‘I have no one to please but myself’: Why more and more women are choosing to stay single

“Don’t worry. Women like you don’t get left on the shelf.”

I couldn’t quite believe my eyes when these words, sent to me by a friend, flashed up on my phone screen. For a few seconds, I read and re-read the text, before bursting into incredulous laughter.

Sure, I’ve had my fair share of judgy comments from older relatives. It just hadn’t occurred to me that someone my own age would consider me a dusty relic sitting on a shelf, waiting to be rescued from neglect and loneliness. I’ve been single for 15 years, and it’s my choice to live this way. I thought she saw me as I see myself: a confident, happy woman who’s thriving alone — I’m someone who takes spontaneous solo trips in far-flung places, has luxurious afternoon bubble baths, and sleeps like a starfish in a king-size bed. But apparently not. To her, I was in life’s waiting room, on pause until a man came along and plucked me from my single misery.

I have zero responsibilities and no one to please but myself. I revel in this freedom, a joy that comes from the fact I have decentred romantic relationships from my life — and I’m far from alone in that. Morgan Stanley predicts that by 2030, 45% of women aged 25 to 44 will be single — and I know plenty of other women who, just like me, feel empowered by going it alone. I thought we’d moved on from the days of believing all single women must be in want of a husband. Why, then, did my friend message me as if I was a sad wreck playing Céline Dion’s “All By Myself” on repeat?

Single mum by choice

Throughout university, from age 18 to 20, Megan McKee said the same thing over and over: “I’m going to use a sperm donor.” Today, at 26 years old, Megan is 14 weeks pregnant. “My friends remember those conversations, and now they’re like, ‘Oh my god, you actually did it’.” The idea of being in a relationship never appealed — the one thing that did was to be a mother. “I didn’t want to wait for something or someone in order to do that.”

Being in her mid-20s, Megan knows she’s younger than a lot of women who are opting for solo motherhood. The average age of single women using donor sperm is between 38 and 40, according to data from the European Sperm Bank. “But I never felt like I was too young or doing something really different or weird,” she says. “It just felt like such a normal thing to do.”

This surety helped when telling her family about her decision. Most were supportive, but “one family member told me that being a solo mum is ‘cruel’ and that we wouldn’t be a proper family without a dad,” she says. “But families come in so many shapes — foster families, adoptive families, donor-conception families. I think solo motherhood is just a little bit behind in being understood.” Yet in recent years, figures show a 60% rise in the number of women opting for donor conception and IVF as solo-by-choice mums. And in September 2024, Megan had her first consultation. From there, she felt supported at every stage of the process, although choosing a donor was admittedly overwhelming.

As Megan browsed the profiles from around the world, she felt like she was swiping on a dating app. “Growing up, you always envisage your partner being good looking, someone you find yourself attracted to,” she says, but because sperm donation is anonymous in the UK, she didn’t know what her donor looked like. This meant Megan could instead focus on finding someone who had the same values as her and who, she felt, was donating for the right reasons. “This donor had actually written a letter to a future child, which made me cry.”

Megan did three IUI (intrauterine insemination) treatments which didn’t work, before moving on to IVF. After the embryo transfer, she was told to allow 12 days before taking a test. But she couldn’t wait. “I was doing it pretty much every day, and I could see the faint line getting stronger. That was so exciting.”

Around this time, her grandma was coming down from Manchester to visit her in London, so she decided to have a big reveal of her news. Pretending not to already know the result, Megan peed on a stick and handed it to her grandma to read out the result. “She jumped out of her chair and hugged me.”

Megan’s experience is proof that we’re not ‘missing out’ if we choose a path that diverges from what’s considered the norm. For LGBTQ+ people, single parents, adoptive parents, foster families, and others, happiness doesn’t have to follow the traditional, heteronormative route. It’s something we can shape for ourselves.

Reaping the emotional rewards

It’s 2am, Californian time, when I catch up with psychologist Dr Bella DePaulo over Zoom. This is how she lives her days, entirely on her own schedule and on her own terms. It has been her lifelong mission to study the joys of singledom, and to dismantle the persisting idea that single women are miserable.

