Lately my friends and I have started joking that a commune is the answer. A big old rambling house in the south of France, maybe, with plenty of interesting people to talk to and a cellar full of booze.
It’s not quite clear how we will manage the cellar steps, though, given this imaginary commune is for the hopefully distant day when we are old and frail but still desperate to avoid a nursing home. It’s only a daydream really, but for the singletons in our group it perhaps has a more serious side. When you’re young you worry about finding someone to love, but as time goes on the fear is more about who will look after you.
All this is obviously a long way off for the actor Emma Watson, who explained to Vogue this week how, at 29, she has learned to be relaxed about being single, or “self-partnered” as she prefers to call it, and approaching 30. She sees herself not as lacking something but fine as she is, making her a part of a growing single positive movement which preaches the joys of learning how to be on your own but not lonely. When the Sunday Times columnist and author Dolly Alderton gave up dating for a year, she wrote that she’d missed “GCSE physics coursework, waiting for a night bus in the rain, the BCG vaccination” more than the soul-destroying business of trying to meet someone; it was so much nicer just not to bother.
The Tinder generation still want to fall in love but they won’t be frightened into settling out of desperation, and frankly all power to them for stripping back the stigma surrounding singledom. Why should something almost all of us experience at least once in our lives be treated like a shameful secret? But if their cultural clout is growing, the surprise is that nobody yet speaks politically for the estimated 15% of British adults living in single-person households, given they’re arguably now redrawing the economic landscape.
In her book All the Single Ladies, analysing the rise of single women as an electoral force in America, the writer Rebecca Traister argues that the trend away from coupledom is pulling politics inexorably to the left. The darker side of independent living is knowing there’s nobody to bail you out of financial trouble, so policies like a higher minimum wage or stronger employment rights start to matter more. (One reason conservatives worldwide tend to champion marriage may be that, without it, people become markedly less keen on a small state, favouring an interventionist one instead.)
Single women helped put Barack Obama in the White House and, while they didn’t stop Donald Trump, they helped drive interest in Bernie Sanders; now politicians such as Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be filling a similar gap. British pollsters rarely ask respondents’ relationship status, but it would be fascinating to see how much of Jeremy Corbyn’s support in 2017 came from singletons craving economic security.
When I was Watson’s age I could still just about stretch to buying a tiny flat on my own in north London. But those dizzy days are long gone now. The median English home now costs eight times the salary of a single man on median male earnings, according to the Women’s Budget Group, and 12 times the salary of a single woman on median female earnings. More shockingly, it calculates that for a lone woman on median female earnings, no region in England is affordable to rent in the private market.
Middle-aged divorcees are falling back into student-style house-shares, and inevitably single parents have it toughest. Any singleton manifesto would put curbing house prices, stabilising rents and building more social housing at the top, but it wouldn’t stop there.
It might well overhaul universal credit, which has been noticeably harsh on single parents (one in five food bank users are single parents, according to a study published this week by the Trussell Trust); it could also crack down on non-payment of alimony. A government for singletons would also prioritise social care, recognising that talk of more families looking after their own relatives is frankly scary for anyone ageing without children.
It would crack down on gender or ethnicity pay gaps that make it unnecessarily hard for some lone earners to manage, and promote the flexible jobs that single parents often need. It would push car-sharing clubs, so that each household in a city street full of singletons doesn’t feel it needs its own car. The manifesto might even come up with a more realistic version of our French commune fantasy, via co-housing developments offering a mix of shared facilities and private space for micro-households.
Look at that list, and it’s obvious Labour is already moving broadly in this direction. But it’s not the only party eyeing up this territory, and the fact that Corbyn is still lagging behind the Conservatives in the polls suggests the contest for singleton votes remains open.
Nobody wants to be the voice of doom, pointing out that being happily self-partnered is a lot harder for anyone not earning Emma Watson’s salary. Millennials are right to run a mile from toxic relationships that make them miserable, and to hold out for the real thing; they also deserve the same chances that my generation had to live and travel alone, and thus to learn the intoxicating lesson that we could cope if we had to.
But in retrospect that freedom was the result, however unintentional, of benign economic and political forces that we didn’t even notice until they were gone, and it won’t just fall back into our laps by accident. All the single ladies, as the song goes, now put your hands up.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
