The single life

The No.1 bitch realises that there is something to be said for being young free and single (well free and single!)

Right girlfriend! Just shake those break-up blues off immediately please! You know you didn’t want your future offspring to inherit his weak jawline anyway, and you knew having a key to the garage, but not the flat, wasn't all that promising for a smug-married future together. You're LONELY!? How can you be lonely!? You're going to outlive a husband by an average of seven years! And you have 468 friends on Facebook – of course online businesses count as friends! You’re going to love your spouse-free zone.

Just make sure you keep regularly flossing and leave your couch on a regular basis. Don’t turn into a sectionable singleton, the kind that sticks uplifting quotes all over her walls and shares her entire existence via Twitter. Coupledom, for many, may be the favoured lifestyle, and we’re suffocated by media messages reinforcing this ideal. The classic line in the film Jerry Maguire, ‘You complete me’ reinforces what many singles believe: If I could only find my soul mate, I would feel whole and my life would come together. And if I can’t, I’m in deep trouble. Solitude is still associated with all kinds of negative emotions – loneliness, depression and feelings of being a sad, pathetic loser. Stop clutching that stuffed animal and listening to Lionel Ritchie ballads. Take Chris Tarrant's advice! Phone a friend!

The fact is, men don’t talk as much as women anyway. A study revealed women talk almost three times as much as men, with the average woman using 20,000 words in a day, 13,000 more than the average man, so there’s proof you’ll have a much better chat with your BFF than a sleep/rage-inducing male. It’s amazing how when you get paired up, your happiness and self-esteem seems to rest on what someone else thinks about you and their bbm/hr (BlackBerry messages per hour ratio).

So it may appear that no-one in the universe cares a jot for you, but you can drink cocktails like the lassies in Sex and the City, you don't have to have mini-seizures about birth-control, you can sleep spreadeagled like a giant Fake-Baked starfish, you don’t have to stroke a fragile male ego (or any other appendages). Plus you can revel in the comedy of breaking wind loudly or pretend that you actually bought your Christopher Kane leather and lace dress five years ago. Celebrate too, the fact that you are not going to be scrutinised in an ‘up close and personal’ manner. You can comb your leg hair into intricate patterns to look like lacy tights and channel your inner Germanic female when attending to your bikini line!

Distance is a beautiful thing, and so is low lighting, we can use it to make us look radiant and glowing from a two-feet radius – keeping the hoi polloi far enough back that civilians can't see the layers of concealer and powder that cover broken veins, brown spots and wrinkles! And don’t worry if we’re coming into summer and you’ve no’one to go on holiday with, often it's when you are away with someone that you realise you can’t spend the rest of your life looking at their pasty features and listening to their anal observations. I may be appearing to exaggerate slightly as most single people do spend most of their time role-playing and musing, lost in their own minds but I had a startling epiphany in the Maldives – nothing makes you feel like your relationship is freefalling into purgatory like being surrounded by lovesick honeymooning couples. When you have nothing to say to each other nothing ­(not even herpes) is as catching as silence.

It is of course difficult to watch girlfriends disappear into Boyfriendland. Suddenly your educated friends indulge in babytalk and basically appear like a cross-eyed conjoined twin. Let's bask in our single lady status, rejoice in the wide and bountiful selection of readily available M&S meals and celebrate the age of wireless communication, fruit-based cocktails and ASOS.com. Hurrah for the single ladies! 'Mon the boyfriend-ly challenged!