Aaargh!

It’s true.  I am over 30 (just) and single.  And therefore, I can’t possibly be happy.

Dr Pam Spurr tells me, that I am just putting up a front, that I am pretending to be happy and fulfilled.

Now, fair disclosure, I would love to meet someone.  I would love to meet a man who makes me smile, makes me laugh, is entertaining, and all the other things on my ever-growing list of things I want in a partner.  But given recent history, and the fact he doesn’t appear to be appearing round any corners and time soon, I’ll get on with the business of making myself happy, thanks very much.

I pity the women who are her patients.  Because I bet she doesn’t dole out any good advice to

“Susie, 38, a music industry lawyer, is a classic case of portraying the sunny single when inside she’s utterly miserable.

In therapy sessions with me, she despaired of her secret search for a man.

I say “secret search”, because two years previously she’d stopped being honest with people and telling them she hoped to settle down, at the very least, with a Mr Maybe Right.

Susie felt ashamed of living a lie – and finally confessed she always pretends to be cheerful about her single status.

“How would other people feel coming back to an empty flat after a long, hard day with no one to talk to or cuddle?”

Maybe she could tell Susie to be honest, when people ask, and say that ‘yes, actually, she would be quite keen to meet someone’.  And in the meantime, she could go about finding out what it is that makes her happy.

Because being in a bad relationship – with Mr Right, let alone “Mr Maybe Right” is more lonely, and causes more unhappiness than being single does.  Learning to be happy by yourself is hard.  But it is easier than worming your way out of a relationship that has gone bad.

Dr Spurr bases her column on the evidence of the women she treats – missing the point that the women who are happily single don’t come to her, because they don’t need therapy.

If being in a relationship makes you happy, great.  But I would suggest that you’re never going to be truly happy in a relationship, until you are happy with yourself.  And I’ve been around enough bad marriages to be in no hurry to march down an aisle, despite my love of big white dresses.

Relationships are great.  At best, they are fun, supportive, loving, and fulfilling.  But why settle for one which isn’t those things?  Dr Spurr might tell you that you are flying in the face of thousands of years of evolution, and socialisation and are denying biology.  But I would suggest that instead of waiting around for a relationship to make you happy, you do that for yourself.  And I would have thought that was what therapy is supposed to do.  But what would I know?  I’m a thirty-something singleton who is obviously worthless.