting and hectic modern family lives.)

The future of loneliness



So perhaps it’s not so surprising that this week’s obituaries of the fabulously wealthy Duke of Westminster, a father of four, should describe him as “lonely”. Immense wealth can of course be isolating – although the money clearly didn’t make the duke unhappy enough to get rid of it, or indeed to eschew the family tradition of minimising inheritance tax liabilities – but in Gerald Grosvenor’s case something else seems to be going on. What emerges is a picture of a man struggling all his life with feelings of inadequacy and anxiety, worried that he had done nothing to live up to the reputation of those ancestors who built his unearned fortune. Bullied at school, he reportedly left Harrow without one proper friend.

And if you can’t bring yourself to feel sorry for a billionaire, the blunt truth is that not all lonely people are lovable old grannies who tug at your heartstrings. An unhappy few have pushed others away with their self-destructive behaviour and are now paying a high price for it; some have struggled bitterly all their lives with the art of making friends, never quite mastering social norms. How much of the late-night bile spewed on social media simply reflects the envy and frustration of those who see other people happily connecting all around them and just don’t quite know how to join in? Loneliness has its dark side, one not so easily solved by more visits from the grandchildren or well-meaning volunteer “befrienders” popping in for chats over coffee.

For Jole and Michele, at least, perhaps there will be a happy ending. Now their story has been made public, perhaps surviving relatives or old friends will rally round, and if nothing else the knowledge that strangers worldwide are now asking how they can send letters or visit must do something to restore their faith in human nature.

Yet while a little kindness goes a very long way, it’s too easy to pretend loneliness can all be solved by a few more companionable plates of spaghetti. It makes for a less heartwarming story but the truth is that, like the poor, the lonely may to some degree always be with us – even, perhaps, when they’re ostensibly with someone else.

25 Best British Jokes

From The Telegraph

1. “I’ve been single for so long now, when somebody says to me, 'Who are you with?’, I automatically say: 'Vodafone.’”

Miranda Hart

2. “I went to a restaurant that serves breakfast at any time. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.”

Peter Kay

3. “A friend of mine always wanted to be run over by a steam train. When it happened, he was chuffed to bits.”

Tim Vine

4. “I thought when I was 41, I would be married with kids. Well, to be honest I thought I would be married with weekend access.”

Sean Hughes

5. “I heard a rumour that Cadbury is bringing out an oriental chocolate bar. Could be a Chinese Wispa.”

Rob Auton

6. “I lost my virginity very late. When it finally happened, I wasn’t so much deflowered as deadheaded.”

Holly Walsh

7. “I’m sure wherever my dad is he’s looking down on us. He’s not dead, just very condescending.”

Jack Whitehall

8. “Hedgehogs. Why can’t they just share the hedge?”

Dan Antopolski

9. “Try shoving an ice-cube down your wife’s front at night. 'There’s the chest freezer you wanted.’”

Ken Dodd

10. “You know who really gives kids a bad name? Posh and Becks.”

Stewart Francis

11. “Most of us have a skeleton in the cupboard. David Beckham takes his out in public.”

Andrew Laurence

12. “I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.”

Tim Vine

13. “I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”

Nick Helm

14. “I waited an hour for my starter so I complained: 'It’s not rocket salad.’”

Lou Sander

15. “I told the ambulance men the wrong blood type for my ex, so he knows what rejection feels like.”

Pippa Evans

16. “I’m in a same-sex marriage… the sex is always the same.”

Alfie Moore

17. “A sewage farm. In what way is it a farm? Is there a farm shop?”

Jack Dee

18. “There are only two conditions where you’re allowed to wake up a woman on a lie-in. It’s snowing or the death of a celebrity.”

Michael McIntyre

19. “For boys, puberty is like turning into the Incredible Hulk - but very, very slowly.”

John Bishop

20. A big girl once came up to me after a show and said 'I think you’re fatist.’ I said 'No. I think you’re fattest.’

Jimmy Carr

21. “In the Bible, God made it rain for 40 days and 40 nights. That’s a pretty good summer for us in Wales. That’s a hosepipe ban waiting to happen. I was eight before I realised you could take a kagoule off.”

Rhod Gilbert

22. “No wonder Bob Geldof is such an expert on famine. He’s been dining off 'I Don’t Like Mondays’ for 30 years.”

Russell Brand

23. 'Toughest job I ever had: selling doors, door to door.’

Bill Bailey

24. “Dogs don’t love you. They’re just glad they don’t live in China.”

Romesh Ranganathan

25. “I was playing chess with my friend and he said, 'Let’s make this interesting’. So we stopped playing chess.”

