The single are used to their private lives being deemed less private than those of their coupled peers. We become adept at sidestepping interrogations from older relatives and accustomed to performing comedy turns at dinner parties, serving up dire online dating debacles as amuse-bouches. When you’re unattached, everyone has a view on your relationship status, and what it boils down to is this: it needs to be changed, quick.
And it’s not just dinner parties: the pressure to pair up is everywhere. Switch on the radio or fire up Netflix, and a torrent of cheesy lyrics and rom-coms will leave you in no doubt that partnering up is what life is about. It’s still, for most, where family begins. The “relationship” is presented as a panacea to whatever ails the soul.
Lately, it’s seemed that pop balladeers and great auntie Sue have found a sly new ally: Covid-19. At the first virtual Downing Street press briefing back in March, Jenny Harries, Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, joked about starting a new career in relationship counselling by suggesting that those living alone could “test” their nascent relationships and move in together in time for lockdown. Then came June’s #sexban, a hashtag born after the government made explicit what was surely already a given: no sleepovers allowed.
Accustomed though we singles are to having our intimate lives discussed publicly, this intrusion reached surreally disquieting levels. Our government wasn’t alone. In the Netherlands, an equally interfering official took the opposite tack and advised people to find a “sex buddy.” It served to highlight the prurience that so often characterises interest in the exploits of the lonely-hearted.
When we talk of relationships, we refer overwhelmingly to romantic relationships. While in recent years words like “marriage” and “partner” have gone through radical shifts, the word “single” remains largely unreconstructed, its meaning defined through lack, especially where women are concerned. Bachelors have historically been indulged but spinsters are figures of pity at best, their cobwebbed images updated with gaudy, Bridget Jones-style clichés.
But that overlooks the richness of lives lived unpartnered, and obscures, too, the range of human bonds that we all crave. The single may be going without one particular flavour of intimacy, yet their lives are often emotionally full. And as anyone who’s ever found themselves stuck with the wrong person knows, loneliness is most acute when you’re lying wide awake at 3am, inches away from an oblivious, slumbering other.
There is a certain poetry—romance, you could say—to a life lived singly. It’s full of possibility. Its pleasures aren’t about the freedom to indulge every whim, either. You may not be quite as time-blessed as the married imagine, but there is still space to deepen friendships and expand social networks. And the single have formed their own families, too—families of choice, in which friendship can prove just as resilient as blood ties.
Nevertheless, our single years continue to be read as prologue rather than a full story. This seems a shame, since, even if that turns out to be true—and for an increasing number it doesn’t—there is still much to be relished in a life lived alone, not least the ability to pay attention to different kinds of relationships rather than expecting that one person to comfort and challenge, amuse and arouse. As those in all but the most blissful unions have learnt, looking to one person to fulfil so many contradictory roles is wildly unrealistic. And yet, many still do, neglecting support from family and platonic friendships.
Lockdown experienced with a family, or even just with your significant other, is obviously very different to lockdown with your cat. In other respects, though, it has been a leveller. Traditionally, those who’ve found their “person” suffer from less anxiety; but this year’s ubiquitous online doom-scrolling has put paid to that. As for sex, it has apparently been slipping off the menu everywhere: according to one survey, almost half of couples living together during lockdown said they were having less sex than usual. And however tired singles are of their own company, it seems fair to assume that many a partnered soul is now badly in need of a break from their one and only.
Will the past few months turn out to have had an enduring impact on our approaches to intimacy, romantic or otherwise? A recent survey of dating app users found that 46 per cent had come to value “extended courtship,” saying they intend to continue spending more time getting to know someone over online calls and messages, even when instant meet-ups are permitted again. The real test is probably this: granted the chance to take lockdown flirtations offline, how many singletons chose to catch up with relatives or best friends instead?