DePaulo says those who are single by choice get to live according to their own values and interests, allowing them to follow their hearts. “They often have what psychologists and philosophers call a ‘psychologically rich life’. That means an interesting life full of unique experiences that give them opportunities to grow and to learn,” explains DePaulo, who is also the author of Single At Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life. Her research has found that single people who actively choose to be single are not only happier [than those in relationships], but that over time “they get happier and happier”.

Being happily single also impacts the way you view the state of being alone. “People who are single at heart embrace their solitude. They find it enriching rather than scary,” says DePaulo. “So time alone might be experienced as relaxing or a good time for reflection or creativity. When you savour your solitude instead of fearing it, you are less likely to be lonely.” Now 72, Dr DePaulo has remained a lifelong singleton, and can attest to the riches that come with decentring romance. Crucially, you get to be the captain of your own ship, she says.

“Within the limits of your resources and opportunity, you get to decide everything from the little things in everyday life, like when you get up, when you go to bed. [You decide] what you eat and when, what temperature you keep your place, how you furnish it, how messy or neat you are, what you do with your free time.” But in addition to the minutiae of how we lead our daily lives, you also get to have control over the Big Life Stuff — the life- altering decisions, the career changes, the house moves; all of which would require lengthy conversations and compromises within the context of a relationship.

The Live Aloners

If I’m the captain of my own ship, that ship would be the flat I now own, in south east London, which I’ve proudly dubbed The Pink Palace. But getting here wasn’t easy, or cheap. The extra financial burden that comes with solo living is often referred to as the singles tax. It impacts everything from food shopping to railcards to having no one to split the cost of a hotel room with at your friend’s wedding. And housing is top of the list.

In 2024, there were 8.4 million people living alone in the UK, an increase from 7.6 million in 2014. ONS figures tell us that people living alone are more likely to be renting and very few report having money left over at the end of the month. Hardly surprising. Renting a room in London costs an average of £980 per month, according to SpareRoom, and the cost of renting a one-bed flat in a well-connected borough can cost between £1,800 and £2,800 per month. Big cities like Manchester aren’t much different, with private monthly rent at an average of £1,319 in September 2025.

But how are you meant to break the cycle of ever-rising rents and no way to save? Single-person households devote more of their income to housing costs, whether that’s utility bills or the aforementioned nauseating rental rates, and first-time buyers are up against the most challenging market in 70 years. Plus, a 2024 report by the Building Societies Association says two strong incomes are now often required to cover mortgage costs. Anyone else crying yet?

It’s all well and good to embrace our independence and find the joy in singledom, but it’s hard to fully thrive when the system feels rigged. Our view of solo living may have moved on, but society, and its support for these life choices, hasn’t. It’s why so many women are now looking for alternative solutions.

Lucy Partington, 35, a freelance beauty editor, had been renting with a friend for five years. Her parents had offered to give her some money towards a deposit, but it wouldn’t have been nearly enough alone. So when said friend confessed she wanted to buy somewhere but didn’t want to get a one-bed on her own, the decision to buy together just made sense.

It took Lucy and her friend a year to find the perfect home. “A lot of places tended to have one master bedroom and then a box room, but we were going in equally, so we needed to have two double rooms of roughly equal size, which we discovered was very hard to find.” When it came to finances, everything was split right down the middle — “even down to the window we had to replace that was part of her bedroom.”

It has been complicated at times, but Lucy would recommend co-owning with a friend, particularly someone you’ve lived with before. “I wouldn’t be in a position to buy solo now if I hadn’t done it. We built up decent equity over the five and a half years we owned together, so I now have a good deposit — well, if I lived anywhere but London.”

Looking forwards, there are some signs of change, with social housing initiatives launching, which are aimed at single women. The UK’s first ever tower block exclusively for women is currently under construction in west London. Tenancies will be offered to single women first as part of the social housing initiative, run by Women’s Pioneer Housing Association, a suffragist-founded group. The building will include 102 flats available to women at affordable rents. Construction is due to end in summer 2026 and residents will move in soon after.