Matt Kirshen

Loneliness is one thing. A happy loner quite another

Britain may well be 'Europe's loneliness capital', but being happily alone by choice is quite another matter

• 
• • Barbara Ellen
  • The Observer, Sunday 22 June 2014

Isolated… or just enjoying her own company? Photograph: Pierre Desrosiers/Getty Images

There used to be a fashion for scaremongering surveys about single women, saying things like: "Eight out of 10 women are going to die alone, surrounded by 17 cats." But to that I would mentally add: "Or it could all go horribly wrong." To my mind, aloneness never necessarily equated with loneliness. It wasn't a negative, something to be avoided, feared or endured.

Now a survey from the Office for National Statistics says that "Britain is the loneliness capital of Europe". Overall, Britons are less likely to have people they can turn to in a crisis or to feel close to neighbours. On this last point, we came 26th out of 28 European countries – beating Denmark and France (but they scored higher in other areas).

However, Britain was better than average in areas such as feeling that life was generally worthwhile. And though we did come near bottom on having people to turn to in a crisis, there were still 88.7% who could turn to someone. Slovakia's score was nearly 100%, but that's just showing off. Joking apart, if the truly lonely in Britain are to be identified and helped, then the first step would be to stop lazily lumping them in with the contented-alone.

I sometimes think of myself as a natural loner, though, in my case, this could just be a cover for being a sullen, unsociable, misanthropic cow who was warped by reading too much as a child. The upshot is that "alone" doesn't bother me much. But, then, there are two types of solitude – voluntary and enforced, the latter being a killer.

Past studies have reported the debilitating impact of loneliness, one stating that, for older people, it could be more deadly a factor than obesity. Such loneliness is caused by myriad factors – disability, unemployment, economic stress, mental illness, family breakdown, relocation and so on. Few would want to suffer it.

Then there is the other type of "alone". This study could just as well be interpreted as saying that many Britons are self-reliant problem-solvers, respectful of others people's privacy – and what's wrong with that? Isn't this the modern British definition of neighbourliness: not over-chummy and intrusive, but friendly, considerate and, most importantly, happy to sign for your Amazon parcels?

Now I'm being flippant. Of course you'd hope that people would help each other out in a crisis. However, generally, things such as "neighbourliness" seem defined by personality types. That's why some people go to London, are shocked by its standoffish ways and leave, while others like myself (escapees from villages) relish the freeing anonymity.

Likewise, while these days social media et al provides a sense of ersatz "community" without human interaction for those who want it (the equivalent of the television left on "for company"?), some people don't even want or need this.

Odd, then, that it's usually loners who are viewed with pity, condescension or suspicion. But why? Britain is an overstuffed, teeming little rock. It makes sense that, just as some people will be sociable, others will adopt the "island mentality" of standing alone and neither is right or wrong.

Still, the feeling persists that sociability is a skill, while the opposite casts a person as a loser or a weirdo – someone who's going to end up walking down a high street wearing a bandana, firing guns at those who've "wronged" them.

Personally, I'd be more likely to distrust people who can't bear time with themselves. What's wrong with them that they can't abide their own company – what are they trying to hide in the crowd?

This is what I take from these kinds of surveys – that there are the lonely, and there are the alone. Seemingly the trick is to reach out to the group who truly need help, rather than getting them mixed up. 

40 Days of Dating: would you go out with an old friend?

The experiment carried out by two single New Yorkers suggests one course of action for those struggling with relationships

• 
• • Hannah Slapper
  • theguardian.com, Tuesday 3 September 2013 13.50 BST

‘40 Days speaks to the many of us who have that friend in our lives who could have become a lover but things never quite worked out.' Photograph: Gen Nishino/Getty

Trying to find a significant other while living in a fast-paced city is a notoriously difficult process, especially as you try to balance all the other things you're expected to do as a young adult (find enough money to survive, carve out a career, etc). It's a struggle to get into the habit of dating, and even tougher to turn those dates into meaningful relationships.

We've read about many ways to deal with this problem, and have friends and family who fit into every category: singles in their mid- to late-30s, people in Skype-sustained long-distance relationships, serial internet dating players.

But on 20 March this year two New York-based designers, Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman, tried something new.

The pair had been friends for years and, on discovering they were single at the same time, decided to date each other for 40 days purely as an experiment.

There was a set of strict rules: they would see each other every day, visit a relationship counsellor once a week, and they would be totally exclusive. Every evening they would separately complete a questionnaire to document their feelings.

The 40 days came to an end on 28 April, but it was only in July that they started publishing the answers on their blog, 40 Days of Dating – capturing the attention of readers worldwide. Walsh and Goodman now have a combined Twitter fan base of more than 40,000, a Vimeo page with hundreds of thousands of views, and have signed up toHollywood talent agency to handle the onslaught of film offers they've received for their story.

So what is the magic that has made 40 Days become a viral hit? The main aspect that people appear to be attracted to is the "what if" scenario. It speaks to the many of us who have that friend in our lives who could have become a lover but things never quite worked out. Often that is for a very good reason, but for many people it's just a matter of bad timing. I overheard a group of women discussing the blog on the London underground, and they took great pleasure in exploring which of their platonic pals would qualify for "upgrading", as they called it. David Nicholls's novel, One Day, revolved around a similar concept: that person you've known for years who, if you just took the time to think about it, could potentially be your soul mate.

