The grinder burrs. I stamp the coffee down with the little tamper and lock it into the espresso machine like I’m a barista. Through blurry, bleary eyes, I collect my delicate cup, dressed only in a Turkish cotton robe, stepping carefully as two kittens dodge between my legs, their tails brushing my ankles.
I move to the couch, light a Vogue cigarette, set flame to an incense stick, drink and inhale it all in at once. Honey-warm morning sun filters through the half-blinds and shutters, breaking the light into gold blocks that drift across the room. When the shutters are opened fully, the apartment floods with it. Routine is easy here. Everything is easy here.
I’m staying in my friend’s inner-city apartment to look after her cats, who were still kittens the first time I came. That first stay felt like a revelation. The apartment doubles as a sanctuary. My friend has curated a place that makes deep, intuitive sense for women – particularly independent, single, childless women. A classy divorcee diva in her thirties and now a forty-year-old powerhouse, my friend has built a life on her own terms, and this apartment reflects it. She leaves the robe on its hanger, tells me to help myself to everything, checks in only to make sure I’m comfortable.
The place holds all the quiet luxuries of being considered: incense wands, Le Labo soap, a kitchen stocked so you never have to leave unless you want to. A jar of tampons in the bathroom. A home designed around thoughtfulness and care. There are trinkets gathered from travels, funny and irreverent, alongside objects that signal seriousness and conviction, like a large, illustrated portrait of Lenin glowing with a frame surrounded by soft light and a hot Italian priest calendar hanging nearby. I laugh every time I see the hot Italian priest calendar.
"I think about how Hollywood insists on portraying the single, childless woman. She is always alone at a comically large table, poking at a sad microwave meal. The lighting is low, the mood, funereal."
It is playful, political, sensual, alive. To live alone and thrive. To be surrounded by all of your own things. To have everything you need. Napping on the comfy couch, sleeping in a generous queen bed. I feel hopeful. Life can be moulded to your likings. It can be something you actively choose. And with the cats – curious, affectionate, instantly attached to me – I never feel lonely. Because these cats sense something in me. All the surplus love I have to give, love that must go somewhere and with them, it quietly does, curled around a cuddle, lazing under the sun.
I think about how Hollywood insists on portraying the single, childless woman. She is always alone at a comically large table, poking at a sad microwave meal. The lighting is low, the mood, funereal. Maybe there’s a pet, maybe not. The camera pulls back to show her isolation, her failure. This is presented as every woman’s worst nightmare, but it bears little resemblance to reality. Because there is an ecstatic, almost spiritual power in choosing yourself. Singleness is not loneliness so much as it is limitless sensuality: self-devotion, erotic intelligence, the magic of desire outside traditional scripts. It is freedom on your own terms. An embodied rebellion.
To choose singleness in a world where dating has become a quagmire of mediocrity and nonchalance is a radical act. It can mean celibacy, or it can mean pleasure without obligation, but either way, it means reclaiming time. Time for your life, your curiosities, your dreams. It is often the only period in adulthood when you can focus entirely on yourself without apology. So many people rush through this phase, if they experience it at all, distracted by the myth of The One. We are told to search relentlessly, to frame our lives around this large, gaping absence, to believe something essential is missing. Meanwhile, we lose the endless space and question marks, to ask why we are here, what we care about, what lights us up.
“To choose singleness in a world where dating has become a quagmire of mediocrity and nonchalance is a radical act.”
Being single offers rare clarity. It gives you uninterrupted headspace and physical room to exist. To ask yourself: What do I value? What feels meaningful? Who am I when I am not orienting myself around someone else’s needs, moods, or expectations?
What we rarely admit is how profoundly relationships and parenthood reshape our lives. We become accountable for another person’s rhythms and desires. That can be beautiful, but the blessing of singleness is that you can go all in on a passion or a purpose. You can begin building a life that feels rich and meaningful without outsourcing fulfillment to a partner. It reminds us that no one else is coming to complete us. That work is ours. As women in a patriarchal society, we have to do so much work to undo the conditioning we’ve experienced, which vilifies pleasure and forces us to consider everyone around us. It doesn’t always allow us the freedom to exist fully as ourselves.
What Hollywood doesn’t show – because it would be too dangerous – is just how sublime it can be to be single and childless. To decide how your day unfolds. To book a plane ticket on impulse. To spend money, time, and energy without having to negotiate first. To invest deeply in friendships, community, and activism. To return home to a space you’ve shaped entirely for yourself, filled with creature comforts that make sense to you. Hollywood could never show you how much fun you can have, because that will start to unshackle us from society’s chains, the ones that keep women down. Dancing around the space like a maniac. Walking around naked. Wearing hydrating collagen masks. Deep cleaning the apartment and it staying that way. Making tea and settling down to watch Mubi. Cooking meals only you feel like eating, or chomping down on ‘Savoury Girl Snack Plates’, the newly evolved ‘Girl Dinner’: salty olives and crunchy hash browns and sardines.
