the cost of being single

being single is my most expensive pastime

The iconic ‘All By Myself’ scene from Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001)

Recently, the cost of being single has been circling conversations with friends, like a broken record that is actually playing a song about you. The cost of living is already at such a high level, that if it were to actualise as an inanimate object, it would be a skyscraper that is so tall the highest point is invisible to the naked eye. It’s bad, but what could make it better is being in a relationship.

Now at 25, I would take some convincing to be wifed up, as I’m a glutton for selfishly loving my own space too much. But there’s moments, when life gets as tough as an old shoe and everything is particularly shit, that you start thinking about the potential positives of getting cuffed - it is almost cuffing season after all.

Your dreams of moving out of your mould riddled basement flat could become reality, because you could snag a 1 bed and split the rent with your partner. A shared bank account for the big and little things. At the end of a long shift at work, if you’ve found the breed of lover thats love language is cooking, you could come home to a lovingly prepared hot meal instead of your 2 slices of buttered toast and an on-the-verge-of-fermenting spoon of yoghurt as desert when you’ve forgotten to do your food shop. It’s the little things, that are actually - humongous, massive, things on the of worst days.

How to Be Single (2016)

One friend of mine is particularly passionate about this, so much so that i’m convinced she could do a TED Talk on it to a sold out crowd. She’s a few years older than me and has unwillingly arrived at the destination where her peers are getting engaged, married or are having babies - seemingly all the time. Said friend is single, and over the financial deficit that comes with it. Destination hen-do’s, destination weddings, actually good wedding gifts, occasion wear to suit the dress code, single occupancy hotel stays; the price of their love is your inconvenience, and you have to be okay with that. But she isn’t. Icon.

It’s not that celebrating love is a nauseating ordeal to the single breed; I love love, so does she, but I get it - it can feel like a one way street, that lengthens for infinity when you’ve been single for a long time and have no plans to get coupled up any time soon, or ever. Unfortunately, there are no singleton celebratory equivalents other than birthdays, which everyone gets anyway.

So you fork out a couple hundred or thousand during peak wedding season that your soon-to-be-married friends won’t have to pay in turn at your nuptials, because after all, you feel like the single thing won’t end any time soon. What if you don’t want to get married one day? Will they fork out the same in kind for a celebration of your love without the legal label attached? Should we start celebrating loving your single life just as we celebrate two people loving one another?

Being single is often portrayed in popular media as some curse that the unfortunate folk have caught, and in turn, they’re depressed, drunks, and have a weakness for making poor decisions. This is the rising action. When they end up in a relationship, they’re suddenly a ‘normal’ person - the denouement. Some of my favourite movies do this, Bridget Jones’s Diary my favourite culprit. In Bridesmaids, Annie (Kristen Wig) is a mess because she’s single. Or like in Frances Ha, where Frances (Greta Gerwig) happens to become single and also happens to be a mess, but I love that film because even though her friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner), getting into a serious relationship is her heartbreak, she doesn’t just find a man of her own to balance it out. Frances travels, and dances, and enjoys this new phase of her life, single and in control of the steering for once.

Frances Ha (2012)

Society is to blame, just like always. Relationships are congratulated and celebrated, whilst being single is often seen as a temporary space you are herded into before you get to where you ultimately want to go (relaionshiplandia), just like the plot of a good rom-com. For me, the cost of being single is not a burden to bear but catch me again at 30 and see how I’m feeling then.