Walsh says some of her favourite feedback has come from readers inspired to make a move on a special someone who had been stuck in the "friend zone". Prior familiarity definitely caused issues for Walsh and Goodman during the first couple of weeks, as both parties struggled to adjust to a new attitude of togetherness.

At first, it looked unlikely they would fall for each other and both seemed to adopt a rather academic stance. They found it difficult to see each other in a romantic way, and the topic of sex was a real issue from the very start. With friends urging them to consummate their relationship in order to prove it as real, plus their combined tendency to overthink everything, it blew up into such a big deal that it basically became a barrier.

However, as they spent more time together and work through each other's issues, we could watch them get closer, they opened up, and suddenly it seemed all too possible that their foundation of friendship would provide a solid structure on which to build a relationship. Readers were thrilled when they revealed on day 24-25 that they had finally done the deed. It certainly was a turning point for the pair, although the emphasis has definitely been on the emotional rather than the physical. The blog paused at day 36 and resumes today. The same question haunts every fan's mind: are they still together? Did they fall in love?

All too often I've been given the advice that finding the one is effortless, and "you just know". After five years in my own, sometimes turbulent, relationship, I couldn't disagree more. I like the fact that 40 Days promotes taking the reins and being decisive: if you embrace compromise, and dedicate enough time and energy to getting to know your other half, learning what's important to them and sharing your own dreams and opinions honestly, then you have a real chance of creating something wonderful.

40 Days seems to propose a solution to the chronic loneliness of the young city dweller. It's never too late to redefine your connection with somebody. And given the blog's impact, it seems certain that many people will now be plucking up the courage to reach out to that one person they've always been curious about.

The secrets of success against spin bowlers

Dean Jones

NOW that Australia has finished its Test cricket for the summer, the Australian batsmen have to have a good think on how they will play in India next month.

This series is massive to a lot of players and could be a great tour for the Australians if they bat well against the Indian spinners. India is not in good shape and if Australia can get a win early, we might win the series. But a lot of work needs to be done.

India will no doubt prepare turning pitches or ''Bunsen burners'' as we like to call them. The Australian batsmen must start preparing now by practising on substandard practice pitches. These will find your weakness very quickly and will really make you watch the ball.

When you play against fast bowling you need to have physical courage to get behind the ball. The top half of your body is always under pressure, ducking and weaving short-pitched deliveries. 

When you play against quality spinners, you must have mental courage to be successful. And your footwork, or bottom half of your body, must be supple and nimble to move quickly to get to the pitch of the ball.

Playing against great spinners was always fun for me. I was fortunate enough to meet the great Lindsay Hassett, who was widely regarded as the greatest batsman to play spin.

Don Bradman just loved the way Hassett played havoc against great spinners. I asked Lindsay why he was so successful at playing spinners. ''Deano, watch their ball release, watch the rotation of the seam, and try to get down the track and hit the ball on the full. If you can't get to the pitch of the ball, then play them off the back foot. It's easy!''

Neil Harvey played the same way. Harvey was known to run at the spinners once the spinner started his run-up! That's how keen he was to use his feet.

So I thought I would play the same way. I quickly realised that spinners don't like you running at them. They say they do, but in reality they don't. I measured how far I could dance down the pitch. It was 2.8 metres. I even did something a bit naughty without the umpires and opposition knowing. I used to place marks on the side of the pitch to help me see how far I could get down the pitch. It also helped me commit to get to the pitch of the ball. I also learnt that I must always make my first stride to the ball a big one. No half-steps. Mark Waugh was awesome at this. Graham Yallop, Allan Border, Brian Lara and Michael Clarke are no different.

Using your feet to the spinners can be very taxing on your body, so you need to be very fit. I often think batting against spinners is a bit like playing chess. If you are worried about bat-pad fieldsmen catching you out, then you must strike up a plan to remove them. It might be a lofted shot over mid-off, which might get rid of the bat-pad on the offside. And a few sweep shots might get rid of the silly mid-on and he might be placed at backward square or short fine leg.

It is just about playing a few shots early to get the fieldsmen where you want them, and then just pick them off with singles for the rest of the day.

So here is where the mental courage comes in. You must practice the lofted shot. You must have the courage to play it early, so you can get the bat-padders away. I must confess I loved hitting bat-pad fieldsmen in the shins. It always gave me a giggle. Sorry, that was just me.

When spinners have really got you under pressure, you must have a shot or plan that you can use to get off strike. Mine was running at the spinners and running a single to mid-off or mid-on. Border, Matty Hayden and Mark Taylor swept when under pressure. David Boon used to walk across his stumps and work the ball behind square leg. You need to find a shot that you can play blindfolded to get off strike.