On a whim, while still staying at the apartment, I decide to host a New Year’s Eve soiree; a little gathering of folks before a big queer dance party. There is quiet power in making that decision alone, in not needing consensus. I do a generous market shop of baguettes bumping their heads out from potato sac bags, stacks of oysters, both decorative and useful pomegranates, freshly cooked prawns, every assortment of cheeses, fancy dips, and antipasti additions – olives, Le Bret fromage-flavoured chips, marinated artichokes, dark chocolate. I clean the apartment slowly, reverently, as if tending to a shrine. I set out small plates and bowls, of which the apartment has a seemingly endless supply, like magic or divine providence. I dress up in a new frock I am bustling to wear – a black, off-the-shoulder, corseted mini dress with a biscotti-coloured tutu skirt from the appropriately named label Lovers + Friends. I chill bottles of wine and prosecco and pour them into dainty crystal coupes that clink when people laugh too hard. For purposes of whimsy, I sprinkle pomegranate jewels in the cups. I tell everyone as they walk in to make themselves at home. Smoking inside is allowed, as if it’s the 70s; the owner’s instructions seemingly coming at us like the most benevolent long-distance host in the world. ‘The owner is fabulous’, I scream across the room, whenever anyone comments on how much they love everything.
“Singleness is not loneliness so much as it is limitless sensuality: self-devotion, erotic intelligence, the magic of desire outside traditional scripts. It is freedom on your own terms. An embodied rebellion.”
People arrive in waves, bringing offerings: warm bread, a houseplant fighting for its life in the humidity and heat, someone on the brink of leaving a life they’ve outgrown, who sees a home in being here, a stranger who turns out to be someone I’d met on a party boat, who took a film photo of me with my hand in the air, hot pink silk diva head scarf wrapped around my head, face tipped to the sky in joy. As if we were always destined to meet. Everyone is mixing and gelling like I have never seen before. My best friend is making cocktails for everyone, and they keep arriving in tiny glasses. All the girls are cackling at the chaos of being served cocktails, and the serendipity of the night, how everyone falls into one another like long lost friends. Lifelong alliances have formed almost instantly. A little community of friends forming. The feeling of how you haven’t met all the people you’re going to know and love yet.
Singledom makes it easier to open yourself up to doing things, to going out, to being so fully part of the world, embedded in it, up for anything, ready to consume it, make out with it, embrace it, be in it. There is so much abundance because there is so much time and freedom and the eagerness to be out looking for who you are in the world. We sprawl across couches and floors. The cats dart between ankles and handbags, drunk on attention.
Music hums low, then louder. We leave to go to our party, a place where people cathartically cry in the bathroom and re-emerge ready for the marathon of partying. We all kiss each other at midnight, messy limbs and lips entangled. Nothing is owned. Nothing is promised. Everything is possible. Toppling off stages and security guards taking our photos like Instagram boyfriends. The night spills into morning, bodies tangled, voices hoarse Marshall speakers are blasting Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe! as the sun rises.
"This is what they don’t tell you about being single: how generous and free it makes you. When your life isn’t narrowed around maintaining a romantic unit, it becomes porous."
I watch people exchange numbers, promising a summer filled with encounters – theatre, poolside swims, parties, long languorous dinners and summers not yet imagined. My heart swells. I’m thanked profusely as if I am some kind of community leader, the way I brought this specific intoxicating mix of people together. For making space and putting in time and energy to make sure it was epic and magical. This is what they don’t tell you about being single: how generous and free it makes you. When your life isn’t narrowed around maintaining a romantic unit, it becomes porous. You have time to host, to gather, to curate, to engineer encounters. You make room for chance. Singleness opens you outward, to the world, to friendship, to surprise. It opens up to pleasure for the sake of it, the kind that doesn’t have to justify itself.
It’s 6am and I am trapped in my corseted dress, stumbling around the apartment laughing as the sun heats my face, doing acrobatics until I reach the zipper and emancipate myself, laugh-crying that I don’t need no one, actually! Standing barefoot on the balcony, wine in hand, smoke curling into the morning, I feel it clearly: the absolute lack of absence in this moment. To be alone with a cup filled and overbrimming with abundance.
