---
title: Unattached- The women who chose themselves, and never looked back
description:  Single people, men or women, are not lonely, sad or incomplete, waiting to be rescued into a real life by a partner. The latest research has said the opposi...
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-06-12T12:00:00.000Z
updated: 2026-06-12T13:01:13.503Z
canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/unattached-the-women-who-choose-themselves-and-never-looked-back
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/Chocolate Gingham Cotton Short Pyjama Set.jpg
categories: Feeling Good and Happy
content_type: Opinion
region: Global
publication: Rich Woman Magazine
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

There is a particular look that crosses a stranger's face when a woman says she is single and means to stay that way. A flicker of sympathy, quickly hidden. A small adjustment, as if she has confessed to a setback rather than described a life. The assumption underneath is so old and so deep that most people never think to question it, that a woman alone is a woman waiting, that her real life will begin when someone arrives to complete it. This is the story we are handed in fairy tales as children and in every film that builds towards a wedding as grown-ups. For a great many women, it was never their story at all.

They are not lonely. That is the first thing the comfortable assumption gets wrong. A woman can be single without a partner, without a community to belong to, without the approval of family or the shape of life everyone expected of her, and be more at home in herself than the people quietly pitying her. Her days are full. Not full of noise and obligation, but full of the things she actually chose, the work that absorbs her, the friendships she tends with real care, the dog asleep at her feet who asks nothing and gives everything, the morning that belongs entirely to her before it belongs to anyone else. She is not waiting. She arrived a long time ago.

The research, when it is read honestly rather than cherry-picked, tells a story very different from the sad-spinster myth. The social psychologist Bella DePaulo, who has spent more than three decades studying single life, describes a group she calls single at heart, people who are not single by accident or while they search for someone, but because living single is how they flourish. From surveys of more than twenty thousand people across over a hundred countries, she found that those who embrace single life tend to grow happier as they age, and build the skills and friendships that carry them through later life with a resilience that those who organised everything around a romance often lack.

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