Tactically, spinners love bowling maidens. So you must look to hurt them early in their over. Don't allow them to bowl when they want. Control the momentum and tempo of the game and let them bowl to you when you are ready. You are the boss and let them know that.

I always asked my playing partner to back up very close to the stumps. If I did hit a ball straight, I wanted my batting partner to get in his way. In other words, he can only field on his side of the pitch.

Basically, every batsman has to learn what works for him and what doesn't. If you are hitting the ball to the field a lot, just change your guard or play everything off the back foot.

I had some wonderful battles with Shane Warne at practice. We would bet $50 for every dismissal. I wanted to bat against him on the worst practice pitches and it was the best fun. Yes, Warnie won a lot of money off me, but I was ready for anyone who bowled spin to me. A trick I learnt was to not go with the spin if it kicks or spits at you. Just hold your original line with your bat and not follow the ball. You will get caught bat-pad very quickly if you go with the spin.

I also practised a lot by playing everything off the back foot. It is just great fun.

Just for anyone asking who were the best spinners I played against. The best off-spinner I faced was Saqlain Mushtaq. The best left-arm orthodox was Maninder Singh. The best leggie was Warne. Mind you, Abdul Qadir was pretty good in Pakistan, with no DRS and local umpires. 

The rise and rise of solo living

I want to be alone: the rise and rise of solo living

The number of people living alone has skyrocketed. What is driving the phenomenon? And solo dwellers Colm Tóibín, Alex Zane, Carmen Calli and others reflect on life as a singleton

• Eric Klinenberg
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 March 2012 23.00 BST

The one and only: Why do more and more of us now live alone? Photograph: detail from image in the forthcoming book Out My Window, by Gail Albert Halaban

 

Human societies, at all times and places, have organised themselves around the will to live with others, not alone. But not any more. During the past half-century, our species has embarked on a remarkable social experiment. For the first time in human history, great numbers of people – at all ages, in all places, of every political persuasion – have begun settling down as singletons. Until the second half of the last century, most of us married young and parted only at death. If death came early, we remarried quickly; if late, we moved in with family, or they with us. Now we marry later. We divorce, and stay single for years or decades. We survive our spouses, and do everything we can to avoid moving in with others – including our children. We cycle in and out of different living arrangements: alone, together, together, alone.

Numbers never tell the whole story, but in this case the statistics are startling. According to the market research firm Euromonitor International, the number of people living alone globally is skyrocketing, rising from about 153 million in 1996 to 277 million in 2011 – a 55% increase in 15 years. In the UK, 34% of households have one person living in them and in the US it's 27% – roughly one in every seven adults.

Contemporary solo dwellers in the US are primarily women: about 18 million, compared with 14 million men. The majority, more than 16 million, are middle-aged adults between the ages of 35 and 64. The elderly account for about 11 million of the total. Young adults between 18 and 34 number more than 5 million, compared with 500,000 in 1950, making them the fastest-growing segment of the solo-dwelling population. Unlike their predecessors, people who live alone today cluster together in metropolitan areas.

Sweden has more solo dwellers than anywhere else in the world, with 47% of households having one resident; followed by Norway at 40%. In Scandinavian countries their welfare states protect most citizens from the more difficult aspects of living alone. In Japan, where social life has historically been organised around the family, about 30% of all households have a single dweller, and the rate is far higher in urban areas. The Netherlands and Germany share a greater proportion of one-person households than the UK. And the nations with the fastest growth in one-person households? China, India and Brazil.

But despite the worldwide prevalence, living alone isn't really discussed, or understood. We aspire to get our own places as young adults, but fret about whether it's all right to stay that way, even if we enjoy it. We worry about friends and family members who haven't found the right match, even if they insist that they're OK on their own. We struggle to support elderly parents and grandparents who find themselves living alone after losing a spouse, but we are puzzled if they tell us they prefer to remain alone.

In all of these situations, living alone is something that each person, or family, experiences as the most private of matters, when in fact it is an increasingly common condition.

When there is a public debate about the rise of living alone, commentators present it as a sign of fragmentation. In fact, the reality of this great social experiment is far more interesting – and far less isolating – than these conversations would have us believe. The rise of living alone has been a transformative social experience. It changes the way we understand ourselves and our most intimate relationships. It shapes the way we build our cities and develop our economies.

So what is driving it? The wealth generated by economic development and the social security provided by modern welfare states have enabled the spike. One reason that more people live alone than ever before is that they can afford to. Yet there are a great many things that we can afford to do but choose not to, which means the economic explanation is just one piece of the puzzle.

In addition to economic prosperity, the rise stems from the cultural change that Émile Durkheim, a founding figure in sociology in the late 19th century, called the cult of the individual. According to Durkheim, this cult grew out of the transition from traditional rural communities to modern industrial cities. Now the cult of the individual has intensified far beyond what Durkheim envisioned. Not long ago, someone who was dissatisfied with their spouse and wanted a divorce had to justify that decision. Today if someone is not fulfilled by their marriage, they have to justify staying in it,
because there is cultural pressure to be good to one's self.

