Emily Atack tweeted something that really struck a chord with her 329,000 Twitter followers last week. ‘People constantly say to me, “How are you still single!?” – I think they mean well and that’s cool,’ she wrote. ‘But being single shouldn’t be seen as negative! I became single by choice. Let’s stop making women feel like they’re failing if they aren’t in a relationship!’ One week and 82,000 likes later, the actor tells Grazia that she’s glad to be doing something to change the conversation around being a single woman in your thirties.
‘Single has become a dirty word and it’s such a shame,’ she says. ‘It implies that you are alone with nothing around you and that couldn’t be further from the truth in my eyes. I’m single in that I’m not in a committed relationship, but I am anything but by myself. I am really lucky to be surrounded by so many friends, lovely men, my family. I’ve never felt less alone.’
When she wrote the tweet, Emily, 30, says she’d noticed that ‘every 10 comments’ on one of her photos on Instagram someone would write, ‘How are you still single?!’ ‘It’s basically saying, where do you think you’re going wrong? I’m not going wrong! I have genuinely chosen to be single,’ she says. ‘Men were saying it is a way of chatting me up, too.’
Emily first found fame on The Inbetweeners but, since coming second on I’m A Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! in 2018, she’s found her private life becoming less private. On the one hand she says she’s fine with that. (‘We all want to know the goss, I want to know if Brad and Jen are getting back together, it’s fine.’) On the other, she’s on a mission to perform a public service, speaking out when she sees a need to. Last year, after being repeatedly told she ‘scrubbed up well’, she tweeted: ‘IT’S NOT A COMPLIMENT!!’
Her six-month relationship with film producer Rob Jowers ended last September, which was ‘incredibly sad’. Now Emily says she’s properly single after going ‘from relationship to relationship’ in her twenties – and although still considering herself single, is now seeing more than one man. ‘I have lovely men in my life. Men are allowed to admit that so why can’t I?’
Two months ago, Emily says she found herself telling her sister Martha that she didn’t think she was ever going to be happy until she’d ‘found The One’. It was a moment that forced her to shift her perspective. ‘I have always been someone who has needed a man to be happy but I had to have a word with myself and change my mindset.’
Realising that there are people out there who struggle with being single and people who love it, Emily wanted to be in the latter party, instead of adopting panic mode just because she’d turned 30. ‘I’m finally finding some inner peace. There’s this huge pressure on us to rush into settling down and having babies, you end up getting involved with someone who isn’t right for you. It can be toxic. It’s also not fair on the guy.’
When Emma Watson came up with the term ‘self-partnered’ last year, which the actor said she preferred to use over single, she was mocked for trying to redefine what it is not to be in a relationship. Emily was cheering. ‘For a famous woman to come out and make such a bold point was important,’ she says. ‘Any woman who is strong enough to say, “I am OK with being single,” sends out a positive message that we need to hear. It’s a big “fuck you” to the system! There should be more of that.’
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