You're in your thirties and you live a pretty glamorous and fortunate life, all things considered. You're living in a cool bohemian suburb and your days are filled with parties, social events, dates with suave men and so forth. You've worked hard to get here, building up your career, working in the media and having had an earlier music career. You run celebrity charity events, go to openings and premieres and have an address book to die for.

But something's missing.

You go home at night to your funky apartment, which was once featured in a magazine, and you're lonely. There are times when you feel tired, vulnerable, ill, and you have no one to share it with. No one to bitch and moan to. No one who cares.

Meanwhile, time marches on, you head towards your late thirties. You start relationships. You have high hopes for them. They end.

The media, most unhelpfully, is full of articles about body clocks, women who have left it too late to have a family, women who have put their careers before fertility.

Bullshit, you think. Simplistic rubbish. It's not the women's fault here. All around you are clever, together, happy single women with so much to give. Most of them would give their right arm to find someone to love and settle down with.

And all around you are men who refuse to settle, refuse to put the work into relationships that's required to build and grow them. After all, they can. They can afford to wait until, say, their late forties, before settling down. They can afford to dream of that young, blonde trophy girlfriend who gives them undemanding sex minus the ticking body clock. They can afford to play the field, have fun, sleep around, enjoy themselves.


Bitter? Perhaps a little. But this is where I was at in 2008. I'd turned forty - my most depressing birthday ever, during which I found it very difficult to actually say the "f" word. No big fortieth bash for me, as I tried to forget it was even happening. I felt I'd somehow failed.

And I'd started to resign myself to a life of being alone.