Another driving force is the communications revolution, which has allowed people to experience the pleasures of social life even when they're living alone. And people are living longer than ever before – or, more specifically, because women often outlive their spouses by decades, rather than years – and so ageing alone has become an increasingly common experience.

Although each person who develops the capacity to live alone finds it an intensely personal experience, my research suggests that some elements are widely shared. Today, young solitaires actively reframe living alone as a mark of distinction and success. They use it as a way to invest time in their personal and professional growth. Such investments in the self are necessary, they say, because contemporary families are fragile, as are most jobs, and in the end each of us must be able to depend on ourselves. On the one hand, strengthening the self means undertaking solitary projects and learning to enjoy one's own company. But on the other it means making great efforts to be social: building up a strong network of friends and work contacts.

Living alone and being alone are hardly the same, yet the two are routinely conflated. In fact, there's little evidence that the rise of living alone is responsible for making us lonely. Research shows that it's the quality, not the quantity of social interactions that best predicts loneliness. What matters is not whether we live alone, but whether we feel alone. There's ample support for this conclusion outside the laboratory. As divorced or separated people often say, there's nothing lonelier than living with the wrong person.

There is also good evidence that people who never marry are no less content than those who do. According to research, they are significantly happier and less lonely than people who are widowed or divorced.

In theory, the rise of living alone could lead to any number of outcomes, from the decline of community to a more socially active citizenry, from rampant isolation to a more robust public life. I began my exploration of singleton societies with an eye for their most dangerous and disturbing features, including selfishness, loneliness and the horrors of getting sick or dying alone. I found some measure of all of these things. On balance, however, I came away convinced that the problems related to living alone should not define the condition, because the great majority of those who go solo have a more rich and varied experience.

Sometimes they feel lonely, anxious and uncertain about whether they would be happier in another arrangement. But so do those who are married or live with others. The rise of living alone has produced significant social benefits, too. Young and middle-aged solos have helped to revitalise cities, because they are more likely to spend money, socialise and participate in public life.

Despite fears that living alone may be environmentally unsustainable, solos tend to live in apartments rather than in big houses, and in relatively green cities rather than in car-dependent suburbs. There's good reason to believe that people who live alone in cities consume less energy than if they coupled up and decamped to pursue a single-family home.

Ultimately, it's too early to say how any particular society will respond to either the problems or the opportunities generated by this extraordinary social transformation. After all, our experiment with living alone is still in its earliest stages, and we are just beginning to understand how it affects our own lives, as well as those of our families, communities and cities.

• Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise And Surprising Appeal Of Living Alone, by Eric Kinenberg, is published by Penguin Press at £21.

Colm Toibin, 56

Colm Tóibín: 'No one told me that I would be most happy in my life when I modelled myself on a nun who runs her own cloister and is alone in it.' Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
No one told me when I was small that I could live like this. No one told me that by the age of 56 I would know all of the gay bars in New York city, most of the Irish ones and a good number of other bars, such as they are, in between. And that I would be content on a Friday and Saturday night at around 10 o'clock merely to feel that those bars were all still there, still full of people calling for more, while all I wanted was to be alone in bed with a book.

No one ever told me that I would be most happy in my life when I modelled myself on a nun who runs her own cloister and is alone in it, not bothered by the chatter of other nuns, or by the demands of reverend mother.

On Saturday I wake at six and relishing the day ahead. I teach on Mondays and Tuesdays; I have to reread a novel for each class and take notes on it. Nothing makes me happier than the thought of this. I often lie there until the seven o'clock news comes on, grinning at the thought of the day ahead.
All day I will read and take notes. The worst-case scenario is that I might need another book, and this involves lot of decision-making and self-consultation. It might end in a five-minute walk to the university library. But normally I go nowhere except to the fridge if I am hungry to see what's there, or to the sofa to lie down if my back is tired, or to the rocking chair if I feel a need to rock.
Normally there's not much in the fridge. In the kitchen there is an oven I have never opened. And there are pots and pans whose purpose may be decorative for all I know. But I know where all my notebooks are. They are all over the apartment. That is the best part. I can leave them where I like and no one touches them or wants to put them away anywhere. No one sighs about books and notebooks piled up. All of the notebooks have stories half-written in them, or stray sentences in search of a home, or musings that are none of anyone's business. If I like, I can go to one of them and add some paragraphs. I don't have to excuse myself, explain myself, or put on a distracted writer's look in order to get down to work. Or worry that someone has, in my absence, opened one of my notebooks and found that they don't like the tone of what is written there.

No one told me when I was small that there would come a time in my life where people would be judged by the quantity and quality of take-out menus for local restaurants. And that I could, without consulting anyone, at any time, make a phone call, order some food, and it would soon arrive at my door.

