Alone time

Removing the dating app from my phone wasn’t exactly unusual. As long-term dating app users know, it’s a love-hate relationship. For every promising match, raunchy fling and interesting encounter, there’s a flip side: The ghosting, the hours lost to swiping and the kicking yourself for mistaking a week of messaging for a connection when you know that’s not how it works. Taking a breather is part of the process. After a few days or weeks, you dive back in – which is what I’d been doing for years.

As my peers settled into married life and parenthood, in my mid 30s, I was riding a second wave of singledom. After almost making it down the aisle (my fiance called it off, which was a blessing in disguise in hindsight), I discovered that ticking those conventional boxes wasn’t the only path to happiness. Being single wasn’t the tragic failure society is fixated upon – in fact, it can be awesome – and, as it turned