It’s not just in the UK that women are rebuilding the societal structures they feel are broken. When she was just 20 years old, Sophie Beilinson moved to an ‘intentional community’ in Austin, Texas, living with other single people. “I wanted more than what had already been shown to me,” she explains. Intentional communities range from co-housing groups that share gardens and common areas to communes that share property, income, and work. They’re centred around shared values, beliefs, or a common purpose.

“I decided that I wanted genuine and safe relationships to turn to when I struggled with things in my life,” she says. Sophie, now 25, has a housemate and they pay rent for their accommodation. They frequently walk over to see fellow community members who live a few houses away. “We have regular meals together and get to bring up issues and interests, and get great advice and support amongst each other,” she says.

This is a growing way of living in the US, carving out new ways single women can foster connection, without going down the traditional route. Take the example set by author Janet Hoggarth, who, one year into single mumhood, decided to create a ‘mummune’ — or single mums commune — with two other single mums. Together under one roof, Janet and her friends Vicky and Nicola became a family, along with their six collective kids. They say it takes a village, and some women are building their own from the ground up — literally.

‘Leftover’ women

When Cindy Gallop was in her early 30s and working in advertising in London, she took a trip to Penang, Malaysia, to visit her parents for Christmas. “I’d been living and working in the UK for quite a long time at that stage, so I had completely forgotten what would happen when I walked into a gathering of all of my Chinese relatives as the 30-something oldest daughter,” she says. “The first question to my mother was, ‘Is she married?’” Much to Cindy’s amusement, that incendiary question ignited her mother’s rage, who had some choice words for her family.

Leanne Yau, 27, is from Hong Kong and grew up in a traditional conservative Chinese family. “I’m very happily child-free and unmarried — and I want to stay that way,” she says. “I think, for me, it’s a feminist decision. And those values are distinctly different from my parents.”

Despite more and more Chinese women choosing singledom, unmarried women in their late 20s and beyond are still often referred to as sheng nü, meaning ‘leftover women’. “If a woman is unmarried by her late 20s, she’s trash,” explains Leanne. “She’s leftover, useless, seen as having less value as a person.”

Leanne enjoys her independence, both financially and legally, but her parents have concerns. “In Chinese culture, there’s this idea that you have children so they will take care of you when you’re older — like a generational contract.”

Her mother proposed adopting a child to serve as a ‘replacement grandchild’ — someone who could look after Leanne later in life — and “she even suggested I give birth and then hand the baby over for her to raise. I had to say to her, ‘I don’t think you realise how batshit insane that is’.”

Leanne says it helps that she’s in a different country from her family, now that she lives in the UK. “Having that distance from my parents makes it a lot easier.” Thankfully, Leanne no longer internalises the comments about her life decisions. “If I don’t respect the opinion, why would I take it to heart?”

It can be easier said than done — particularly in cultures where not only mainstream opinion, but entire societal, political, and governmental structures are set up to make us feel less-than. One glance at the comments section under Taylor Swift’s engagement post to Travis Kelce in 2025, and our global obsession with ‘completing’ singledom and reaching the ‘conclusion’ of marriage, was still oh so clear. Great for her, and for anyone who finds happiness in that life — but it isn’t for everyone.

Now 65, it’s been 30 years since Cindy entered that family party in Penang. More than 42k followers and a TED Talk later, she loudly and proudly displays her singleness and is the founder of sex education movement Make Love Not Porn. “I’m one of those people who is happiest on their own, and I am deliberately being very public about that, because we do not have enough role models that demonstrate you can live your life very differently from the way that you’re expected to, and still be amazingly happy.”

Speaking to single women in their 60s and 70s shows the future is bright for women who put themselves first. I’m tired of hearing unsolicited comments about my singleness. (“Maybe you need to lower your standards.” “You just need to try a bit harder.” “It’ll happen.”) Future Rachel won’t be rattling around an empty house, reminiscing over past loves and wishing she hadn’t dumped them. If Cindy and Bella’s life lessons are anything to go by, I’ll be waking up thanking my lucky stars that I had the courage to live life my own way.

Staying single doesn’t mean you’re a ‘leftover’ on a dusty shelf — far from it. If the idea of decentring relationships appeals to you, an enriching and liberated life awaits.