And then there is music when night falls. I can put on whatever I like, follow dark obsessions without worrying about depressing anyone else, or cheering them up for that matter. There is no one to question my sanity, my taste in music, or say: "That again? Not that again. Did we not hear that yesterday?"

And then there is the small question of alcohol. No one told me when I was a teenager that there would come a time when I would not bother drinking. No one told me that when Saturday night came, I would long to talk to no one and wish to go to bed early, and that my only moment of pure and capricious pleasure would be taking a book to bed that was not for class the next week. Otherwise, my life as a nun is a lesson to others, a pure example of good example. It has its rewards in the morning when I wake in silence with a clear head, ready for more.

Colm Tóibín is an author.

Carmen Callil, 73

Carmen Callil: 'Living alone means freedom, never being bored, going to bed at eight if I feel like it.' Photograph: Felix Clay I have never given much thought to living alone, because it wasn't something I decided upon, it happened to me naturally. What with a childhood amid a vast family, then the convent, I was rarely alone. I shared a bedroom with my sister, life with my brothers and mother. One set of grandparents lived next door, the others across the road. Many aunts, uncles and cousins were only a yell away. The convent was black with nuns, its dormitories and classrooms packed with other girls. I left home when I was 21.
Almost immediately, I fell in love with a man who was, vaguely, married. An open marriage, it would be called today. For a decade or so, I wanted to be available for him, so I moved into a bedsit above a salt beef bar in St John's Wood. That was 1964. I was 26, and I have lived alone since.
I very much liked being in love and repeated it all too frequently. But I also hated it. I have a photograph of myself aged two, in a pram outside Melbourne zoo. My chubby legs are battling to get out: the look of struggle on my baby face is tremendous. That is how I felt each time I fell in love and spent extended periods with the beloved object. Often it was boredom: hours spent doing what the beloved object wanted, rather than pursuing the thousand things juggling in my own head. When I was in love and thought of marriage, I always came to feel like that child in the pram.
Tussling with this incapacity came to an abrupt end once I started to work. I had been raised to think of work as a prelude to husband, children, home. Once I started Virago, in 1972, and then, from 1982, working at Chatto, too, boredom vanished, and the days and years fled by.
What do I like about living alone? The greatest blessing is the number of friendships you can indulge in, the number of people you can love. I love to hear their stories, follow their lives. This can become frenetic but you can always cross through a night in the diary with BED in capital letters and there is no one to say nay to that. I wouldn't have minded having the children I could have had, but I have insufficient self-esteem to need any duplication of myself in the world. In truth, I have fretted more about my friends, my work and about understanding what is going on in the world than I ever have about failing to "wax fat and multiply", as the Catholic marriage service instructs.
Living alone means freedom, never being bored, going to bed at eight if I feel like it, feeding myself as I like, thinking, pottering and yelling at the radio without feeling a fool. I am never lonely as long as I am at home. I can decorate my house to suit my eccentricities – not everyone wants to live with 200 jugs and thousands of books. Every object in my home reminds me of one loved person or another. Knowing all my friends are dotted around, going about their business but available at the end of a phone is enough.
There are, and have been, great tediums. Men – Auberon Waugh and Lord Longford spring to mind – have occasionally insisted to my face that I was lesbian. I felt this to be an insult to women who are lesbians as well as to myself. I hate getting invitations addressed to "Carmen Callil & Friend" and am often tempted to bring my dog.
But there is so much to do, and to think about, and so many friends to love. They are my rock. If I am in trouble, they help me, and I don't – and never have – worried about dying alone, because everyone does.
Carmen Callil is a publisher and author, and founder of Virago Press.

Alex Zane, 33

Alex Zane: 'It's not about selfishness, just knowing what you like and doing what you want without having to take another person into account.' Photograph: Rex Having lived alone for the past six years, sharing my home with anything bigger than a cat is not something I enjoy.
This doesn't make me an oddball. I'm not Norman Bates, wandering around my flat dressed as my mother – I just like the fact that if I wanted to, I could.
Living alone provides me with the time I need to recharge, and to let loose the aspects of my personality best labelled "Not For Public Consumption". When Superman needs a break from saving the planet, some time to himself, where does he go? His Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic Circle. I have what I like to call my Flat of Solitude in north London. I'm not comparing my average day to the conquests of the last son of Krypton, but he has a public image to keep up, and that I can relate to.
"Me" is the very best part of living alone. It's not about selfishness, just knowing what you like and doing what you want without having to take another person into account. OK, that sounds selfish, but if you're going to be selfish, it's probably best to do it on your own, so no one knows.
My solitude is not total. I have a girlfriend, and we've been together for a length of time that makes people wonder why we don't share a home. The truth is, she stays with me often. She has a drawer. She knows where I keep the sugar. I know to put the toilet seat down. She knows which of the three remotes actually turns on the TV. I know she checks my internet history.
It's a well-oiled machine. And although it has yet to be spoken out loud, I'm aware eventually a change will come. A change that will involve me no longer eating packets of microwavable rice and soy sauce for every meal. The spectre of co-habitation is looming on the horizon.
There are, of course, some things that I won't miss about solo living. There are moments of melancholy, the silence can be quite over-powering, and if I've spent three days holed up in my flat, when I finally emerge the first conversation I have with another human can be an awkward affair, like learning to speak all over again: "I… OK… you, yourself, well?"
But there's one thing that dwarfs all the other downsides to living by myself, one thing I'll be happy to leave behind. It's to do with my Wii. I try to shake the feeling, but I can't. Ultimately, there is no more tragic image than a man standing in the middle of his living room, alone, in his boxer shorts, pretending to ski jump.
Alex Zane is a DJ and television presenter.

