‘I’m Single And 35 In The Midst Of A Pandemic – And It’s Actually OK’

Back April, a couple of weeks into lockdown, I called a single friend who was living by herself and struggling. ‘But this was our year!’ she wailed down the phone. What she meant – as she was single, and I was single – was that 2020 was supposed to be the moment we met our other halves, fell in love and ‘caught up’ with our married friends. In my friend’s wonderful but fairly neurotic brain, it was as if we were in a Jane Austen novel and only had until Christmas to find a husband before otherwise becoming bonnet-wearing old maids.

Both she and I turned 35 a month before lockdown began, and this strange milestone age exacerbated her feelings. It’s a funny age, 35. Not funny as in ‘ha ha’, but funny in the random way that certain ages carry so much more significance than others.

Turning 35 felt bigger than 30 for me, a crossroads age. It’s the age where headlines seem to start shouting about fertility with more urgency, it’s the age where you realise you’re tipping closer to 40 than 30 (40! Are you kidding? In my head, my mum’s still 40), and what have you got to show for it? It’s the age where, if you’re single, you may start to question whether there is genuinely something wrong with you. Years ago, my friend Cara told me a story about a woman who walked into her local GP surgery with such a bad case of vaginal bacteria that the doctor diagnosed her before she even whipped off her knickers, apparently able to smell it as soon as she sat down. This has haunted me ever since. Do I have the same problem? Am I single because I’m emitting a peculiar smell?

Combine this paranoia with a pandemic and the result is, potentially, like that science experiment where you drop a Mento into a bottle of coke. ‘I wish everyone would STOP carping on about grey hair,’ my friend texted not long after our phone conversation. ‘I don’t care about their hair, WHO’S THINKING ABOUT MY OVARIES?’ I’ve heard plenty of people joke that 2020 ‘doesn’t count’, that we’ll all just have to write it off and forget it ever happened, wipe the slate clean when we start 2021. It’s not quite so easy for single women in their mid-thirties who want to have children, worrying about every year that slides by.

If this is you, perhaps you’ve been trying harder to date. Certain brave friends have attempted this with mixed results. Avoid a man called Paul, who works in sports management and moved back in with his parents in Wolverhampton during lockdown.* Having spent long hours romancing one of my friends from afar on Zoom, he ghosted her after Date One when they finally met up. Not cool, Paul. I heard about someone else who drove from London to Scotland to sleep with a man she’d been messaging for a few weeks, and while I admire a woman whose libido makes her drive 400 miles north, I had zero interest in dating myself.

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That’s one of the things I’ve loved, actually, the lack of pressure to date, the fact that I had an excuse to stay in every night of the week and go to bed at 9pm. Can’t come out, sorry, no, not even for a walk in the park, too dangerous. Every now and then, I’d flick through Hinge but there was something so bleakly depressing about those answers: ‘This year I really want to...’ ‘survive’, or ‘leave my flat’. After weeks of wearing leggings and the same bra, I wasn’t about to put on make-up for those jokers.

Shrugging off dating wasn’t the only upside. A few months of peace, of slowness has helped me refine what I do want in the next few years. At some stage, that’s children, so I had my eggs frozen in June.

In many ways, I loathe that fertility becomes such a big topic for women in their thirties. What about everything else? What about careers and friends and travelling and getting pissed in pubs like we used to? Why must it all come down to babies – whether you have one, whether you’re trying to have one or whether you don’t want one?

And yet it has to for many of us, permeating our thinking in a way it doesn’t for men (classic men), so I chose freezing to delay any decision about children right now. I know a few single women who are doing the same, freezing eggs to take control of their fertility and trying to use this limbo time productively, especially if another lockdown’s on the way. It’s an expensive and gruelling bitch of a process that not everyone can put themselves through but, for me at least, it’s restored a vague sense of calm.

Because without wishing to sound like a motivational poster on Etsy, while time has become more precious in the past few months, that hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing. I’m not going to see the people I don’t want to see out of obligation any more, I’m going to hang out with the ones I like. I’m going to stay out and have another drink because, why not? Should a man with acceptable shoes and bathroom habits cross my path and I fall wildly in love, then how magical. But I’m not going to date anyone I feel half-hearted about in the meantime. There’s liberation in all this, which is good for those of us who are, dare I say it, ever-so-slightly neurotic and uptight. And I haven’t had to go to a single hen party all summer, either, which is possibly the biggest win of all.

‘The Wish List’ by Sophia Money-Coutts(HQ) is available in hardback, eBook and audio download

*Names and details have been changed