Alone, but not by choice

Why are so many people single without wanting to be?

The Question

Write to me at AskPhilippa@yahoo.com Subject to Terms and Conditions

“I’m a single man in my mid-twenties with a birthmark on my face, and romance has always felt out of reach…”
“I’m 37… It’s taken me a while to come out as gay, but now I have, and I still haven’t had a serious relationship with a woman.”
“(f,27) I already feel like giving up on dating. Nothing ever seems to go anywhere. Everything fizzles out after a couple of months...”
“I’m a middle-aged man, single, and despite taking great care over the messages I send, I haven’t received a single reply...”

“I’m a 31 year old woman… where are all the single men my age?

You get the gist?

I receive quite a few of these. Emails from people who, for a range of reasons, feel left out of love. Women tend to write more often than men, but men write too. Across all of them there is the same quiet ache. A sense that finding love is more difficult than it used to be.

Most of these people are not doing anything wrong. They are thoughtful, open, reflective. Often they are successful in other areas of life. And still, connection feels impossible. Some wonder if they are not attractive enough. Others blame dating apps, or the lack of opportunity, or emotional unavailability, either their own or other people’s. But maybe what looks like a personal problem is actually a cultural one. Perhaps this sense of struggle says something about the kind of world we now live in.

My Answer

Dating apps were supposed to fix loneliness. They were designed to connect us. Instead, many people now say they feel even more alone. The issue is not a lack of choice. The problem may be too much choice. The psychologist Barry Schwartz called this the Paradox of Choice. When we are faced with a vast range of options, whether it is breakfast cereals or potential partners, it becomes harder to choose. We worry we will make the wrong decision. We keep second-guessing ourselves. The more we search, the less satisfied we feel. We think, what if someone better is just around the corner?

It is a bit like spending an evening scrolling through endless films or box sets on Netflix, only to watch nothing in the end.

The constant swiping, scanning, and evaluating keeps us locked in a state of searching. We don’t land anywhere. The very technology that was meant to help us find love is turning us into consumers of people. In the process, we forget how to commit. We forget how to sit with someone’s flaws. We forget how to stay long enough for something meaningful to take root. We get stuck on the idea of a person, and never allow ourselves the time to really experience them.

Sometimes we even develop entire relationships in our minds without doing much checking of them against reality.

All of this is happening alongside another shift, which is less often talked about. The growing education gap between men and women. In the UK, women now significantly outnumber men at university. As women advance academically and professionally, many find it harder to meet partners who feel like equals, either intellectually or emotionally. Some women feel pressure to date down. Some men feel shut out by women they view as out of their league, or too independent. On the whole, women today are not looking to be rescued. They are looking for partners. But not every man has caught up with that yet. These mismatches only increase the sense of caution. They reinforce fear and hesitation. They create more distance.

Meanwhile, modern life makes connection harder in quiet and insidious ways. We live on online instead of in public spaces. We order food in rather than going out. We shop from our sofas. We stream films alone instead of going to the cinema. Even sitting in a café by ourselves can feel like a social risk. These small choices seem irrelevant to love, but they add up. The fewer interactions we have with other people, even casual ones like the barista or the person at the bus stop, the lonelier we become. And loneliness does not make us bolder. It makes us more afraid. It shrinks our world. It makes rejection feel unbearable. The less we risk, the less likely we are to connect at all. The loop tightens.

Love is not the only path to intimacy. Humans thrive best with many sources of support: friendships; chosen families; communities. These are also forms of love. They matter just as much. Perhaps the great love stories of our lives are not romantic at all, maybe they are platonic? Maybe we need to imagine new ways of belonging, new kinds of kinship beyond the nuclear family.

Still, the longing for romantic closeness is hard to ignore. And if we want it, we may have to do something that increasingly feels radical. We may have to risk something. Risk talking to someone in real life. Risk going to events, or taking a trip, or showing up to a class on our own. Risk awkwardness. Risk being seen. Because connection is born from risk. It happens when we stop trying to be perfect. When we allow ourselves to be human with someone else, and give that process time. No one arrives ready-made. No one is perfect off the peg. Relationships are shaped over time. I call this getting used to each other, not a very romantic phrase, but it is a beautiful thing. Psychoanalysts call it mutual impact. It is what happens when two people change each other, slowly and significantly. Think of Belle and Beauty and the Beast. Or perhaps Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a better example - Darcy and Elizabeth each had to allow the impact of the other before they could find each other, I’m talking about the book, not film adaptions. These days they’d both swipe right, and never even meet.

If we only fall in love with the version of someone we have created in our imagination, we are not going to find lasting love like that. We won’t find it either if we judge too quickly and assume too much.

There is another idea we need to question. The spark. Chemistry. We may believe attraction needs to be there from the start, that a relationship has to begin with a strong emotional jolt. But attraction does not need to happen immediately. Your type is not always your type.

Take Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen. Marianne Dashwood feels that overwhelming spark with Willoughby. He is charming and exciting and handsome. But in the end he is also faithless. Colonel Brandon, by contrast, is quiet, kind, older, not especially attractive to her at first. But over time she comes to love him deeply. The spark she felt with Willoughby turned out to be nothing more than infatuation. With Colonel Brandon, she builds something more mature, more real. If you have not read the book, I recommend it.

I have an issue with the idea of “a spark”. That rush of excitement we often mistake for chemistry is sometimes something else entirely. It can be a pattern from the past. If you grew up feeling not quite enough for a parent, you might find yourself drawn to people who are emotionally distant, hoping they will finally make you feel whole. That feeling can seem like love, but it often leads to the same disappointment. The spark, in these cases, is not a sign of compatibility. It is a repetition of an old wound.

Of course, not all sparks are traps. Sometimes they come from a place of seeing something benignly familiar in someone. But even the most intense chemistry fades. What matters is not how someone makes you each feel in the first few moments. What matters is how you each eventually reveal yourselves and how you feel together over time.

So if love has not arrived yet, you are not too late. You are not too much. You are not, not enough. You are not alone. It may take time. It may not look how you imagined. But connection and belonging are as possible as they ever were. You may need to step over some unhelpful modern cultural ideas and developments to find them. Remember a date is not an interview, try to enjoy it as much as possible. And if nothing else, you’ll have an anecdote to share on your next one.

Whilst researching for this article I came across this: Wandsworth has the highest ratio of young women to men in the country, research shows. Figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal that there are 33 per cent more females in their twenties than men living in the south-west London borough. Who knew?

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