Esther Rantzen, 71

Esther Rantzen: 'Although I'm getting used to living on my own, I still think it's not natural.' Photograph: Karen Robinson I am living alone for the first time at the age of 71. Until now, most of the changes that arrived with age were mercifully gradual – the need to turn the television volume a bit higher, say, and the first few grey hairs – but this change has been huge, sudden and, for me, cataclysmic.
All my life I have been surrounded by people. As a child, I grew up in an extended family. At college, I lived and worked in a lively and energetic community. Moving into a flat with a flatmate, starting a family, having a bath or going to bed at night, I had company and conversation. Now, for the first time, I come home to an empty, silent flat, nobody to shout a cheerful hello to, no one to listen to the stories of my day. It's been nine months on my own and a difficult adjustment. But I'm getting there.
My life has followed a pattern familiar to most of us as we grow older. You lose a partner; in my case my beloved husband Desmond Wilcox died. Children leave home and create their own lives; my older daughter, Emily is taking a mature student's degree; Joshua, the doctor, works in the West Country; Rebecca, the TV reporter, lives with her husband and they are expecting their first baby.
I mustn't nag them to spend more time with me. So instead I have found ways of making aloneness feel less lonely. Downsizing from my family home to a flat was a help. Not only are there no more empty bedrooms, but given far less space, the pictures and ornaments that mean the most to me are always in my eyeline. The print my mother gave me is on my bedroom wall, instead of downstairs in my old study, so it greets me as soon as I wake. The vase my best friend gave me is on my table instead of being stashed away in a cupboard.
Getting to sleep by yourself is a problem, but I decided not to have a bedroom television. I tried it for a while and although Newsnight was the perfect cure for insomnia, I loathed waking up at dawn with the screen blaring at me. So I fall asleep to Classic radio, which accompanies my dreams with decent music.
I understand why an American survey of more than 300,000 old people found that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking. You may have spent a lifetime looking after your family; now that they don't need you, it seems pointless to look after yourself. Cooking for one seems too much effort – I can't muster the energy or enthusiasm to make hot food for myself. Cheese and biscuits and fruit fill the gaps.
Although I am getting used to living on my own, I still think it's not natural. We humans are herd animals. If it were left to me, I'd make us all live in longhouses, like the ones in Nepal, with all the generations packed in together. We've evolved to depend upon each other, we need each other, especially the old. If I were a stone age woman aged 70, I'd never survive on my own. Without the warmth and protection of the tribe around me, the first cold winter would finish me off. But then, if I were a stone age woman, I'd be without the flu jabs and dental bridgework that enable me to boast that 70 is the new 50.
There are mornings when I potter around contentedly at my own pace, watching the sunrise as I sip my orange juice, happy not to have anyone else cluttering up the flat, using up the last tea bag or loo roll without replacing it. Pretty soon there'll be another cataclysm in my life, the arrival of a grandchild. Some claim that then I'll look back on these days alone with nostalgia. Rubbish. I can't wait.
• Esther Rantzen is planning to create a helpline for older people, The Silver Line, to combat the effects of isolation and loneliness.

Sloane Crosley, 33

Sloane Crosley: 'I like being able to come home late and collapse into bed without worrying about waking anyone with my drunken shoe removal.' Photograph: Corbis Good friends, a couple, are being kicked out of their apartment this month. Decent apartments can be hard to come by in Manhattan, so it's all hands on deck, trying to help with the search.
"I might know of something," I emailed the male contingent of the pair. "What's your budget?"
"We're paying $4,400 now," he shot back.
What a pad one could get for that price!
I sat back from my computer and bristled. Ah, the power of two. There's nothing quite like it. Especially when it comes to paying utility bills, parenting, cooking elaborate meals, purchasing a grown-up bed, jumping rope and lifting heavy machinery. The world favours pairs. Who wants to waste the wood building an ark for singletons? Even the word "singleton", to the American ear at least, reads as particularly insulting. We never use it and thus it sticks out in conversation. Perhaps it's bothersome due to its resemblance to the word "simpleton", which we do use.
I live alone. I have also lived with significant (and sometimes not-so-significant) others for brief periods of time. Truth be told, I was fine either way. There are profound perks and drawbacks to both, too numerous on both sides to list in earnest.
I hope to one day co-sign a lease with another person but, well, it doesn't plague me that I have yet to do so. Put it this way: I've never had to violently tug at my own pillow at 2am to get myself to stop snoring.
In the past, I have not seen the state of my habitation and the state of my love life as connected. This is the nature of being relatively young and living in an urban environment where expensive rental fees can make or break relationships. Cohabitation seems a greater leap in cities because it's all the harder to extract oneself if things turn sour. It's what keeps otherwise functional adults living with their mothers.
The thing is, I am newly single this. For this week (and several more after it, I suspect), living alone feels freshly related to being alone. On top of which, I own a cat. On top of which, I like to eat spoonfuls of almond butter over my sink, put this gross Swedish hair balm in my hair before bed and sleep in old cocktail dresses. None of this was any different when I was romantically teamed with another human, yet suddenly these micro-activities bode poorly as an advertisement for my life.
When I was coupled socially, no one seemed to notice that I was unattached residentially. Two people go out to dinner together, meet each other at shows, take vacations, and suddenly living across town from each other isn't such a big deal. But the building blocks of our daily existence were always separate. He never paid my rent and I never paid his. He was never subject to awkward conversations with my superintendent regarding clogged drains. I was never subject to the etiquette question of tipping his doorman around the holidays. Though most of my friends, attached and not, are in the exact same living situation, society still quietly damns the single-household dweller to one of two diagnoses:
1) Hyper control: I live alone because I am inflexible, intolerant, likely a mysophobic glove-wearer and so stringent about my own schedule that I leave no room for a roommate, lover or a mysterious Italian boarder who happens to moonlight as a DJ.
2) Complete lack of control: with no one to bounce off, my weird behaviours have gone unchecked and my body unshowered. I am socially awkward out in the world while my home is infested with vermin and the crackling sound of broken dreams.
Who among us has not experienced elements of both states? And what does that mean for the future? I wouldn't mind if things were different, but they're not and, truly, I have always enjoyed my space. I love turning the key in the door at the end of the day, being able to decompress, knowing where I left the remote control to the television. I am partial to hot water. I like being able to come home late and collapse into bed without worrying about waking anyone with my drunken shoe removal.
This is not a matter of statistics or trends; it's my life. There is no advertisement for it. Funnily, that's one of the better selling points imaginable: once you realise you're not obligated to persuade others about your existence, it becomes a lot easier to exist.
Sloane Crosley is an author.

Peter Hobbs, 38

Peter Hobbs: 'The mind roams more freely in empty rooms, and the days can spill into evening, and then night, without interruption.' Photograph: David Rose Even when I've lived with others, I have always been protective of my solitude. I have always needed time to retreat to my own company, and to be alone with my thoughts. It takes me a long while to adjust to sharing living space, to become accustomed to different patterns of noise and movement and sleep.
My first prolonged experience of living alone came in my 20s, when I was suffering from a long illness. As soon as I was able to cope, I moved to live by myself. It was terribly isolating in many ways – I was unable to work or go out – but I wasn't comfortable with company. Illness is a foreign land, and you go always alone. Sometimes I'd go for days or weeks without speaking to anyone, except for brief interactions at supermarket checkouts (in recent years, of course, I would even have been able to find automated checkouts).
It's not an accident that it was during this time I began to write. Gradually, the emptiness of the afternoons began to fill with ideas, and the most pleasurable part of those unhappy days was when I sat down with my thoughts and formed stories, giving myself over to my imagination. Since then, I've always written better when I've lived alone. The mind roams more freely in empty rooms, and the days can spill into evening, and then night, without interruption. Even now I find it hard to write if I know there's someone else in the same building, no matter if they're sitting quietly behind a distant closed door, minding their own business.
Of course the solitude of those years was largely enforced, rather than having been chosen, and though it may have suited my nature, it was a devastatingly lonely time. Something of the pattern of those days has stayed with me, but I try now to monitor my tendencies towards solitude. I'm careful to protect a degree of isolation in my life, but I do not think I will always want to live alone.
I have friends who will live alone for the rest of their lives. They live alone because of choice, or because a partner has died, or because they're so accustomed to solitary living that they're no longer willing to make the compromises necessary for sharing with others. Most of them are content, or at least reconciled to it, but it's clear to me that the happiest of them are those who have arranged their lives so they can spend a great deal of time with as many people as possible.
We're social animals. I think of the way families and friends gather round at times of grief. The way many of us live today can cause the threaded connections of kith and kin to separate and thin, almost to disappear. Yet they reassert themselves in crises. For those who desire it, living alone is a tremendous luxury. But it is a luxury enabled by an existence within technologically advanced, relatively wealthy societies, which insulate us even from the need for others.
Eric Klinenberg is convincing about the hows and whys of the rise in solitary living. The set of circumstances he describes has provided many of us with an extraordinary freedom. I just wonder how fragile they are, and what it might take for us to rediscover how much we need other people.